Based on an earlier show
Did you know that Scooby Doo's character's roots go back to a 1950s/1960s sitcom called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis?
shareIf being technical Scooby's characters are based on the sitcom Dobie Gillis, that were adapted off the Dobie Gillis stories, which were said to be influenced by the Archie comics.
Other heavy influences on Scooby's make up are the tv show, The Mod Squad and the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books, and before the last inning retool, the show had some more similarities to the then Archie tv show.
The more you dig, the more you learn everything is connected by an influence one way or another.
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But the main influence was Dobie Gillis. Have you ever seen that show?
shareIf by "main" you mean the structure of the characters. You can easily trace the similarities of the Scooby Gang which characters from the Gillis tv show/stories.
But most of the other stuff came inspired by all the other things mentioned in that post.
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Well, all of this is very interesting. I've always watched Scooby-Doo and read/watched plenty of Archie and Hardy Boys but never connected them. Makes sense.
Dobie Gillis is something I've recently started watching and that connection was obvious.
The Drew/Hardy books aren't always typically mentioned but they play a very important aspect to the genre when you count cross medium.
Historically speaking for many decades the chief characters of detective fiction were white males. Nancy and the Hardy Boys respectively are the stars to their series but what is sometimes forgotten is that they are the children of detectives in their given works.
This is one of the most important handoffs that helped inspire the whole "meddling kids" genre for cartoons.
Unfortunately sometimes you will find conversations like this are had by people looking to historically inaccurately just site one thing as ripping off the other, etc. In those cases you sometimes miss all the cool transitions that fiction has gone through over the decades/centuries.
Scooby himself is a great example of something that for a time reshaped the whole medium of saturday morning cartoons, but at the same time played an important part and owed a lot to the detective fiction of the past. Plus the parallels to things like Dobie Gillis.
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Other heavy influences on Scooby's make up are the tv show, The Mod Squad and the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books, and before the last inning retool, the show had some more similarities to the then Archie tv show.
I can't help wonder if the movie, Bloodlust, also influenced Scooby Doo. Bloodlust is a cheap B movie horror/Dangerous Game ripoff starring a very young Robert Reed, but the main characters in that movie and the way they behave reminds me so much of a Scooby Doo episode. Just like the show, they're a group of "plucky" young teens who end up somewhere strange (on an island), then "split up" to defeat the villain.
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Bloodlust! is an excellent reference for an inside into that time period. Because you are right, you can easily see how in part "meddling Kids" type characters were around before Scooby put that setup on the map.
Hell the villain of Bloodlust even kind of looks like a guy who might be a scooby villain.
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