Saturday morning programming almost without exception at that time consisted of short subject properties—they ran six or seven minutes a piece like the theatrical shorts. They were hooked together with advertising, ads, bumpers, bridges, stay tuned, Huckleberry Hound, and that’s what they were. They comprised a half hour piece of entertainment.

Fred Silverman came in and said I would really like to put on a Saturday morning show that runs a full half hour end to end so we could really tell a story. He said at the time he always wanted to do a teenage mystery show.

I designed the four teenagers, the general feeling, ambience of the show, the mystery aspects of it. Part of the make of the show is not to take it too seriously. It’s very tongue in cheek short, Abbott and Costello, you had oversized buzzards sitting on top of houses and that kind of stuff.

But no matter what we did with it, there seemed to be lacking a very important thing, I guess you’d call it entertainment. The four teenagers were walking around, being who they are, spending an awful lot of time talking to each other about solving whatever mystery that existed within the show and the rest of the time they spent running away from it.

Anyway, we were in a meeting and Fred brings the point out and Joe says “what if we loosen it up by giving them a pet like a dog and so on down the line. So it was decided that we’d try a dog.