Iwao Takamoto creator Scooby-Doo died recently;
Mr. Takamoto, who learned his trade in a Japanese-American internment camp, was hired by the Walt Disney Studios on the basis of two dime-store notebooks full of sketches. He went on to work on animated films like “Lady and the Tramp” and “101 Dalmations.” In 1973, he directed, with Charles A. Nichols, the animated film “Charlotte’s Web.”...
After his release, Mr. Takamoto contacted Disney Studios, knowing little about the animation industry but remembering the name from his Manzanar tutors. Asked to bring in a portfolio of his work, he was perplexed. “I had no portfolio,” he told Animation Blast magazine in a 1999 interview. “I didn’t have much of an idea what a portfolio truly was.”
Mr. Takamoto spent the weekend before his interview sketching anything he could think of — “from knights to cowboys,” he said — and filled up his notebooks. The results landed him a job as an assistant illustrator at Disney, where he worked from 1947 to 1961...
“Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?,” the original Scooby-Doo series, was partly the brainchild of Fred Silverman, then the director of daytime programming at CBS. Mr. Silverman wanted a highly plotted cartoon echoing the 40s radio show “I Love a Mystery.” Mr. Takamoto drew the original sketches for four human characters and a dog (widely believed to be named after Frank Sinatra’s scat-style singing in “Strangers in the Night”).
The dog’s physiognomy was Mr. Takamoto’s contribution.
“There was a lady that bred Great Danes” at Hanna-Barbera, Mr. Takamoto said in a recent conversation with Cartoon Network Studios employees. “She showed me some pictures and talked about the important points of a Great Dane — like a straight back, straight legs, small chin and such. I decided to go the opposite and give him a hump back, bowed legs, big chin and such. Even his color is wrong.”
What is right about Scooby-Doo is his fearful courage. Like the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz,” Scooby-Doo is always terrified, but always willing to get to the bottom of the mystery of the day with his four human companions, Fred, Daphne, the brainy Velma and the perpetually famished and clueless Shaggy, Scooby-Doo’s human counterpart (originally voiced by Casey Kasem).
In various incarnations “Scooby-Doo” has been on television almost nonstop since it began in 1969 and has spawned many spinoffs, including a live-action movie featuring a computer-generated Scooby in 2002 and a sequel in 2004."
Related Blog- The Cartoon Brew
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