Prologue
Let's get one thing straight right off the bat. These are my memoirs. I'm not using ghost writers like Daphne, Fred, and Scooby. Shaggy, of course, wrote his own book but it was a cookbook so it really doesn't count.
Also, if you are reading this expecting some tell-all about why The Gang broke up, you're going to be disappointed. I'm nowhere near emotionally ready to be talking about a betrayal that ended a decade-long friendship and I certainly won't be publishing it for all to see.
This is a story about corporate greed and the network that took advantage of four teen-agers and got them hooked into a contract which reduced their lives to Saturday morning children's pablum. My attorney tells me that I can't discuss the details of the contract due to a non-disclosure clause but there is nothing to stop me from telling the true stories of our mysteries. Yes, the TRUE stories, before the network hacks re-shot, re-wrote, and edited them into ridiculous and blatant fiction.
I can hear you tsk-tsk-ing already (that means you—Agnes, my literary agent). Yes. This is exposition—narrative—in all its glory. Heaven forbid I return to a writing style from back in the day when people weren't getting bored and heading to their I-Phones after 3,000 words.
A lot happened after Scooby, Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, and I were thrown together and solved our first mystery in the first few weeks of our sophomore year of high school. Don't worry. I'll get to the juicy stuff in time and you'll learn more about those of us you call The Scooby Gang than you ever wanted to know. And it won't all be pretty. And it won't all be nicey-nice. But that's life and we lived it. The one thing that I will guarantee is that it will be true. It will be the first time that you've heard the unvarnished truth.
A few of you may have heard the original podcast which later got transcribed into story form as "Mystery Prime". Not an imaginative title, but don't blame me. In the modern world of publishing, titles are made by committee. At the end of that story, you probably noticed that Daphne, Shaggy, and I didn't automatically become great friends like in most of the fanzine accounts of our first meeting. I'll let you in on a little secret. We didn't like each other. And if you ask me right now, I'd say that in a lot of ways we still don't. If we did, then The Gang would have stayed together. But, like I said, I'm not ready to talk about that.
To continue with my exposition (take that, Agnes!), the use of my parent's podcast to describe in detail our part in solving the Annie Sadler mystery, made the downloads jump from seven per week to nearly twenty thousand per week. I thought I had hit the big time. But then I got to the end of that mystery and had to return to discussing the legends of Crystal Cove and the listening numbers dropped off. Week after week of debunking one lame ghost story after another and I had dropped below one thousand.
During that time, Marcie Fleach became someone with whom I could have actual enjoyable conversations. Butch Roberts became someone with whom I could have conversations that I didn't hate. And Shaggy, if he was not high (which wasn't much of the time), and I would talk for two-minute stretches. I would nod in the hallway to Daphne or Fred. Once or twice, they might have nodded back.
I did notice, though, that for two people that got off on such a wrong foot, Daphne and Fred were spending a lot of time together. One thing that I have to give those two credit for was that they kept Scooby Doo's secret. I expected the news of the talking dog to be all over the news within a week but, the weeks went by and the secret stayed a secret.
Of course, by the time that the network bought our souls and took our original YouTube videos and converted them from true crime stories to Saturday morning kiddie fodder, Scooby's secret was out and, when they made us reshoot large parts of our second mystery in studio a year and a half later, Scooby changed from a relatively minor part to the central character. That's what you saw when you watched the old television show. My publisher's attorneys tell me I cannot name the network but if you think of a space shuttle, a country in South America, and the capitol of one of the Carolina's you might be able to hazard a guess.
What you watched on the network-who-shall-not-be-named was not the way it was.
Also (spoiler alert), museums don't keep operational Sopwith Camels with full gas tanks inside buildings. And, if we did one tenth of the damage to a museum that the final broadcast showed, we would still be in prison. But, enough with the exposition. Agnes' torment is over.
It's time to get to the mystery.
