Ken Spears

Ken Spears was an American television writer and producer.

Spears is best known for co-creating the Scooby-Doo cartoon franchise with partner Joe Ruby.

Spears grew up in Los Angeles, where he befriended the son of animation producer William Hanna. Soon after, Spears was hired at Hanna-Barbera Productions as a sound editor. While working in the editing department, Spears met Ruby, and the pair began a prolific writing partnership. They wrote scripts for Hanna-Barbera, Sid and Marty Krofft Television Productions and DePatie-Freleng Enterprises.

In addition to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, Spears and Ruby created animated shows like Dynomutt: Dog Wonder, Jabberjaw, The Barkleys, and The Houndcats, as well as cartoon adaptations of live-action feature film franchises Police Academy and Rambo.

In the early 1970s Fred Silverman, at that time CBS's president of children's programming, hired Spears and Ruby to supervise CBS's Saturday morning cartoons lineup, and when Silverman moved to ABC, they followed.

In 1977, Spears and Ruby created Ruby-Spears Productions, where they created or rebooted several animated series, including Superman, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Fangface, Mister T, The Plastic Man Comedy-Adventure Hour, Thundarr the Barbarian, and Saturday Supercade. Ruby-Spears's catalog was sold, along with that of Hanna-Barbera, to Turner Broadcasting in 1991.

Spears was predeceased by Ruby in August 2020.

Spears died November 6, 2020, in Brea, California. He was 82.