I saw a tiktok of some guy making a joke about if Scooby Doo ever went to Mexico to solve a case he’d get killed by cartels or something and BOOO! WRONG! Real Scoobyheads know that he’s already BEEN to Mexico in the classic 2003 direct to video movie Scooby Doo and the Monster of Mexico where a white American businessman tries to scam Mexicans out of their ancestral land because they refused to sell to him.
Iwao Takamoto, Hanna Barbera design artist who created the look of Scooby Doo, the Jetsons, and Wacky Races. Interned at the Manzanar internment camp after Pearl Harbor, he left his job as an agricultural worker and fruit picker in Idaho to work for Walt Disney, where he was trained in animation and did character design for Lady and the Tramp, due to his lifelong love of dogs, his favorite animal. Moving to Hanna Barbera in 1961, he designed Scooby Doo by deliberately reversing every sign of “good breeding” in a Great Dane, arguing he would be more beloved if he was an “ugly” dog than as a perfectly bred show dog specimen.
A lifelong lover of dogs, the reason Astro, Scooby Doo, Hong Kong Phooey, and Muttley look so similar is because he designed all of them.
