- [Scott] "Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights"
wasn't the first "Scooby-Doo" video game,
but it was the first one that really tried
to capture the feeling like you were playing an episode
of an old "Scooby-Doo" cartoon.
It recreated iconic scenes from the show,
used the same voice actors from previous Scoob cartoons-
- We're here to solve a mystery.
- Aw! - But apparently,
the thing they thought was most important
was to prominently feature a baffling element
from the original cartoon.
- Don't tell me.
Because it's haunted, right? (studio audience laughing)
- Yeah, Shaggy. How'd you know?
- Because it's always haunted. (studio audience laughing)
- The fake studio audience laugh track.
It wasn't a good idea.
Uh, it was a bad idea, actually.
(studio audience laughing)
According to a poll I put up on my Twitter,
about one in four of you weren't aware
that the original "Scooby-Doo, Where are You!" cartoon
used canned audience laughter to punctuate certain jokes
so you know that they're funny.
And it's just, it's so helpful,
because I wouldn't have known to laugh
without being told that I should.
Other times, they would add in,
like, this nervous snickering
any time there was even a little bit of silence.
- The Black Knight is supposed to come alive
when the moon is full.
- Like, wow! (studio audience snickering)
The moon was full last night.
- Shaggy's looking at us?
What do we do?
We laugh, right? We... (chuckling nervously)
(tense music) (studio audience laughing)
And I don't even understand what's happening here.
Scooby's just walking, you know?
That's not even, like, a silly cartoon dog thing.
It's just a dog...
He's, he's a dog. He's walking.
It's so normal for dogs to walk
that they named a yo-yo trick after it
and it's the only one people know.
Now, people look back on this laugh track today
with disdain for how annoying and repetitive it is,
but at the time, it was an element
that helped make the show successful,
so much so that this laughter continued
through "The New Scooby-Doo Movies"-
- Like, you wouldn't happen
to have a Bat-cookie on you, would you?
- Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.
- [Scott] "The Scooby-Doo Show"-
- This is my half, Scooby!
Like, you eat from the other end.
- ending with the first season
of "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo,"
while the second season picks up
without a laugh track, weirdly,
presumably because Scrappy sucks
all the joy out of the room.
I'm kidding. I like Scrappy.
You're all just mean.
Even today, there are still homages
to "Scooby-Doo's" laugh track
as this profound, quintessential element of the series.
"Mystery Incorporated," a series that to me feels
like a love letter to the entire "Scooby-Doo" franchise,
literally ends, spoilers, by the way,
with the Mystery Machine driving off into the sunset
as we fade to black over...
What's that sound? - Scooby-Dooby-Doo!
(upbeat music) (studio audience laughing)
- A laugh track, something this particular show
had never used before until these very final moments,
intentionally calling back
to the original "Scooby-Doo" cartoons.
But why?
It's not like "Scooby-Doo" was the first cartoon ever
to use a laugh track.
Dozens of Hanna-Barbera cartoons used a laugh track
from 1960 to 1980.
But for some reason, "Scooby-Doo" is the cartoon,
I feel, that gets most associated with phony laughter,
laughter that only got progressively worse as time went on
due to budget cuts that we will talk about.
It is unforgivably bad.
But as annoying as those old looping laugh tracks
might be today, Hanna-Barbera saw them as the thing
that helped make "Scooby-Doo" successful and,
even more so, helped save their entire studio.
(studio audience laughing and applauding)
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How are you doing, you wonderful nerds?
Scott here, and the thing about early Hanna-Barbera cartoons
is that they wanted to capture the feel of the sitcom
that dominated television in America during the 1950s
and '60s but they wanted to do it with cartoons,
which meant that they could add more robots
and bears with hats and dogs with hats and a gorilla,
(clicks tongue) but he's got a hat on.
"Flintstones" was prehistoric "Honeymooners,"
"Top Cat" was "The Phil Silvers Show" for furries,
and of course, "Scooby-Doo" was based heavily
on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."
I've already done a video that goes into much more detail
about that, if you wanna watch it after this one.
I'll have it linked below.
But you sort of see what they were going for, right?
If Hanna-Barbera was trying to translate live-action sitcoms
into animation, the inspiration didn't just stop
at characters and general setups.
The language of sitcoms on TV at the time
necessitated a laugh track,
which meant so did "Scooby-Doo."
The same is not true for the language of video games,
which are typically a lot longer
than the half-hour television sitcom.
"Night of 100 Frights" is a seven-hour game,
10 if you're a completionist.
And the laugh track wouldn't just play during cutscenes.
The audience would laugh at you
during the gameplay itself.
(Scooby whimpering) (studio audience laughing)
They'd laugh at Scooby when he did silly things,
which means they're really laughing at you, the player.
They're laughing at you, you fool!
Although presumably, all of the people
who provided the laughs are dead,
which means this game is haunted. (warbles)
And that's how Mystery Inc. stays in business.
And the people making "Scooby-Doo" video games
kept doing it for three other games after this one
until they graciously decided to give the players a way
to turn off the laugh track, finally.
And I've not been able to confirm this, but I've heard
they did a similar thing for the old "Scooby-Doo" cartoons
as well, at one point selling home copies of them
that didn't include the laugh track
because viewers outspokenly found it obnoxious.
But here's the thing: there are actually two versions
of the "Scooby-Doo" laugh track.
One of them is fine. It's decent.
But it only lasted for a single year.
The other one is truly terrible, lasted for a decade,
and is probably the one you know best and hate best.
So I've been referring to this laugh track
as canned laughter, which is a term for laughter
that's added in later in post-production.
Having a live studio audience at the taping
of a TV show was a legitimate thing,
still is a legitimate thing, but it creates limitations.
I mean, for starters, nearly every scene
in a sitcom would have to be set indoors
because moving the entire audience to an outside set
or even to a massive soundstage that wasn't equipped
with bleachers, it just wasn't feasible.
Plus, you know, if an actor flubbed their punchline,
the audience would naturally laugh less and less
hearing the same joke over multiple takes,
a thing my five-year-old nephew has yet to comprehend.
No, please, I would love to hear how you make a tissue dance
for the 12th time today.
The solution to both of these problems
was pre-recorded laughter
that you could insert into the show later.
The first use of canned laughter on television
was in this super obscure sitcom
called "The Hank McCune Show" that only lasted
for, I believe, five total episodes.
People are not fond of the show.
- The immortal Hank McCune.
Some of the most godawful garbage
that ever graced the idiot box.
Yes, I'm talking industrial-strength utter trash.
- Canned laughter also opened up this idea
of using a laugh track for cartoons
since obviously they couldn't real-time animate episodes
of "Scooby-Doo" in front of a live studio audience
to get candid reactions.
That's impossible, even for Quick Draw McGraw,
and drawing quickly is his whole thing!
And the answer, by the way,
is you put a little boogie in it.
That's how you make a tissue dance.
Now, the single human being who invented the laugh track
was a sound engineer by Charley Douglass in the 1950s.
He was working on single-cam sitcoms at the time,
which meant that actors had to often do scenes
multiple times from different angles,
which made the laughter
from the live studio audience super inconsistent.
Plus, for a medium where a director might want
to have complete control over everything from lighting
and blocking and, of course, sound design,
a live audience was a chaotic,
unpredictable element thrown into that mix,
not too different from trying to film outside
in the middle of a busy city.
(traffic whooshing)
Charley Douglass, being a sound engineer,
noticed that the audience might miss a joke and not laugh,
or maybe they would laugh but someone in the audience
has one of those untamably distracting guffaws.
You know, something like... (laughing comically)
(Scott imitating Mandark laughing)
Hyuk! You know, one of those.
So he would start sweetening the audio
by adding in more laughter
or muting especially intrusive audience members
to make everything sort of fit the vision of the producers.
But even at the start,
Douglass knew that you couldn't just record a couple takes
of an audience laughing and use that over and over
and over again without people at home getting annoyed,
a thing we've mysteriously forgotten about.
The human brain is hardwired to detect patterns.
I mean, that's pretty much all our brains are good at
to the point of often seeing patterns
where there aren't any,
like superstitions or this image of dots
that people keep telling me has the number five in it.
So Douglass built a specialty machine called the Laff Box,
which was basically this keyboard with hundreds
of pre-recorded audience reactions on it
that he could mix and match together at various volumes
and lengths and in thousands of different combinations
to simulate the appropriate audience response.
He also recorded new reactions every couple of months
and retired old ones that became too recognizable
just to try and keep everything fresh.
The Laff Box was so effective and so cheap to implement
that many shows stopped
using a live studio audience altogether
and switched to solely using the box.
And since he singlehandedly invented this device,
Douglass was effectively the only person
in the entire industry who could add in
or sweeten an audience laugh track on TV shows,
which meant if there was a laugh on television
anytime between the '50s to the '70s,
it was likely from this guy with his weird little box
being shuttled around from studio to studio,
pushing buttons in a dark room somewhere.
This includes Hanna-Barbera cartoons,
but it also included others.
I believe "Rocky and Bullwinkle" was the first cartoon
to use Douglass's laugh track in 1959-
- [Narrator] Boris raced to beat the heavy safe
to the ground, and he won.
Almost. (studio audience laughing)
- [Scott] with "The Flintstones"
following shortly after in 1960.
- What's this? Four!
- One more four out of you and I'll give you what for.
(studio audience laughing)
- But why "Scooby-Doo" is so important
is because up until that point,
the laugh track was used almost exclusively
on prime-time cartoons.
Other cartoons that were shown during the daytime
didn't have canned laughter,
until "The Banana Splits Adventure Hour" in 1967.
But that was more of a variety show
with live-action and cartoon segments
and not every segment had a laugh track.
They were still very much experimenting with it.
Plus, technically that a midday time slot,
so if we wanna just look
at the famed Saturday morning cartoon block,
then "Scooby-Doo" was Hanna-Barbera's first
to use Douglass's Laff Box.
And it was specifically "Scooby-Doo's" success,
not "The Flintstones," not "The Jetsons,"
not "The Banana Split Adventure Hour," which, by the way,
should be called "The Banas Split Adventure Hour."
It was "Scooby-Doo" specifically
that inspired Hanna-Barbera to expand the laugh track
into nearly all of their cartoons
throughout the rest of the '70s.
- Scooby-Dooby-Doo!
- Huge caveat, though.
Remember how I said that studios used Douglass's Laff Box
to outright replace audiences in part because it was cheap?
Well, even that was too expensive for Hanna-Barbera.
It makes sense, though, really.
I mean, Charley Douglass had a monopoly on laugh tracks.
He could charge anything he wanted.
What are you gonna do about it?
Download some low-quality laughter from YouTube? You can't!
It hasn't been invented yet!
It was a better time!
They did sort of do something similar, though.
Hanna-Barbera had their own sound engineers
isolate some audience laughter from previous episodes
of their cartoons to create new mixes on their own.
In other words,
they literally took Douglass' own laugh tracks
and started remixing them for themselves.
But you will notice an unmistakable sharp drop
in what their sound engineers could do
compared to what Douglass could do.
Now, partially that's due to Douglass having a decade
of experience, more than I think a decade of experience
at this point, with a custom machine
that he designed for this particular purpose,
but it's also because his Laff Box had 320 distinct laughs
on it that he could mix together in countless ways
while the sound engineers at Hanna-Barbera had less than 10.
Some reports I found said that Hanna-Barbera had a total
of six laughs, six total laughs, for every episode
of all of their cartoons for a decade, though,
to be fair, they did try different creative techniques,
like speeding it up or slowing it down,
just to try and make their limited budget
of laughs sound a little bit different.
It's most noticeable in "The New Scooby-Doo Movies."
- Nobody in his right mind would use this
as a secret hideout.
- I would.
- Like I said, nobody in his right mind.
Come on, let's go. (studio audience laughing)
- And it's just like we talked about earlier.
If you repeat the same audio over and over again
after every punchline on every cartoon,
it won't take long for the viewers and critics
to pick up on it and get annoyed,
and that's exactly what happened.
So you might be wondering, then:
why not just cut the laugh track out completely, right?
If Hanna-Barbera was trying to save money and people
at home were hating their now-inferior canned laughter,
why not just scrap it?
Well, it sorta goes back to what I was saying at the top.
Hanna-Barbera wanted to mimic the appeal
of multi-cam sitcoms, and the laugh track was a part of it.
Plus, and this is just me speculating,
but it might have actually been cheaper
for them to keep using the laugh track
than to stop using it, right, because then,
after any joke they wanted, they could freeze frame
for a couple moments after the punchline
and just fill it with fake laughs and save themselves
from having to animate anything during that window.
- With him around, I can't even get a bite in edgewise.
(studio audience laughing)
- Any editor will tell you that it is significantly faster
and cheaper to add in a bad sound effect
than it is to animate literally anything,
and Hanna-Barbera was already trying
to animate as little as possible.
You ever wonder why so many of their animal characters
have collars but no rest of their shirt?
It helped them section characters into distinct chunks
so that they only had to animate, like, a character's head
and not have to animate their whole body.
Sometimes, you can even see how they,
like, split up Scooby-Doo's head
so they could animate just his mouth
without having to animate the rest of his face.
My point is, any and all cost-cutting measures
were always on HB's table.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I am glad that we have gone away
from using a laugh track in cartoons.
I don't even like them that much on live-action sitcoms.
But I do think the laughter
in the original "Scooby-Doo" cartoon,
the one done by Douglass,
I think that one's fine.
I think it's good, actually,
and it adds to the charm of the show.
After that, though, yeah, it's, it's real rough,
and I don't know.
To me, it's just sad that Hanna-Barbera saw the success
of "Scooby-Doo" and figured that it must be, in part,
at least, because of the laugh track,
so much so that they then copied it
across all of their cartoons so poorly
that now, ironically, people look back
on early "Scooby-Doo" cartoons with disdain and annoyance
specifically because of the laugh track.
- Scooby-Doo. (studio audience laughing)
- And just speaking personally,
I think if you really want to laugh,
then please watch this ad.
I worked really hard on it.
Hi, I'm Melvin Doo,
star of the hit 2002 film "Scooby-Doo: The Movie."
- Uh, Melvin Doo.
- Yep! That's me there.
I look exactly the same as I do right now.
Fun film fact: did you know
that Spooky Island was actually filmed
at an Australian resort called the Tangalooma?
Less fun film fact: did you know
that if you're in Australia,
you can't actually watch "Scooby-Doo: The Movie" on Netflix
'cause it's not available in that region?
You'd have a better chance of actually staying the night
at the Tangalooma, and their website says
they're fully booked through the 25th century.
But thanks to today's sponsor, NordVPN,
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Now, that is a spicy meatball.
And that's because using a virtual private network
like NordVPN allows you to spoof your location
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And that's in addition to also being a VPN
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And as we've established, I'm Melvin Doo.
I've seen meddling kids track down clues
about people's private lives and whereabouts.
It's fun when they do it.
They get to wear cool outfits.
But it's not fun when big tech companies
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There's no catchy musical chase scene involved.
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What's not to love?
Go check it out.
Thank you so much for watching. It's Scoobtober!
I'm rushing to make a bunch of "Scooby-Doo" videos
at the tail end of October, mostly to build up my Patreon
and also annoy my fans who only want me
to talk about comic books, and if that sounds good to you,
then please, please, please support me on Patreon.
The link's gonna be in the description.
I would love to hit 1,000 patrons this year
with names like Amanda Trisdale, Brendan,
Cristoffer Lange, DeCassowary, Emma Da Enby,
Eric Ketchum, Jacob Rundell, Jonathan Lonowski,
Karl Bachmann Eyrunarson, so sorry about that,
Rebekah Moss, William Tillotson, A Filthy Casual,
BKBW, Eric Tortora Pato, Jonathan and Megan Pierson,
Maher Saadaldeen, Pete Temple, and the rest
of the wonderful nerds who support me
over at patreon.com/nerdsync.
Link will be in the description.
Genuinely, please check it out.
I'm trying to buy a house. (laughing)
I would love to buy a house
and move out of my one-bedroom apartment finally.
Please.
Once again, my name is Scott,
reminding you to explore your favorite art
through curiosity and vulnerability.
See ya.