Prologue

The reasons for the break-up of the Scooby Gang were simple.

Actually, they weren't. They were complicated. But it did all come down to a single point in time during a single moment of a single day. That was the simple part.

The complicated part was everything that led up to it.

It began (as everything does in the business) with ratings. The show had started out as a podcast where the gang solved a mystery at their school. A handful of people listened to the podcast and began inviting them to help solve similar mysteries that seemed to spring up all around. It was fun. There were no advertisers. No ratings. Then the podcast took off. First, it went from podcast to Youtube channel. Other than Velma uploading a new 20-minute video each week, they didn't pay much notice until they hit 1,000,000 subscribers. And they were making $50,000 per year. Which seemed like a lot.

Then Velma received the e-mail from CBS' in-house production company requesting a meeting. Still in high school at the time, they had no idea what to do about this. So, Daphne went to her father for help. He gave her a list of talent agents and their phone numbers. As it turns out, it is very easy to get an agent when your last name is Blake and CBS has requested a meeting. It is much more difficult otherwise. In case you're wondering.

The agent was hired, the meeting was had. Then lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. And voila! They had a one-year network deal for seventeen episodes. The basic premise of the show remained the same. It would be reality-based with raw footage obtained through the process of their solving a mystery. Other than that, everything else changed.

There was an influx of money which was good. The biggest bonus had been the Mystery Machine. Prior to that time, they had gone in whatever vehicle they could borrow from one of their parents. The good week-ends were when they could get one of the Blake fleet, the bad week-ends were when they had to borrow Velma's mother's Volkswagen Beetle. Second, they had a camera person and a producer who followed along in a separate car. While Velma continued to shoot a great deal of the footage with her phone to maintain the look of the original channel, the majority of the finished product now came from professional video.

Some compromises were also required. The production company had sold a portion of their contract to Sony who stipulated that one of Columbia's songs be prominently featured in every episode in its entirety. The only way to effectively do that was a chase scene montage which Velma hated since it took 3 minutes away from the total of 22 minutes they had available per episode. The biggest point of contention came when the production company wanted to take over editing. Velma went ballistic and negotiations ceased for a week. The next offer included Velma retaining creative control of the editing process but she had to work with the CBS team.

The original Youtube Channel had been called simply Mystery, Inc. But focus groups were brought in and there was no avoiding the fact that the thing which held their fascination was the talking dog. The name became 'Scooby Doo Where Are You?' No one on the gang really minded the name change but they thought it was sort of odd given Shaggy and Scooby's place in the mystery solving process. It was like having a fishing show and naming it after the worm.

Even though it was a live-action reality show, the network placed it on Saturday morning against the Hardy Boys. And they kicked the Hardy Boys' butts. Ratings were great, advertising revenue increased, and everyone was happy. Until, of course, the network executives decided they could squeeze more money out of the show in its second season. They changed it to an hour and added guest stars. The gang had just graduated from high school and in the second season, they were on the road for 35 weeks out of the year trying to get enough raw footage to create an hour-long show. The guest stars did not travel to location and their involvement was scripted post-production and green-screened. Even though this change made the costs of the show double, the income per episode increased only 50% and the production values suffered.

A year of this led to a staged rebellion by the original Scooby gang which was not resisted by the production company since revenues had not increased. The format returned to normal for the third season with the exception that the network wanted more scripted content and began providing the gang with complete scripted episodes which were shot in studio. These were interspersed throughout the season with the reality episodes and resulted in the more ridiculous storylines such as the gang going into outer space.

Even with the network meddling, the ratings peaked in the third season with the combination of the show returning to its original 30-minute format and being relocated out of the ratings dungeon of Saturday morning and into a prime-time slot. The entire gang postponed college. This bothered no one except for Velma.

After the third season, ratings began to slip but no one panicked. They just worked harder. 32 weeks on the road per year created 16 reality episodes for which roughly 60 hours of raw footage was edited down into 19 minutes which was added to the 3-minute song montage for a 22-minute show. Another 8 weeks were spent in California in studio creating 8 scripted episodes for a total of 24 episodes per year.

The scripted episodes always felt awkward as they were acting while playing themselves doing what they did the rest of the year for real. The network executives stepped in again and required an additional character be added in the form of another talking dog. And Scrappy Doo came into being. Since there was no Scrappy Doo in real life, he was added as CGI in post-production and they had to do their acting with a small man wearing a green outfit that had ping pong balls attached to it. The Scrappy Doo scripted episodes set record lows for ratings.

The shows were about mysteries and, while the weekly unmasking of the latex-covered villain was the resolution of the short-term mystery, the big mystery that was discussed endlessly on-line and kept up the viewership of the show was 'Where did a talking dog come from?' Interjecting a fake counterpart was confusing and they never completely recovered from the ratings slips of that season. Which they referred to as the year in Scrappy purgatory.

Discussions began about what to do if they were not renewed. Negotiations with CBS ensued and two scripted movies per year were added to their workload on top of the 40-week schedule they already had. Their producers and camera people became a revolving door of new faces as they couldn't stand the strain of the schedule. The editing crew also had heavy turnover and considered Velma a tyrant as she never allowed them to miss a deadline by more than six hours.

But then the movie came out of nowhere and brought some cash flow into the production company which allowed them to offset some lost advertising revenue from the slipping ratings. The other result of the movie was that the actress cast to play Velma shared few of her physical attributes. This resulted in Velma listening to repeated conversations about how people were suddenly considering her look to be sexy. The average age of young women dressing up as her on Halloween went up sharply. But with the increase in height, there was no corresponding change in dress length. This had led to some self-esteem issues and resulted in her going on a diet which lost 20 pounds, made her extremely grumpy for the ten-month duration of the diet, and radically changed how the fans talked about her on the internet (especially the male fans).

And then it happened.

While filming a series of episodes where they were exploring similar groups that had preceded them through history, the gang began to find evidence of previous talking animals. Ratings began to creep back up as it began to look like the big mystery might be on the verge of solution. When it came, the revelation of the dimensional beings, the Anunnaki, who had spawned the talking animals whose purpose was to solve mysteries and guard the secret sarcophagus was the highest rated episode in the history of the show.

There were advantages to the knowledge being out. First, Scooby Doo was made a citizen of the United States which required a massive sifting through all previous episodes and overdubbing over any reference to Shaggy as Scooby's 'owner'.

Second was that Scooby no longer had to go to the vet. The announcement of the Anunnaki had created grants to study them including medical doctors and scientists. Not only did Scooby get paid for participating, he also got free medical treatment.

Going to the vet had always been odd. Every vet made the same joke: "I've never had a client who could tell me what was wrong before." This had gotten so old that on one occasion when one of Fred's traps had gone badly awry and Shaggy had rushed Scooby to the vet with a bleeding compound fracture in his leg, the vet had made the joke and Scooby had responded with an amazingly diverse and abundant string of profanity. The vet had used the preponderance of 'R' sounds within the outburst to pretend that she didn't understand.

One of the things that Scooby missed about the vet was that veterinary use of pain killers and sedatives was much less controlled than it was for human doctors. And he would frequently come out of the vet's office completely baked. When they would get out to the car, Shaggy would turn to him and say, "You know Scoob, if you keep this up, we're going to exchange reputations."

To which, Scooby would rest his head against the window and respond "Ratever roo ray, Raggy" before passing out.

But there was a major negative to the news.

After the ratings bonanza, corks were popped. Champagne was drunk. Celebrations were had. The hard work had paid off and they were back. Negotiations began for increasing the cost for advertisers. The negotiations fell flat. The network and the advertisers understood something that the gang had not yet grasped. Remove the big mystery from the show and you remove the interest.

Ratings plummeted. After being their home from the beginning, CBS pulled the plug. A brief dalliance with ABC amounted to nothing and they ended up for one season on basic cable before being cancelled again and left with trying to hang on for a season in syndication. Their workload had increased as they lost the ability to pay employees and it went back to just the five of them. Now it was 40 weeks on the road interspersed with frantic periods of sleepless editing and overdubbing. It had become an exhausting, full-time, life-consuming job all for the purpose of putting together a show that they hoped they might be able to sell on an episode-by-episode basis while they all burned through their personal savings.

Meanwhile, with the mystery of Scooby's existence explained, their remaining fans' on-line conversations had switched to the personal lives of the gang.

This was the environment as the Mystery Machine drove through the non-descript Kansas countryside on their way to what appeared to be a mundane mystery. Velma had already solved it on paper and they could have called it in but they needed raw footage for another episode. Spirits were low since Fred had not been able sell any of the last three episodes and the company were gushing red ink.

The atmosphere in the van was a little tense. The topic that Daphne wanted to discuss was about what they could do to raise interest in the gang and hopefully provide some potential demand for new material. Her conclusion was that they needed a big splash announcement based on what the fans were discussing on-line. And right now the hot topic amongst the ever dwindling fan boards was again about Velma.

"Velma, it's all right. None of us really cares and it would open up a new potential demographic."

Velma knew exactly what Daphne was saying but refused to make it easy.

"None of you really care about what, exactly?"

"You know…"

"I know what?"

"None of us really care if you're gay."

Velma's teeth clenched. She had seen the discussions on the internet and could almost deal with strangers discussing her private life, but these were her friends. They should know better.

"I'm not gay."

"So, you're straight?"

"I'm not straight."

This brought a pause even to Daphna and then her face lit up, "You mean you're asexual, or bisexual, or pansexual, or any of those other sexuals?! That would be great! We could generate some real buzz…"

"No. I'm none of those."

This brought the van to a silent point.

Since the previous year when Shaggy had felt forced to choose between Velma as a romantic partner and Scooby as a best friend – and had chosen Scooby – any discussion that involved Velma and romance would get him to leave the room. Whenever he as much as hinted around the subject, he would find out that the Velma's wounded ego had not yet healed. Maybe this was his chance to try again.

He interjected, "C'mon, Daph. Some things…"

Without even turning in her seat, Velma spoke through gritted teeth, "I can speak for myself, Norville."

Shaggy stopped talking and nodded.

Scooby raised his forepaw in the air and spiraled it downward making as close to a whistle as a dog with no lips can make until the paw crashed into Shaggy's lap which Scooby punctuated with "Kaboom."

Shaggy whispered, "I guess it could have gone worse."

Scooby whispered back, "Rearry? I'm 'retty sure she 'ropped a 'Norville' on roo."

Shaggy nodded, "Yeah. She dropped a 'Norville' on me."

But Daphne refused to give up, "Velma, there's L. There's G. There's B. There's T. And there's Q. And maybe some others. You have to choose one."

Velma now was pushed back into her seat with her arms folded across her chest, "I'm a V."

Daphne sighed. Where this was going was obvious, but she would play it out to the end, "A 'V'?"

"Yes. A Velma. I am a Velma."

"And what is a Velma?"

"A Velma is someone who considers her sexuality no one else's damn business."

This is where Fred decided that he just had to step in, "C'mon Velma. You have to be something. Otherwise, it's just not natural."

And that was the single moment in time when the Scooby Gang ended.

There was a pregnant pause before Velma spoke calmly, "Please take me to the nearest airport."

But none of that is what this story is about.

This story is about a mystery.