Jonathan Stern is the Emmy-winning writer/director of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You Now! It’s a new one-hour live-action/animated Scooby special premiering this Friday October 29th at 8pm on The CW. (It re-airs Thanksgiving night, Nov. 25, at 8pm.) Stern discusses what went into making this one of a kind special that reunites and celebrates the beloved Hanna-Barbera characters… and much, much more. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: This is such a cool special. I had the chance to watch this the other night. It’s so bold and unique. First of all, what was the inspiration behind doing a Scooby-Doo reunion / retrospective combo special?

Jonathan Stern: Well thanks for the kind words. The initial idea behind doing the special was simply: everyone wanted to do something to honor, look back at and look forward at Scooby-Doo. That was it. What format do you put that in? Right about the time we were having this conversation, the Friends [reunion] special was finishing up and then came out. Long story short: I just ripped-off the Friends reunion special.

JM: (laughs)

JS: There have been other reunions out there too. There’s been a little bit of a reunion movement going on right now and I know there’s more coming out. So it just seemed like a format. Now the joke being, of course, these are not actual, living, human being characters that would have a reunion. So that’s where the twist is. It did open up the question to, “What would the person playing Velma… or Fred actually be like?” And then we get a little meta here where it’s not a completely different character — it’s not an actor — it’s just someone who looks and sounds and is exactly like Velma and has Velma’s name *also* got cast as Velma.

JM: Everybody loves nostalgia. Especially when the pandemic started up, I think that’s why people wanted to sink themselves into that feeling. You mentioned the Friends special: that aired fairly recently [May]. So how long ago did production begin on the animation work on the characters? Obviously that takes time.

JS: From a technical level, this was an interesting puzzle because things weren’t being done linearly. Everything had to happen simultaneously. The first draft of the script that I did was right before the Friends special came out. Then the Friends special came out and I saw so many things to rip-off from that — or make fun of — so as soon as the script was done we immediately started doing storyboards and voice recordings almost on top of that while we were still doing storyboards. And then we did a radio edit: you create a little animatic from the storyboards and you put the voice on top of it and you edit the voice dialogue. That becomes kind of like a film strip or slideshow. That’s what got sent to the animators to start animating to, really in earnest, knowing that we were still editing. We had to lock picture on the animated material pretty quickly while we still hadn’t even finished shooting all the live-action material.

JM: It’s a great accomplishment. And there are so many layers to this special. One [key element to this] is: you give us some comedy in a sort of mockumentary style. How did that idea hit you?

JS: This is an area I’ve worked in a lot and always love doing. I produced and wrote on Children’s Hospital, and every season I would write one behind the scenes episode where it was kind of a 60 Minutes profile of what was happening behind the scenes in the making of Children’s Hospital. I enjoyed doing that so much and the episodes were a really refreshing break from what you were used to seeing. That was on Adult Swim. [Also] Burning Love, which was based on The Bachelor. That was on Yahoo and Hulu. And Hot Wives of Orlando, which is still on Hulu, which was a Real Housewives thing. You’re not just finding jokes in all the characters and stories, there’s another level where you’re able to find jokes in the format or really the artifice of the format.

JM: There are also legitimate interviews with a lot of influential people in and around the world of Scooby-Doo [including] Tony Cervone, director of SCOOB! and my boss at Animation Scoop, Jerry Beck. He had a great time talking with you. What did you enjoy the most about speaking with Tony, Jerry and the other people you have in this?

JS: There were I think five people that really were animation history and execution / production experts that have a lot of screen time and A LOT of other people who have brief interviews. For me, I’ve always had a certain familiarity with animation but there’s a lot about the making of it that I don’t know and I’ll never know because I’m not personally an animator. What I took away was just how much we don’t realize is happening before our eyes that we are fooled and take for granted in the way these characters come to life. A common joke is how the backgrounds recycle. You watch The Flintstones and Dino’s chasing Fred in his house and it’s the same background going over and over. You see this in Scooby-Doo. I do a live-action joke version of it in the Scooby-Doo special, which maybe you can find…

JM: I did see that. There’s a ‘walking by’ moment. And I was gonna ask you about being on the Warner Bros. lot and filming this, which must’ve been so cool. And yes, you do a nod to that.

JS: Yeah. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t really appreciate until some experts like the people you’re talking about start explaining it to you. David Silverman, the main director of The Simpsons, was explaining things… simply the character design… all these things that go into making a shortcut in your brain for appreciating what’s happening as if it’s real. The silhouettes are all distinct. The way they walk. The simple facial expressions that communicate a lot more. All of these tricks are really what I started to appreciate from what they were doing.

Jonathan Stern

JM: This [special] could’ve gone to a streaming service. This could’ve gone straight to HBO Max. But the fact that it’s on The CW… I think it’s great. I’ve always loved network primetime [animated] specials. What does it mean to you that this is on the network?

JS: To me, as a viewer, they’re all the same. I think that’s for everyone now. Personally, watching Scooby-Doo episodes, you have to watch on HBO Max for the most part and you can find a lot of those and the movies and the old series there. So HBO Max is still a good place to watch Scooby-Doo…

JM: Sure.

JS: [But] You’re right. There is this kind of network special excitement. I remember as a kid when there was a special on the networks and there would be a little thing at the beginning. Somehow that made it really exciting – really a big deal, even though I think it just meant they didn’t have any new programming that night. The CW: this is a different thing. CW has a specials programming mandate. In terms of the execution: for me, and this is the case for any of the shows we make here at Abominable Pictures, the difference between network and non-network is commercial breaks. Sometimes a more stringent clearance process because of things that are advertiser-based. But working to commercial breaks also has its advantages because you have to create little cliffhangers to go into commercial. That’s part of the format you can have fun with. Sometimes you create a cliffhanger and you pay it off *immediately* when you come back. But that’s part of the ‘mystery’ format that was built into Scooby-Doo from the beginning. That just made it a natural fit.

JM: You have a mystery element to this [special] as well. There are several bold, wow moments for Scooby-Doo fans, not just learning the information but there is a moment in this when the characters bring up Scrappy-Doo and I just went, “Whoa!”

JS: (laughs)

JM: Was that a risk? Did you need approval to say what you say about Scrappy-Doo?

JS: Well I certainly needed approval, and I think [the Mystery Machine Gang] actually bad-talked Scrappy-Doo a little bit more in the first draft of the script. And that got noted out. There is enough consensus amongst the many people that I was working with that Scrappy-Doo is not a high point of the Scooby-Doo franchise. I think there’s a lot of comfort level in making Scrappy-Doo the butt of jokes. If you watch the Scrappy-Doo episodes, he’s not nice to Scooby. He’s kind of a d*ck. I feel if you watch it, you feel protective of Scooby and the other characters. Scrappy doesn’t belong here. Stop bothering them! And little things. Why does he have such a more fluid way of speaking English than Scooby? It really undermined… it suddenly made Scooby the dumb one of the partnership. I didn’t like that. Obviously Scrappy has not become a permanent fixture in the Scooby universe. I’m sure there are some Scrappy fans out there. But also every reunion special has its dramatic moments, so we had to find our dramatic moment.

JM: It’s quite a moment. You have some dramatic moments. You do a little ‘in memoriam’ bit in a way and… there are also some surprise cameo appearances from others within the animated world. You do a lot with this! And maybe this could spawn some other animated reunion specials. Who would you wanna see next have an animated reunion special?

JS: There’s a few that I actually incorporated in the cameos on this show that I would love to do more with. You’ll see The Banana Splits have a cameo in here. The Great Gazoo makes an appearance. I’ve always wanted to do more with those. There are a lot of other Hanna-Barbera properties that are already, basically spoken for that anyone who’s ever watched TV would wanna see more of. Obviously The Flintstones, but that’s way out there. The Jetsons. People are always trying to do something with The Jetsons. Jonny Quest – I’d love to do something to. That’s, I believe, in development somewhere. But at least Jonny Quest makes a cameo here. There are a bunch of DC characters too, and at the moment, in collaboration with Warner Bros. Animation, we’re developing some podcasts around some DC and Hanna-Barbera characters. Who knows if those will ever see the light of day. But I am trying to find a way to bring some characters to life, at least in an audio way.

Our own Jerry Beck makes an appearance in this special

JM: I hope you have the opportunity to do more of these reunion specials and take some chances like you do here because you pull it off here really well.

JS: Thanks. I guess if there’s one show I’d really like to see in the Hanna-Barberra universe, it would be The Laff-A-Lympics. That was the era of the Saturday morning animation block, which people my age grew up with. The Laff-A-Lympics was hosted by Scooby-Doo and was an ongoing olympics competition starring all of the Hanna-Barbera characters from all of their shows. There are rights issues and things being tied-up, so there’s many reasons I don’t think that it’s technically possible right now. But I always loved that show and would love to see a way to bring that back in any format.

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Jackson Murphy

Jackson Murphy is a movie critic and entertainment columnist. He is the creator of the website Lights-Camera-Jackson.com, and has made numerous appearances on television and radio.

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