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.
The Simpsons also had an episode where they met Jack Bauer from 24. (All I remember about that episode is being disappointed that Hans Moleman wasn’t used as the obligatory mole in CTU, or even as a red herring.)
I saw these New Scooby Doo Movies episodes in reruns as a kid in the 1980s and had no idea who the majority of these “celebrities” were, or that some of them were now dead.
Paul:
Bearing in mind that this is “Cartoon Research” and not ‘Sitcom Central,’ let me quickly advise that “The Good Guys” (a pleasant enough show which I also liked), actually ran two seasons; it was slightly reworked in its second year (Bob Denver gave up his taxi and joined Herb Edelman and Joyce Van Patten in their diner) before it was cancelled. I don’t believe it has surfaced since.
The idea of Bob Newhart guesting on a New Scooby Doo Movie… My, oh, my… There’s a lost opportunity of the 1970s if ever there was one!
I imagine some of the stars turned it down, or else couldn’t due to health reasons, they had busy schedules, or other personal reasons. And I’m sure the writers couldn’t come up with a good episode the celebrities would have been willing to do. I’d like to imagine the celebrities in question – those that were based on real people like Don Knotts or Sandy Duncan – would want some input into the story and their fictionalized self.
With crossovers with other animated series like “Speed Buggy”, “Josie and the Pussycats”, and “The Addams Family” (there was a cartoon series at the same time as “Scooby Doo Movies”), they’d just confer with the writers, although I’m sure many of them all worked on the same shows.
One celebrity I was thinking of after reading that they were all stars of other CBS shows was Jack Benny, but his show ran back in the 1950s and 1960s, at least 10 years before “Scooby-Doo Movies” premiered.
This wasn’t the first time Hanna-Barbera did crossovers. A decade earlier, the Flintstones famously met Samantha Stevens from Bewitched, along with rubbing elbows with movie stars Ann-Margaret and Tony Curits — or should we say Ann-Margrock and Stony Curtis? And there was also that cameo by Yogi Bear.
The Flintstones also had a crossover with ABC’s “Shindig”, in which host Jimmy O’Neill guest starred as “Jimmy O’Neillstone”. Then there was the western episode where Fred and Barney were rescued in the end by Ben “Cartrock” and his sons Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe — but “Bonanza” aired on a different network.
Also, I think there was an episode of The Jetsons where Elroy is watching Flintstones reruns.
I’ve seen multiple versions of those opening credits over the years—The one shown here, and another without the licensed characters and real-life celebrities, Then there’s others with the gunshots occurring off-screen, and sometimes with none whatsoever. Weird.
Wouldn’t be the first time CBS had done that sort of thing. A great many of the guests on “What’s My Line?” were tied to CBS shows (in spite of the fact that the moderator himself was tied to ABC).
It was this show that made me really like Scooby Doo, mainly just because of the often unusual guest stars! Looking at the again in adulthood I see how awful some of the animation was, compared with it being quite nice in the original show. But I also love how guests became embedded in the series long term, so we could have Vincent Price in there, Simon Cowell showing up, Don Knotts just incidentally wandering around; Johnny Bravo and Superstition, etc etc! And then a whole comic book series of them!
Actually, Don Adams was tied to CBS in a way. The fifth and final season of Get Smart in 1969-70 was on CBS.
Also, there’s former Monkee Dav(e)y Jones, who guested in the December 9, 1972 Movie, “The Haunted Horseman Of Hagglethorn Hall” (in which he performs “I Can Make You Happy” [a remake of the tune from “Mystery Mask Mix-Up”]). CBS had some time before finished a 3-season run of repeats of The Monkees’ 1966-68 television series on its Saturday Afternoon schedule and switched them over to ABC.
I believe the Groovie Goolies – Looney Tunes crossover was also such an idea. They clearly were copying the formula of Scooby in having the titular “gang” traveling in their vehicle and meeting stars (in this case, still contracted to ABC at the time, though, the Goolies had just come over from CBS, and the Looney Tunes had been split between both networks, and were about to go full CBS for awhile). While such a series wasn’t mentioned in the Filmation Generation book, since all of those “Saturday Superstar Movies” were likely pilots for new series (some becoming series), then if that had become a series, that’s probably what you would have seen
Don Knotts and Jerry Reed…life was good in cartoons back then!
Right now there’s the eccentric “Scooby Doo and Guess Who”, a half-hour with both fictional and real celebrities. Recently caught one that had them meeting their own current voice cast, so the actors were speaking tongue-in-cheek praise to flattering caricatures of themselves.