This article is about the franchise. Scooby-Doo is an American animated media franchise based on scooby doo fruit snacks animated television series launched in 1969 and continued through several derivative media.

Scooby-Doo was originally broadcast on CBS from 1969 to 1976, when it moved to ABC. ABC aired various versions of Scooby-Doo until canceling it in 1985, and presented a spin-off featuring the characters as children called A Pup Named Scooby-Doo from 1988 until 1991. In 2013, TV Guide ranked Scooby-Doo the fifth-greatest TV cartoon of all time. Fred Silverman, executive for daytime programming at CBS, was then looking for a show that would both revitalize his Saturday-morning line and please the watch groups. During the design phase, lead character designer Takamoto consulted a studio colleague who was a breeder of Great Danes. After learning the characteristics of a prize-winning Great Dane from her, Takamoto proceeded to break most of the rules and designed Too Much with overly bowed legs, a double chin, and a sloped back, among other abnormalities.

Ruby and Spears’ second pass at the show used Dobie Gillis as the template for the teenagers rather than Archie. The treatment retained the dog Too Much, while reducing the number of teenagers to four, removing the Mike character and retaining Geoff, Kelly, Linda, and W. The revised show was re-pitched to Silverman, who liked the material but, disliking the title Mysteries Five, decided to call the show Who’s S-S-Scared? Now without a centerpiece for the upcoming season’s programming, Silverman had Ruby, Spears, and the Hanna-Barbera staff revise the treatments and presentation materials to tone down the show and better reflect its comedy elements. The rock band element was dropped, and more attention was focused upon Shaggy and Too Much. Every episode of the original Scooby-Doo format contains a penultimate scene in which the heroes unmask the seemingly supernatural antagonist to reveal a real person in a costume, as in this scene from “Nowhere to Hyde”, an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The first episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

What a Night for a Knight” debuted on the CBS network Saturday, September 13, 1969, at 10:30 AM Eastern Time. Each of these episodes features Scooby and the four teenage members of Mystery, Inc. Saturday-morning audiences were tuned in to CBS when Scooby-Doo was being broadcast. The TV influences of I Love a Mystery and Dobie Gillis were apparent in the first episode. The role of each character was strongly defined in the series: Fred is the leader and the determined detective, Velma is the intelligent analyst, Daphne is danger-prone, Shaggy is a coward more motivated by hunger than any desire to solve mysteries, and Scooby is similar to Shaggy, save for a Bob Hope-inspired tendency towards temporary bravery. Scooby-Doo itself influenced many other Saturday-morning cartoons of the 1970s. Now president of ABC, Fred Silverman made a deal with Hanna-Barbera to bring new episodes of Scooby-Doo to the ABC Saturday-morning lineup, where the show went through almost yearly lineup changes.

Then Joe Ruby and Ken Spears left again to start their own studio in 1977 as competition for Hanna-Barbera. They would remain away from the rest of the 1980s. 79 season, reduced to 90 minutes when Dynomutt was spun off into its own half-hour and the 1969 reruns were dropped. Scooby’s All-Stars continued broadcasting reruns of Scooby-Doo from 1976 and 1977, while new episodes of Scooby-Doo aired during a separate half-hour under the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! After nine weeks, the separate Where Are You!