The Golden Days of 1988

I notice that the first season of "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo" came out on DVD recently. This was a pretty interesting show and in its own way, fairly important. Though it was basically a children's show and doesn't have a lot of adult references or humor -- unlike Tiny Toons, done by a lot of the same people, or Mighty Mouse, which premiered a year before this, Pup wasn't trying to pull in grown-ups -- it had a nice combination of reverence and irreverence towards the Scooby-Doo franchise. It made fun of the clichés of Scooby-Doo and of H-B cartoons in general, but its style actually felt much closer to early H-B cartoons than any H-B show had been for years; early H-B character designs popped up among the supporting characters, there was no Scrappy-Doo, no plundering whatever movie or TV show was big at the time, and the stories were, in their tongue-in-cheek way, the most "pure" version of the series premise; it actually made the mystery-solving format kind of fun and cute.

It was also literally the first H-B show ever that actually looked better than previous H-B shows; Hanna-Barbera and indeed every other cartoon studio had been making cartoons that looked worse every year, Pup finally dumped the Ruby-Spears look that the studio had been doing for decades -- the flesh-colored eyes, the drab, ashen backgrounds -- and went for an angular look, stylized backgrounds, bright colors, Tex Avery takes, and even some decent animation (from Wang's Cuckoo's Nest studio, supervised by Glen Kennedy). Even the music was different, with doo-wop vocal tracks inspired by Little Shop of Horrors. Velma even had her own distinctive way of walking, and while they may have over-done it on the accompanying sound effects, it was the first time in a while that a character was actually characterized and given individuality by the way she walked.

Everybody in 1987-88 was scrambling to revive old characters, sometimes as kids, sometimes not (Mighty Mouse, Beany and Cecil). Within a few years, the people working on these shows would create new shows with new characters, but shows like Pup weren't just notable for the people who worked on them (notably Tom Ruegger, who conceived and produced the show, Charlie Howell, who co-wrote the first episode, Alfred Gimeno, and Scott Jeralds) but just for helping to establish the idea that network kids' cartoons could, and should, look a lot better than they had been for the previous 20 years.

This interview with Tom Ruegger gives a lot of great background information, including the information that Bill Hanna directed the first episode himself, the first time in a number of years that he'd done that. (By that point H-B shows did not have individual director credits for the episodes.)