My God, it's true. It's true: Scooby-Doo is just a rip-off of Dobie Gillis, with a big damn dog attached!
Bizarre, isn't it, that Gillis is long-dead, and that its only break-out star, Bob Denver as the "beatnik" Maynard G. Krebs (hey, remember beatniks? No, um, no, neither do we!), went on to ultracult status as Gilligan of the infamous Island ... but that a Saturday morning cartoon version of it has actually outlived its original "inspiration," to use the term loosely, by decades -- by lifetimes. Check it out:
- Fred = Dobie, the painfully good-looking, over-groomed and shallow pretty-boy
- Velma = Zelda (how could we not see this?), the spunky but bespectacled brainiac
- Daphne = Thalia Meninger, the gorgeous if not overly intelligent blonde (My God, that was Tuesday Weld, back in the day. And now that we think about it, Warren Beatty was a regular on that show to. Warren friggin' Beatty, man!)
- Shaggy = Maynard, right down to the cracked voice and the scraggly goatee.
Dobie was only on for four years, from '59 to '63. It was six years later, when damn near everyone had forgotten about the show entirely, that Fred Silverman and the Hanna Barbera people ripped it off, part and parcel, to bring the Scoobs to life.
Damn. There's not only nothing new under the sun now; there wasn't anything new under the sun fifty years ago.
Oh, and there's a new Scooby-Doo animated feature coming out soon, and going straight to Cartoon Network. Just so's you know.
