Mama Cass's Golden Caramel Bar: An Examination of a Single Episode of The New Scooby Doo Movies.

By David Macpherson

David Macpherson explores an hour long episode of Scooby Doo. This tale deals with Cass Elliot owning a haunted candy factory. Only Scooby and friends can save the day.

This book examines aspects of the show, the need for guest stars in a Saturday morning cartoon and the joy and pain of limited animation.

Mama Cass's Golden Caramel Bar is a funny, thorough exploration of something that was never meant to be closely examined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393048367

Book preview

The Author in The Unknown Truth about the Origin of Scooby Doo

Scooby Doo premiered on September 13, 1969. September 13th is the birthdate for Ben Savage, Milton Hershey, and Roald Dahl, among countless others. Tyler Perry has the exact birthday, he is exactly the same age as Scooby.

I was born October 2, 1969. I am just a few weeks younger than Scooby Doo. My life walks hand in hand with Scooby Doo. I have watched him every part of my life. I now watch it with my son, but sometimes I am more into it than he is.

To be accurate though, to me Scooby Doo was a brand new show, never to have been aired until 1975, when Scooby and I were turning six. On that Saturday morning, ABC had taken over the program. Instead of producing new episodes, they aired the original episodes from 1969, I was not aware of him before. Did I not watch Saturday morning cartoons before the age of six? That’s impossible.

The only possibility was that near the end of its time on CBS, there was nothing great about the show. From 72 to 73, the powers that be changed the format of the show. It was now an hour long. Most of the tropes were the same: four teens and a dog solve crimes that have to do with the supernatural. The monsters are always revealed to be human criminals in masks, Scooby and Shaggy are afraid and constantly hungry, and there must be many instances of Scooby and Shaggy running away from the fiend of the week. The more running, the funnier the show tended to be.

The differences were only two, but they were very large differences. The first was that now the show expanded from a half hour to a full hour. The thinking was smart. Scooby Doo was a big success and the shows that followed it lost ratings. Why not have Scooby take up a full hour? The problem appeared to be that the legs of the formula could only hold a half hour of show. The formula was: kids stumble into a deserted location where it is being terrorized by a creature of the night, the kids begin to solve the mystery, they find clues, they are chased by the creature, they come up with a plan to capture the monster, the plan fails but they capture the antagonist and reveal him as a man in mask. That’s it. SImple and perfect. It’s a winner of a formula, but a formula that seems to work best in thirty minutes.

At sixty minutes, the formula is diluted. There is only so much running around in a deserted building or amusement park anyone can stand. Even a five year old kid will find it tedious. He might not use that particular word, but he can still feel that niggling sensation that he chose the wrong station, that the cartoon on Channel 5 or Channel 7 is better than this sort of Scooby Doo on Channel 2. The imitators are more enjoyable than this long in the tooth original.

The other problem is that every episode had special guest stars. Batman and Robin, twice. The Harlem Globetrotters, twice. Speed Buggy (another Hanna Barbera show in a form of cross promotion), I Dream of Jeannie, the Three Stooges, Jonathan Winters, Don Knotts, Phyllis Diller, Sonny and Cher, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Reed, Sandy Duncan, Tim Conway, Don Adams, Cass Elliot, DIck Van Dyke. Having Batman and the Harlem Globetrotters was fine, because they were things kids still liked. But Dick Van Dyke? Wasn’t he in that movie where he was a singing chimney sweep?  Sonny and Cher, sure, they have a variety show that was kind of funny, when we were allowed to stay up that late to watch tv, of course if we could stay up that late, that was not the show we chose to watch.

Also, the strain on the writers was evident. They had to find a reason why the Scooby Gang came across Sandy Duncan or the Three Stooges. Then they had to fill up forty three minutes instead of twenty two. It is not surprising that it didn’t hold up.

It is ironic to think that by doubling the length and by including guest stars of some repute, the filmmakers were under the idea that making it bigger makes it better, but actually all of these additions made it smaller and forgettable.

I didn’t know of the New Scooby Doo Movies until I was ten. My family had moved back to New York from years in Illinois. Channel 11 was playing the Movies at seven in the morning. It was not played for long, replaced by two half hour shows. I was excited to see these unknown episodes, but soon I stopped getting up early to watch them. I might have said, I was too old to watch cartoons, but the truth was more that I was not engaged. I still wanted to watch the original Scooby Doo Where Are You, because they made me happy.

On watching them now with my son, I am still happy with them.

Batman and Robin and the Scooby Gang in The Snare of the Self Referential In-Joke

From the comic book Scooby Doo Team Up issue one, page 3. Published January 2014 by DC Comics. Written by Sholly Fisch, illustrated by Dario Brizuela.

Batman: Why, it’s Scooby Doo and the Mystery Inc. gang!

Daphne: Long time, no see, Batman. Ever since our run-in with the Joker and the Penguin.

Fred: Yeah, we kept running into all sorts of people back then. Singers, basketball players. It felt like we were teaming up with someone different every week.

Batman: I know the feeling.

Fred Silverman in The Riddle of the Naming of Scooby Doo

From an interview for the Archive of American Television, an interview with Fred Silverman, the head of CBS Daytime Programming in the late 1960s. "I always thought, that kids in a haunted house, would be a big hit. Going back to the days when I was a kid, looking at Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. You now, in movies like that. I take it was a great opportunity to do that. Play it