Clue Club

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Clue Club

Clue Club was a Saturday morning cartoon series produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1976. Very similar in format to its high-rated Scooby-Doo program, the show centered around was a group of teenagers, the Clue Club, who solved mysteries with the help of a pair of talking dogs named Woofer and Whimper.

The four teenagers in the Clue Club were Larry, Pepper, DD, and Dotty. Dotty, the youngest, usually stayed at home and helped solve cases by providing information and results from her minicomputer.

Much of the comedy would come from Woofer, who would constantly accuse suspects without good reason, then later backtrack while proclaiming his genius, and Whimper, a much simpler, easygoing, and less intelligent dog, who would gently go along with his comrade's schemes. Unlike Scooby-Doo, the dogs are depicted as only being able to talk to each other and not to humans.

Like a then-recent cancelled TV series, Banacek, Clue Club mysteries usually involved seemingly "impossible" crimes, such as a movie director vanishing, or a two ton statue disappearing into thin air.

Clue Club only had one season's worth of first-run episodes ever produced; these originally aired from August 14, 1976 to September 1977 on CBS Saturday mornings (the original home to Scooby-Doo, which, interestingly, Clue Club had replaced and was being groomed for its move to ABC). Cut-down versions of the episodes appeared under the title Woofer and Whimper, Dog Detectives as part of the CBS Saturday morning package program The Skatebirds from September 1977 to September 1978. The full length versions of Clue Club returned to CBS for four more months from September 1978 to January 1979, concluding the show's original network run. After a mid 1980s revival on the USA Network Cartoon Express, it has since resurfaced on the Cartoon Network and its sister station, Boomerang.