Post by wileyk209 on Jun 18, 2017 19:10:53 GMT -5
I'm sure many of you remember how Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, whom both helped develop Scooby-Doo and wrote many of the early episodes (they also developed Captain Caveman, Fangface, Dynomutt and the Blue Falcon, and a few others) left Hanna-Barbera in the late 1970s to start up their own animation company, Ruby-Spears Enterprises, and one of their first projects was a Scooby-Doo clone (similar to how H-B also had the Funky Phantom, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, the Clue Club, etc. This was known in the industry as "Three/Four Kids and a Nyah-Nyah.") The twist to the formula was the goofy male teenager in the group was actually also a werewolf: Fangface!
After that, Ruby-Spears began doing much different programming than that, and had numerous successful shows in the 1980s and early 1990s (like Plastic-Man, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Saturday Supercade, Thundarr the Barbarian, Turbo Teen, Mega Man, etc.) They also co-produced "The Scooby-Doo, Scrappy-Doo and Puppy Hour" with Hanna-Barbera in 1982. (In fact, by 1981, both H-B and Ruby-Spears were owned by Taft Broadcasting, and eventually most of the old Ruby-Spears library was folded into H-B and Warner Bros.)
But there's a website Ruby-Spears did in the early 2000s that's still active, but hasn't been updated for 15 years, and it lists some new projects they were planning. One of them was, believe it or not, ANOTHER take on the "Three/Four Kids and a Nyah-Nyah" formula: "Fetch!"
The blurb explains, "Fetch, the handsome canine star of the hottest new mystery television series, Howlin' for Clues, has a deep, dark secret. A secret that only his owners know about. Fetch is a fraud! Inside the pedigreed dog costume is a goofy-looking mutt. While Fetch and his owners go on the road to meet and greet his adoring fans, they encounter and are expected to solve these real mysteries. The problem is Fetch thinks he can."
I'm not sure how this show would've turned out. I still sometimes wonder what it would've been like. The joke partly is that Fetch looks like a handsome pedigreed German Shepard or something, but inside the dog suit he's really a goofy typical "Nyah-Nyah" sort of dog, like "Goober and the Ghost Chasers" or something would've done (Scooby is pretty strongly-built and not as goofy-looking as many of the other "Nyah-Nyah"s are.)
Just felt like sharing this interesting tidbit.
After that, Ruby-Spears began doing much different programming than that, and had numerous successful shows in the 1980s and early 1990s (like Plastic-Man, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Saturday Supercade, Thundarr the Barbarian, Turbo Teen, Mega Man, etc.) They also co-produced "The Scooby-Doo, Scrappy-Doo and Puppy Hour" with Hanna-Barbera in 1982. (In fact, by 1981, both H-B and Ruby-Spears were owned by Taft Broadcasting, and eventually most of the old Ruby-Spears library was folded into H-B and Warner Bros.)
But there's a website Ruby-Spears did in the early 2000s that's still active, but hasn't been updated for 15 years, and it lists some new projects they were planning. One of them was, believe it or not, ANOTHER take on the "Three/Four Kids and a Nyah-Nyah" formula: "Fetch!"
The blurb explains, "Fetch, the handsome canine star of the hottest new mystery television series, Howlin' for Clues, has a deep, dark secret. A secret that only his owners know about. Fetch is a fraud! Inside the pedigreed dog costume is a goofy-looking mutt. While Fetch and his owners go on the road to meet and greet his adoring fans, they encounter and are expected to solve these real mysteries. The problem is Fetch thinks he can."
I'm not sure how this show would've turned out. I still sometimes wonder what it would've been like. The joke partly is that Fetch looks like a handsome pedigreed German Shepard or something, but inside the dog suit he's really a goofy typical "Nyah-Nyah" sort of dog, like "Goober and the Ghost Chasers" or something would've done (Scooby is pretty strongly-built and not as goofy-looking as many of the other "Nyah-Nyah"s are.)
Just felt like sharing this interesting tidbit.
