This page took me a long time to author. I spent many hours in libraries, writing emails and talking with the Scooby Doo artists, musicians and producers to make this section as accurate as possible. Thank you to all who contributed historical information for this page.
Fred Silverman and his son
Iwao Takamoto (Scooby Doo Artist)
Casey Kasem and his wife (Shaggy's voice)
Larry & Pam Marks (Scooby theme musician)
Warner Brothers Scooby staff
Atlanta, GA Public Library
Roswell, GA Public Library
Dunwoody, GA Public Library
Sandy Springs, GA Public Library
Berry College Memorial Library
Scooby Doo first aired on CBS and can be traced back to Fred Silverman in 1969 who was the head of Daytime Programming for CBS. Silverman was looking for a show that would lead the network away from the superhero cycle and take them into an area of comedy and adventure. The combination of Carleton E. Morse's 1940's popular radio program I Love a Mystery, in which three detectives roamed the world solving crimes and mysteries, and the 1959-1963 television sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, about a scatterbrained teenager and his friends, was the look Silverman was after.

Silverman's quest was brought before Hanna-Barbera who assigned writers Ken Spears and Joe Ruby to create the characters, plots, and many of the story lines. The show actually started out revolving around four teenage detectives who traveled the country in a van, called the Mystery Machine, solving mysteries in dangerous situations. A Great Dane accompanied the foursome but was not a promient character. The show was first known as Mysteries Five and later changed to Who's Scared? The show was then presented to the top CBS management and president Frank Stanton as a new Saturday morning cartoon for the fall of 1969.

There was one problem: the artwork was very frightening which led Stanton to reject the show. Silverman immediately flew back to Los Angeles that night. While listening to the earphones on the flight back, Silverman was relaxing to Frank Sinatra singing Strangers in the Night. The phrase 'Scooby-dooby-doo' struck Silverman so much that he went back and said 'We'll call the show Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and we'll make the dog the star of the show.' And with those words Scooby-Doo was created with the other characters supporting him.

Iwao Takamoto, the art creator of the Scooby Doo

The new show was now more comical then mysterious. Don Messick became Scooby with his trademark laugh and scratchy voice, Top-Forty DJ Casey Kasem became Shaggy who was always in a constant state of panic and hunger which also served as Scooby's partner, Frank Welker became blond Freddy, Nicole Jaffe became brainy and bespectacled Velma, and the trouble-prone, sexy, Daphne was the voice of Heather North.