Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1203639
D E PA R T M E N T 37 KEYFRAME on Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? and says that even now, "When you mention Scooby to people their eyes light up, and it triggers a childhood memory." Cole feels one reason the show maintains such a firm grip on the imagination is the continuity in the backgrounds with "a certain design and color language that was established early on." She adds, "Iwao gave me some words of wisdom about painting Scooby. He said if you're painting an exterior house or building, paint the windows dark, with no lights on. It automatically makes it feel haunted or spooky and in the world of Scooby." As for what makes Scooby-Doo still appealing after 50 years, Cole says, "Familiarity. I think people look forward to hearing Shaggy say 'zoinks!' or the villain say, 'If it weren't for you meddling kids!' There's also the fact that the villain is unmasked at the end. It lets kids know that the monsters in the story aren't real. And when Scooby or Shaggy get scared, they face their fears and end up solving the mystery or saving the day. There is a positive lesson in that." "They love that damn dog." Layout artist Susan Crossley and husband, Animation Director Tim Walker, have enjoyed separate successful animation careers filled with Scooby-Doo projects. A graduate from art school in the early 1970s, Crossley learned that Hanna-Barbera was looking for people who could draw figures. But she was told, "'We can't bring you in right away.' Another couple days after that, they said, 'Well, you're welcome to join the ink and paint ladies.' I said, 'No. You told me I was coming in at this studio, and that's what I'm going to do.' So that's what I did. I got myself in. I made it happen." "Susan made a life for herself," Walker adds. "Nobody sat down with her when she came in fresh off the street. She was thrown into the deep end and she came to the surface and made a career for herself." "It was hard sometimes," Susan continues, "not having more women around. And I was always nervous. I was a perfectionist in a way, and I was always like, "Oh God, I hope I make it," especially since Scooby was a little hard to draw. He was all angles, and Iwao Takamoto had to go over our drawings." Takamoto drew the exact opposite, bowing Scooby's legs, enlarging his feet and sloping his hindquarters. This goofiness is fun for kids to watch, but as Walker says, "That dog is not designed for animation. Animation is circles and ovals and things like that. Things you can move around and squash and stretch. Scooby had so many hard lines." Like Crossley, Walker graduated from art school, but he knew even at four or five that he was going to be an animator, and later, when a neighbor told him where the Hanna-Barbera studios were located, he realized it wasn't far from his middle school. "I had the bright idea to ride down there one Saturday. I lifted up the trashcan lid, and there were cells and backgrounds everywhere," he says. "That started a good ten years of dumpster diving. I had backgrounds and hand-inked cells. Beautiful." It was only natural that Walker would wind up at Hanna-Barbera, with one of his first jobs freelancing for Ed Love, an animator on the original Scooby- Doo, Where Are You? Throughout Walker's career he worked for every studio in town, but he often returned to Scooby-Doo because, he explains, "By far I had the most fun working at Hanna-Barbera. To me it was like, I'm this page: Kids appreciated Scooby's goofy limbs but the character's hard lines made him difficult to animate. SPRING 2020 37 This page: Scooby Doo (Tv - Ani) Credit Hanna Barbara Scb 001 Moviestore Collection Ltd, Alamy Stock Photo