May 16, 2020

All'scoops!"Easter Eggs We found to pay tribute to the crew of the original Hannah Barbera

Scoob! is in some ways a perfect release for VOD since it's packed with tributes and Easter eggs for classic Hanna-Barbera fans that might be too quick to catch in a theatrical viewing.

Watching it at home though gives us the opportunity to pause and find all of the tributes. Of course, there's a plenitude of references to the Hanna-Barbera library of characters, but we also noticed that there were quite a few shout-outs to the people who were involved in the original 1969 series. Below, we've cataloged the ones that we've found so far. If you see others, let us know in the comments.

Shaggy is standing in front of a building with an advertisement that reads Casey's Creations. This is a tribute to Arab-American disc jockey Casey Kasem (1932-2014), host and co-creator of the American Top 40 radio program, who was also the original voice of Shaggy and has brought him to life for a large part of the character's run.

This location is a nice nod to Joe Ruby (b. 1933) and Ken Spears (b. 1938), the two animation writers who developed the series. They later launched their own studio, Ruby-Spears Productions, which produced lots of children's shows including Thundarr the Barbarian, Rubik, the Amazing Cube, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Mister T, and the U.S. Mega Man series in the 1990s.

This is a fine tribute to Iwao Takamoto, the master designer at Hanna-Barbera who developed the visual appearance of the Mystery Inc. gang. His iconic designs have played as much a role in the success of this franchise as any other factor.

This is one of the sweetest tributes in the film. Two of the references are plain enough. Bill Hanna (1910-2001) and Joe Barbera (1911-2006) are the founders of the animation studio Hanna-Barbera, which produced the original series. But did you catch Carlton Way- That's a shout out to Carlton Zapp, the beloved personal assistant to Hanna and Barbera from the early 1990s through their deaths. No employee spent more time with the famous animation men in the final years of their lives than Carlton, and it's more than fitting to see him get some recognition alongside his bosses.

Another multi-tribute scene here. Fred Silverman (1937-2020) was the CBS executive who championed the original series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and came up with the name of the series. He discusses his role in the development of the show below:

The street sign refers to Jerry Eisenberg (b. 1937), one of the key artists at Hanna-Barbera who was there for most of the Sixties and Seventies, and did a bit of everything including character design, storyboard, layout, and animation. He worked on the original development of the show, including helping to design Shaggy, but made most of his Scooby contributions to later iterations of the franchise.

Voice actor Don Messick (1926-1997) gets his own major location in the film, and for good reason: he was the voice of Scooby Doo from the very start until his retirement in 1996. If you're a Hanna-Barbera fan, you're undoubtedly familiar with his other characters too, some of which are seen below: