I was thinking about the guest stars of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, and it dawned on me that several of them had ties to the CBS network. So, the cartoon served as “product-placement” for some of the network’s other offerings between 1972 and 1974.
Product-placement is nothing new in Hollywood. In television’s early years, producers sometimes incorporated the sponsor of the series into the series’ title. In 1972 CBS decided to promote its series and stars by using one of its own series to do the job. Moreover, that series would be an animated Saturday morning offering: Hanna-Barbera’s The New Scooby-Doo Movies. In this sequel series to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby drive across the country and meet guest stars, who recruit the group to help solve mysteries. Several of the guest stars were either caricatures of entertainers on CBS or characters of series on the network during the 1972-74 run of Movies.
The 1972-73 season offered guests with no connections to the network for the first month or so. Then in October 1972, Sandy Duncan of The Sandy Duncan Show became the first star of a current CBS series to meet the group. On the next Saturday, Sonny and Cher Bono of The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour teamed up with the sleuths. In November the first guest stars of a current animated series—Hanna-Barbera’s own The Harlem Globetrotters–joined the detectives. The following month, the ballers returned for another episode, and Scooby and the kids met Jerry Reed, late of the network’s summer series The Jerry Reed When You’re Hot You’re Hot Hour. Only five of the sixteen episodes of the season consist of CBS’s product-placement, and the guest spots did not seem to benefit the guests’ careers. Reed’s summer show did not return, and the network cancelled Duncan’s series in December and the Globetrotters the following May.
Hanna-Barbera produced only eight episodes for the 1973-74 season of Movies, but seven of them feature stars with ties to the network. In addition, CBS used the series to promote its other Saturday morning programs. The Globetrotters made one final appearance to start the season. The next week the stars of Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space apparently returned to Earth to meet the sleuths. Then the guests were characters from Jeannie, CBS’s animated adaptation of the live-action sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. Scooby and the crew also encountered the stars of Speed Buggy, a new Saturday morning series which had only aired on the network for about a month when this episode aired. As a result, Shaggy’s announcement at the episode’s start of “the famous Speed Buggy” stretches credulity—even for a cartoon.
Dick Van Dyke
After CBS canceled this product-placement experiment, neither that network nor its competitors aired any similar series. ABC came close with Goober and the Ghost Chasers in the 1973-74 season, in which another group of young sleuths and their dog only occasionally met guests. Characters from the network’s own The Partridge Family made multiple appearances. Michael Gray, who had a guest spot on ABC’s The Brady Bunch that season, also had one spot on Goober. Meanwhile, networks aired animation studios’ adaptations of their current live-action television series into the 1980s, such as The Dukes on CBS and Fonz and the Happy Days Gang on ABC. But the days of asking one cartoon series to promote multiple network offerings were over.
Christopher P. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. His books include American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era and The Colored Cartoon, and he has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University.
CBS program director Fred Silverman, who had been something of a midwife to the Scooby-Doo franchise, was undoubtedly the mastermind behind all of these cross-promotions. Years later he would engineer a TV movie crossover between the Harlem Globetrotters and “Gilligan’s Island”; series creator Sherwood Schwartz wanted the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders instead, but they had a contract with another network.
Don Adams’s only CBS connection I can think of is that “Get Smart” aired on the Tiffany Network during its final season after four years on NBC. His follow-up sitcom, “Partners”, was an NBC show. I liked it, as I did Bob Denver’s post-Gilligan sitcom “The Good Guys”, but both were cancelled after just one season.
I wonder how many other CBS stars were offered the chance to guest star in the New Scooby-Doo Movies but turned it down. Was there ever any likelihood of Scoob and the gang solving mysteries with Mannix or Barnaby Jones? How about Lucy? Maude? Doris Day? Bob Newhart? Tony Orlando and Dawn? Seriously, a New Scooby-Doo Movie with Jimmie “J.J.” Walker would have been DY-NO-MITE!
“…the days of asking one cartoon series to promote multiple network offerings were over.” Not quite. Twenty years later on Fox, “The Simpsons” had episodes promoting that network’s “The Critic”, “The X-Files”, and “Family Guy”, and Michael Jackson guest starred on the show around the time his heavily-promoted “Black or White” music video premiered on Fox.