Stay with us on this one. This is one of those tortured posts that takes you down the rabbit hole before you get to the anti-climactic punchline that’s sort of about a purebred dog. What can we say. It amuses us to do it, but we also promise that you will shock and awe your friends if the subject ever comes up.
We start with Melina Mercouri, a Greek actress, singer, and politician who received an Academy Award nomination (and won a Cannes Film Festival Award) for her portrayal of a “professional girl” in the 1960 film, “Never on Sunday.” We insist you hear her voice at the :37 second mark:
We wanted you to hear Mercouri sing because she was the first choice to sing a particular song that would go on to become pretty famous. She was actually assigned to do the song (then named, “Beddy Bye”) for the movie, “A Man Could Get Killed.” Mercouri, however, thought a man’s voice was better suited for the melody and declined to sing it.
The song was then offered to Jack Jones and one other singer, but when Reprise Records heard that Jack Jones was to release his version in few days, they immediately recorded the other singer’s interpretation of the song and released it before Jack Jones’s version got on the radio. The studio hired Glen Campbell to play rhythm guitar on the track, and he was able to rehearse the song with other members of the band only about a dozen times before the famous singer arrived to do his part. Then a session musician for hire, Campbell recalled in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that he was so dumbstruck by being in the presence of the Sinatra that he couldn’t stop staring at him. The song was recorded in three takes before the session was stopped. The first take was what everyone heard on the radio.
Good call, Reprise Records. The song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the Easy Listening chart, and the UK’s charts. It won its singer four Grammy Awards including “Record of The Year” and “Best Male Vocal Performance.” You can hear it below:
When Frank Sinatra sang the newly named, “Strangers in the Night,” he hated it. He said the words weren’t subtle enough, and went on to say “…the first time I heard Don Costa played it for me some years ago…I hated it! I hated this goddamn song the first I’ve heard it. And I still hate it! So sue me, shoot bullets through me. Shoot.”
In her book, Lady Blue Eyes: My Life With Frank, his wife, Barbara described him performing the song on stage one night in what we think was Japan: “I could see he was thrown. Even when the crowd settled down a bit and allowed him to go on, he was overwhelmed. So much so that when the time come to sing “Strangers In The Night”, he was completely unable to – the first time I’d ever seen that happen. He stood up there on stage, eyes welling, as the music carried on without him. Then the most amazing thing happened. Almost every one of the 175,000 people in that arena, many of whom had learned to speak English by listening to Sinatra records, began to sing the words to him, heavily accented. “Strangers in the night, exchanging glances. Wond’ring in the night, what were the chances…” Their voices welled as one until the night air was filled with melody. Tears slid down my face as well as down Frank’s. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I ever heard.”
“Strangers in the Night” was a big comeback song for Sinatra and became his first #1 pop hit in eleven years, but the end of the song was totally ad libbed. Sinatra added the nonsensical scat line, “dooby dooby doo” which in some ways became the most famous part of the record. The late 1960s was a musical era in which lazy fades concluded songs, and “dooby dooby doo” was such a memorable ending that when Sinatra did a 2008 compilation CD, “Nothing But The Best, an extra nine seconds of fade was added so that listeners could get more “dooby-dooby-do.”
And this leads us to Fred Silverman.
Fred Silverman was the CBS’ daytime programming back in 1969, and it was he who commissioned the Hanna-Barbera animated series, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! for Saturday mornings. Hearing “Strangers in the Night” while on a plane inspired him. He described the moment: “On the plane, I couldn’t sleep — y’know, it was a Red-Eye, and I’m listening to music — and as we’re landing, as we’re going in for the landing, Frank Sinatra comes on, and I hear him say “Scooby-dooby-doo”, and it’s at that point I said, “Yeah, that’s it! We’ll take the dog, we’ll call him Scooby-Doo, move him up front, and it’ll be the dog show!”
Of course he had misheard the phrase, but it stuck and the cartoon dog animated by Iwao Takamoto was forever to be known as Scooby Doo, though his original name was “Scoobert.” For anyone who didn’t already know, Scooby Doo is male Great Dane and lifelong companion of amateur detective, Shaggy Rogers, with whom he shares many personality traits. Takamoto, Scooby-Doo’s creator, revealed that his endearingly klutzy canine was inspired by the features of a prize winning Great Dane. Sort of. In an interview with Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald in 1997, Takamoto said that he had spoken with a breeder of show dogs and learned “what made a prize-winning Great Dane. Takamoto took this description and went in the opposite direction. In his own words, Takamoto said: ““The legs were supposed to be straight so I made them bowed, I sloped the hindquarters and made his feet too big. He was supposed to have a firm jaw, so I receded it. Even his color is wrong.”
And there you have the punishing explanation of how Strangers in the Night that was supposed to be sung by Melina Mercouri lead directly – sort of – to a clumsy cartoon Great Dane.