Scooby-Doo is an American animated media franchise based on an animated television series launched in 1969 and continued through several derivative media. Writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears created the original series, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, for Hanna-Barbera Productions. This Saturday-morning cartoon series featured teenagers Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Shaggy Rogers, and their talking Great Dane named Scooby-Doo, who solve mysteries involving supposedly supernatural creatures through a series of antics and missteps.
Sketch comedy comprises a series of short, amusing scenes or vignettes, called "sketches", commonly between one and ten minutes long, performed by a group of comic actors or comedians. The form developed and became popular in vaudeville, and is used widely in variety shows, comedy talk shows, and some sitcoms and children's television series. The sketches may be improvised live by the performers, developed through improvisation before public performance, or scripted and rehearsed in advance like a play. Sketch comedians routinely differentiate their work from a "skit", maintaining that a skit is a (single) dramatized joke while a sketch is a comedic exploration of a concept, character, or situation.
John Joseph Travolta is an American actor. He came to public attention during the 1970s, appearing on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979) and starring in the box office successes Carrie (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Grease (1978), and Urban Cowboy (1980). His acting career declined throughout the 1980s, but he enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s with his role in Pulp Fiction (1994), and went on to star in films including Get Shorty (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Phenomenon (1996), Face/Off (1997), A Civil Action (1998), Primary Colors (1998), Hairspray (2007), and Bolt (2008).
Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance drama film directed by John Badham and produced by Robert Stigwood. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young Italian-American man from the Brooklyn borough of New York. Manero spends his weekends dancing and drinking at a local discothèque while dealing with social tensions and disillusionment, feeling directionless and trapped in his working-class ethnic neighborhood. The story is based on "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a mostly fictional article by music writer Nik Cohn, first published in a June 1976 issue of New York magazine. The film features music by the Bee Gees and many other prominent artists of the disco era.
Edward Regan Murphy is an American actor, comedian, and singer. He rose to fame on the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, for which he was a regular cast member from 1980 to 1984. Murphy has also worked as a stand-up comedian and is ranked No. 10 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time. Murphy has received a Grammy Award and Emmy Award and was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2015 and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2023.
Michael John McKean is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, composer, singer, and musician known for various roles in film and television such as Lenny Kosnowski in Laverne & Shirley, David St. Hubbins in This Is Spinal Tap, and Chuck McGill on Better Call Saul.
Philip Edward Hartman was a Canadian-American actor, comedian, screenwriter and graphic designer. Hartman was born in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, and his family moved to the United States when he was ten years old. After graduating from California State University, Northridge with a degree in graphic arts, he designed album covers for bands including Poco and America. In 1975, he joined the comedy group The Groundlings, where he helped Paul Reubens develop his character, Pee-wee Herman. Hartman co-wrote the film Pee-wee's Big Adventure and made recurring appearances as Captain Carl on Reubens' show Pee-wee's Playhouse.
Animation in the United States in the television era was a period in the history of American animation that slowly set in with the decline of theatrical animated shorts and the popularization of television animation during the late 1950s to 1960s, peaked in the 1970s, and ended in the mid-late 1980s. This era is characterized by low budgets, limited animation, an emphasis on television over the theater, and the general perception of cartoons being primarily for children. Due to the perceived cheap production values, poor animation, and mixed critical and commercial reception, this era is sometimes referred to as the dark ageof American animation by critics.
Christopher Crosby Farley was an American comedian and actor. Farley was known for his loud, energetic comedic style, and was a member of Chicago's Second City Theatre and later a cast member of the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live for five seasons from 1990 to 1995. He later went on to pursue a film career, appearing in films such as Airheads, Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, Beverly Hills Ninja, and Almost Heroes.
"Saturday-morning cartoon" is a colloquial term for the original animated series programming that was typically scheduled on Saturday and Sunday mornings in the United States on the "Big Three" television networks. The genre's popularity had a broad peak from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s; over time it declined, in the face of changing cultural norms, increased competition from formats available at all times, and heavier regulations. In the last two decades of the genre's existence, Saturday-morning and Sunday-morning cartoons were primarily created and aired to meet regulations on children's television programming in the United States, or E/I. Minor television networks, in addition to the non-commercial PBS in some markets, continue to air animated programming on Saturday and Sunday while partially meeting those mandates.
Ant & Dec are a British television presenting duo, consisting of Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, from Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Formed after their meeting as child actors on CBBC's drama Byker Grove, they performed together as pop musicians PJ & Duncan, the names of their characters from the series.
Maya Rudolph is an American comedian, actress, and singer. In 2000, she became a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL), and later played supporting roles in the films 50 First Dates (2004), A Prairie Home Companion (2006), and Idiocracy (2006).
Fox Kids was an American children's programming block and branding for a slate of international children's television channels. Originally a joint venture between the Fox Broadcasting Company (Fox) and its affiliated stations, it was later owned by Fox Family Worldwide.
Laff or LAFF may refer to:
Karen Lynn Gorney is an American actress who had roles in television shows and films including the soap opera All My Children and the movie Saturday Night Fever.
William Thomas Hader Jr. is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer, and director. Hader first gained widespread attention for his eight-year stint as a cast member on the long-running NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2005 to 2013, for which he received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations and a Peabody Award. He became known for his impressions and especially for his work on the Weekend Update segments, in which he played Stefon Meyers, a flamboyant New York tour guide who recommends unusual nightclubs and parties with bizarre characters with unusual tastes.
What's Up, Doc? may refer to:
Saturday Morning Mystery is a 2012 independent horror film by Spencer Parsons that premiered at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival. The movie is a dark parody/spoof of the Scooby-Doo cartoon series. Parsons cited Re-Animator and Basket Case as inspirations for the film.
The following is a list of recurring Saturday Night Live characters and sketches introduced during the thirty-ninth season of SNL, which began on September 28, 2013.
