In my ongoing quest to learn the pop-culture history and design of the things I felt compelled to buy over the years.
This time I was inspired by this action figure I have from Cartoon Network from the early 2000s. The 10,000 Volt Ghost from the original Scooby-Doo.
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I've been trying to study the background of the toys that I have and trying to find out the history of the things that I've collected over the years. My own little pop-culture art history project.
First, a little backstory about my collection
In the late 90s early 2000s, it was kind of a heyday for toys. Cartoon Network had all of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons as well as their own original cartoons and they started making toys out of everything! And I bought all kinds of weird crap that I still have to this day from the Cartoon Network.One of them is from an old episode of Scooby-Doo it's the 10,000 Volt ghost.
I was just kind of curious to know when they came up with Scooby-Doo. What was the process behind that? Who comes up with it? Was it by committee? Was it one person who pitched the idea?
Instead of looking it up I used Quora.
To find out the answer I wanted to try something new. So I went to the equivalent of the "can you google that for me?" website Quora.All I said was, "Who were the artists that designed the original Scooby-Doo cartoon characters?"
I got a response almost like instantly from a person named Chris Bracher. Turns out he is the former system engineer from Hanna-Barbera from 1995 to 1998. So someone from Hanna-Barbera actually responded to me!
Chris told me it was just one man that came up with Scooby-Doo, Iwao Takamoto, was his name.
He created the whole thing. When I looked up Iwao, I realized I've seen him in like a bunch of the stuff about Hanna-Barbera I've seen over the years.
Chris tells me that Iwao Takamoto, was the senior artist and creative consultant at Hanna-Barbera until his death in 2007 and that Chris worked with him in the summer of 1997.
They designed a limited edition Flintstones collector cell together and he attached a picture of it to the post.
So I went to Quora thinking I'm gonna get a bunch of Google search answers and I ended up hearing from a person that actually worked at Hanna-Barbera that knew the person that created Scooby-Doo.
So that's the history I have behind my Scooby-doo villain action figure.