Just two years after it launched, the BBC announced plans to pull Scooby-Doo and his gang from their schedule.
They would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids - who planned protests in Glasgow to ensure mysteries would be solved to this day. Banner-waving youths took to the streets of Glasgow, and marched to the city’s BBC offices to make their voices heard.
A petition in Scotland was signed by more than 30,000 children in February of 1971, showing they weren’t messing around. The BBC announced a deal to repeat all 24 episodes of the show later in the year, and while it may have swapped channels over the years - it’s been a constant in children’s lives since.
Check out the snaps from Glasgow's puppy protest below.
Television's favourite crime fighting canine first graced our screens in September 1969, and was an immediate hit. With American network CBS refusing to green light a second season, the BBC had to pull the plug.
The announcement of the school week extending into Saturday probably wouldn’t have seen the same levels of resistance from children across Scotland, who asked ‘Scooby-Doo, where are you?’
The demonstrations outside the former BBC HQ at Queen Margaret Drive saw steelworkers backing the youth - threatening to withhold the proposed £1 rise in the TV license fee if the Great Dane didn’t return to TV. Newspapers ran campaigns to save the pooch, with the protests making top spot on the evening news.
Mike Stanger, who worked at the BBC in the 70s, told the Daily Record: “It was the biggest protest we’d ever seen at Queen Margaret Drive - and might still be the biggest ever to have taken place there.
“They made their point extremely well and were very well behaved, if a little noisy.”
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Reportedly, the gathering was successfully dispersed when the children were reminded that an episode of the show was starting in 15 minutes.
In the Highlands, a Fort William primary school joined in the efforts - with a march organised by 11-year-old Ann Smith. A 50 strong group of kids protested with banners, and collected over 1000 signatures to present to the BBC.
Protests reached Dundee as well, with children as young as three taking to the streets. John Duncan, who went on to work for Grampian Police, was part of the Glasgow Scooby supporters.
He told the Daily Record: “I remember, as a class, we were all hacked off that they were going to take off Scooby-Doo. Bearing in mind that, at the time, we only had BBC and ITV for entertainment, there wasn’t the choice we have today with satellite TV.
“So to take off one of the prime-time shows that the kids loved was a big deal. So we decided that we would protest at the BBC offices.
“I don’t think we would have the same reaction if it was, say, Bugs Bunny. Scooby-Doo is like a mini-film, you’re on the edge of your seat all the way through.
“I remember making banners in the class and then walking down from our school, Temple Primary in the city’s west end. It was quite a long way and I remember I misspelt ‘hungry hound’ on the banner, so a much smaller letter ‘y’ had to be added.”
In today's world, it's hard to imagine a group of mainly unsupervised children taking to the streets in protest - but it did the trick in 1971. Months after the Scotland wide protests, CBS ordered a second season of the hit show.
Hanna-Barbera, the animation company behind Scooby-Doo, never forgot the Scottish reaction. A spokesman said: “We’d never had a response like that before, it was very exciting.”
This article was originally published in April 2022.
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