From the late 1960s until the 1990s, the franchise rarely deviated. Hatecraft, voiced by Jeffrey CombsĪdd to these literary concoctions the influence of 1940s radio serials and you have the basic formula for the entire oeuvre of Scooby-Doo. Scholar Robert Kenneth Jones, the author of The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s, defines the entire sub-genre as “a form of story in which the villain perpetrated seemingly supernatural deviltries, which were logically explained in the end.” Usually, personal gain in the form of wealth or status motivated weird menace villains, while weird menace heroes often joined in the mystery after the abduction of a loved one.

Originating in Dime Mystery Magazine around 1933, weird menace stories more often than naught presented stories that emphasized torture, physical violence, and sexual intrigue. Lovecraft was an active participant) publishers tried to expand upon the combined popularity of the mystery and horror genres by creating the so-called “weird menace” sub-genre. Wallace, like the later creators of Scooby-Doo, typically disguised his bizarre crime stories as horror tales up until the final reveal.įinally, during the height of the pulp magazine era (of which H.P. Across the English Channel, Edgar Wallace, an author so prolific that a frequently cited statistic asserts that he was responsible for producing one-quarter of all the books read in England during the 1920s, crafted novels about masked criminal societies who threatened isolated castles or London townhouses surrounded by thick fog. In France, where super criminals like Fantômas ruled the pulp world as quasi-surrealist observations about the insidious nature of urban terrorism, Arthur Bern è de created a proto- Scooby-Doo novel in the form of Belph é gor, a 1927 mystery about a treasure-obsessed criminal who dresses up like a demon in order to search the Louvre for hidden treasure. Before Hanna-Barbera and writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears debuted the show in 1969, plenty of fictional detectives had already battled seemingly supernatural foes who turned out to be nothing more than imaginative thugs.

Unbeknownst to most, the Scooby-Doo franchise has quite the lineage. In a word, I wanted my monsters to be real for a change, not just shoddy criminals in rubber masks and suits coated in phosphorus. That was certainly true in my case, for after years of wolfing down the adventures of Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby, and the Mystery Machine, I began to crave something more-something less reassuring. It’s the adolescent’s gateway drug to darker, more disturbing horror.

Shudder Pulps by Robert Kenneth Jones