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LOS ANGELES - Without Iwao Takamoto, Saturday morning cartoon audiences in the 1970s and 1980s might have been treated to a show called The Mysterious Five, featuring the adventures of a teenage rock band and their sheepdog Too Much.
Thanks to the efforts of one of American television foremost animators, however, the sheepdog morphed into a distinctly unorthodox Great Dane whose name came from an ad-lib Frank Sinatra once did at the end of Strangers in the Night, scooby-dooby-doo.
Takamoto, who died on Monday at the age of 81, enjoyed a six decade-long animation career, first with Disney and then with Hanna-Barbera, creating such characters as Astro, the dog on The Jetsons, and Muttley and Penelope Pitstop from The Wacky Races.
He will almost certainly be best remembered, however, for Scooby-Doo, the cowardly dog detective who always finds his courage when a snack is in the offing.
When he was assembling ideas for the character, Takamoto talked to a dog breeder on the Warner Brothers lot and learned all about the straight back, straight legs, small chin and other features of a Great Dane.
He then proceeded to ignore every one of these.
"I decided to go the opposite and gave him a hump back, bowed legs, big chin and such," Takamoto recalled recently.
"Even his colour is wrong."
Takamoto was a second-generation Japanese immigrant who was interned by the US government during World War Two.
It was while at the Manzanar internment camp in California that he was taught to draw by a couple of experienced animators.
He landed a job with Disney shortly after his release, and his career was set.
- INDEPENDENT
