Scooby-Doo: A Legacy With Appeal That's No Mystery

You had to be 8 years old, really, on your third bowl of Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries (your parents were still asleep, dreaming on a Saturday morning that you and your brother were already off at college), when the sugar rush was reaching your toenails, when the theme song came on in its complete and utter brilliance:

Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you?

We got some work to do now.

There he was! The Dog! The Scoobster! The sugar high morphed him into 3-D!

Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you?

We need some help from you now.

You were thwonking the spoon while you watched. Bopping your head! Scoob! Shaggy! Ruh-roh! Zoinks!

The sublime joy of the house to yourself, of half an hour of pure and meaningless kid-dom! "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!," a show in which nobody is as smart as unsupervised young detectives who never go to school, have no parents, no zits and no sex drive! And a van!

All together now, with the villain:

"And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"

Iwao Takamoto could not have foreseen the 37-year (and counting) phenomenon that was emerging from his pencil at Hanna-Barbera Studios when he first sketched Scooby-Doo in the late 1960s. There is no apparent meaning in a Great Dane with limited English skills. But Takamoto, who died at age 81 this week in Los Angeles, imbued his big-pawed friend with such warmth, goofiness and inner ham that he created a pop and counterculture icon that just about every American child since 1969 has known.

"You see these animated movies today, they spend so much money on them, and it's just amazing that guys like Takamoto touched you and moved you; they captured the imagination of kids and retained the magic of youth without all that elaboration," Ramin Zahed, editor of Animation Magazine, said yesterday. Cut to theme: