Throwback Thursday: “Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Monster,” 1975!

This was was one of my favorite books from early childhood.  It was written by Jean Lewis and illustrated by Ralph Canady.  (I also had two other titles that you see on the back cover below  — “Hong Kong Phooey” and “Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Doghouse.”)

But this was the one that rocked my imagination.  Scoob and the gang follow some “monster” footprints to discover nothing less than a rampaging wooly mammoth.  (The big reveal is that it is a malfunctioning robot created by a friendly scientist.  If memory serves, he had a little preserve of robotic extinct animals in his backyard.) 

My fondest dream as a five-year-old was to somehow “create” miniature dinosaurs that I could keep as tiny pets in a little corral beside my house’s chimney, like an equally misguided pre-school John Hammond or something.  (I won’t embarrass myself further here by describing my modus operandi.  Suffice to say that no actual dinosaurs resulted from my efforts.)  So the idea of ice-age-beast machines was pretty magical to me.  (Hell, in the 1970’s, there were always a couple of anachronistic wooly mammoths or saber-tooth tigers thrown into a set of plastic dinosaurs.)

Believe it or not, I think I can actually remember my mother buying this book for me.  I remember a long, tidy, below-street-level bookstore on a New York City block, and being told that I could pick out two books.  The other was definitely a nonfiction dinosaur book.  (I want to say it was Jane Werner Watson’s “Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles.”)

Good times.



scooby doo

cover

Source: Scoobypedia


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