The Time Scooby Doo & The Gang Visited Washington State

Over their many years on the road solving mysteries, Scooby Doo and his gang of human pals covered a lot of territory.

Some of the places they've parked the Mystery Machine and stayed awhile to unmask villains are fictional, while others are absolutely real in the human world just the same.

Among the latter locations is the Emerald City of Seattle, Washington, which the gumshoeing bunch paid a visit to in Episode #110 of The Scooby Doo Show entitled "A Frightened Hound Meets Demons Underground."

The episode first aired on November 13, 1976 on ABC Television, and features several nods to the city's most-famous landmark, as well as portions of its storied past.

This installment in the series finds Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Daphne, and Velma sleuthing down the origins of a winged red demon which has recently emerged from Seattle's underground in search of a sacred talisman as it terrorizes the local longshoremen and the owner of a construction company (who...spoiler alert!...turns out to be said demon).

The most recognizable depictions of the city appear in the opening minutes of the episode, which feature a cartooned exterior shot of the Space Needle (albeit in an unfamiliar shade of red) along with the interior of its rooftop restaurant, where Fred can be found clutching a newspaper called "Seattle News" and Scooby is battling with the spicular claws of a still-live lobster that he's ordered for dinner.

There are also several mentions of the real historical fire that burned down old Seattle in 1889, although Velma's verbal lesson on the topic to the rest of the gang has her offering the date incorrectly as "around 1890." And there is also an assumably-fictional account that's spun later on in the episode about a horde of demons which surfaced from a hole in Seattle's burgeoning landscape in 1860 that had to be driven back into their own subterranean hell with the aforementioned talisman.

In the end, this chapter of the long-running franchise plays like vintage Scooby, replete with all of the same playful chicanery, madcap interludes, and rubber-masked intrigue that can be found in any of its episodes and has become a beloved cornerstone of the animated series.

And this installment of the cartoon that first aired nearly 50 years ago isn't the only time that Washington State has blipped the radar of a Scooby Doo-themed exercise, as a pair of Scooby Doo comic books - "A Tree Grows in Seattle!!" and "Land-Grabbing Ghosts" also feature the crime-solving dog and his pals in the Evergreen State, as well as an interactive storybook entitled "Scooby Doo! and You: The Case of the Lost Lumberjack."

article images courtesy of Planet Scooby on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe_TvpLrGn8