Scooby Doo

One of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons from childhood, Scooby Doo, has to be one of the longest running and most successful animated series ever. The show began in 1969 so I was quite young when I started watching it. The show featured four teenage characters - Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy,  - and their lovable Great Dane, Scooby Doo. Although the show didn't specifically deal with Halloween, the gang always solved mysteries involving what were thought to be supernatural entities including zombies, ghosts, phantoms, and other ghouls - things I associated with the holiday. The show was a lot of fun because of the hijinks and mayhem involved with solving the mysteries, but also because of the spookiness involved. I remember seeing a zombie on the show and asking Mom exactly what a zombie was. She said it had something to do with voodoo. And a witch doctor reanimating a dead body through magic. The zombie was under the control of the reanimator since the zombie had no will of its own. More recently in pop culture the zombie state was caused by a person being infected with a virus causing them to want to eat flesh and brains. More recently still, the zombie is the victim of a pandemic illness.