A Night of Fright is No Delight

A Night of Fright is No Delight
Details
Air date	January 10, 1970
Written by	Ken Spears Joe Ruby Bill Lutz
Directed by	William Hanna Joseph Barbera
Chronology
Previous episode	Spooky Space Kook
Next episode	That's Snow Ghost

A Night of Fright is No Delight is the sixteenth episode of the first season of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.

Premise

Scooby is included in the will of eccentric millionaire, Colonel Beauregard Sanders because the former saved the latter from drowning years ago. He and some other heirs will each get a fortune, but with a twist: spend the night in the Colonel's haunted mansion. It proves right when two green phantoms frighten the heirs away.

Synopsis

Scooby, Shaggy, Freddy, Daphne and Velma are boating across the ocean to a spooky mansion on an island. Scooby has been chosen as an heir to the late Colonel Beauregard Sanders, whom Scooby saved from drowning in a fish pond years before. It is a creepy night and there is thunder and lightning.

The Colonel's lawyer, Cosgoode Creeps, comes to greet them and ushers them into the house. The gang meets the other four heirs, Cousin Slicker, Cousin Simple, Nephew Norble and Sweet Cousin Maldahyde. Cosgoode tells the heirs that the only instructions from the Colonel was to play a record. The recording tells them they must stay the night to get the fortune. Creeps explains that the mansion is haunted, much to Scooby's and Shaggy's horror. The whole gang decides they’ll stay with Scooby.

Fred, Shaggy, and Scooby are getting ready for the night. Fred and Shaggy are in the bedroom while Scooby decides to take a bath. Fred tells Scooby to hurry up and he is scrubbing up when a ghost appears from a tile trapdoor. The bathtub slides through a secret passage and down a chute into a coal cellar with Scooby in it. While he is sitting on a pile of coal, a green, chain-rattling phantom shadow appears, laughing. Scooby is terrified and he breaks out of the basement. He frantically tries to explain what happened, but after seeing the bathtub in place and bolted to the floor, they dismiss it and go to bed.

The clock chimes midnight and a green ghost goes into Cousin Simple's room and stands over his bed, laughing. The gang wakes up and finds Cousin Simple gone. On a dusty mirror, a menacing message warns them to leave the island, signed the Phantom Shadow.

The gang decides to rig up a dummy of Scooby Doo to catch the ghost when he comes to grab the dummy. Scooby and Shaggy are watching from outside on the drainpipe, when the ghost pushes the drainpipe loose. Velma tries to help them, but gets pulled out of the window, too.

The drainpipe swings the three down into a cave that is a secret passage underneath the house. They find the Phantom Shadow’s footprints and decide to follow them. The footprints lead to a room with a stash of Civil War memorabilia. They find a wagon full of uniforms, and one starts flying and chasing them. It corners them in a elevator and Scooby starts growling and making faces at it. It turns out to be a duck and it flies away scared.

They go up in the elevator and it takes them to a secret entrance to Cousin Slicker’s room. Cousin Slicker is missing as well. They gang all meet up and realize all of the heirs are missing, and Scooby is the only remaining heir.

The gang follows the sound of an organ playing. They find the organ and then see something written down on a music book. It reads "Feed the organ, and watch the floor". Scooby plays the piano and the door locks and the walls begin to close in! Scooby starts playing as fast as he can and the walls stop. Velma deduces that Feed means notes. F-E-E-D. Playing the notes, a trapdoor opens and the gang climbs down steps to the catacombs. There they see the heirs inside coffins, and one more coffin that is empty and dog shaped.

The Phantoms appear, except there are two and they are not shadows! They all run as fast as they can. Scooby faints, but a Scooby Snack revives him. They continue running and finally hide in the chandelier, but the ghost cuts it and it falls to the floor. Scooby and Shaggy find a wine rack and use the corks as ammunition against the ghosts. They continue trying different ways to get away from the green ghosts, and they meet up after they ditch them.

Shaggy gets green paint on his hands. That gives Fred an idea. They devise a trap, including a fan and a washing machine. It backfires, when Scooby turns on the fan too soon and the entire contraption goes airborne, but it still catches the phantoms, unmasked as Cosgoode Creeps, along with his partner, Crawls. They were trying to scare all of the heirs off of the island so they could keep the million dollars to themselves. The bodies in the coffins were dummies and they painted themselves to be green ghosts. The million dollars turn out to be Confederate money. Then a floating bone materializes, but that's one thing that Scooby isn't afraid of.

Cast and characters

Actor	Character
Don Messick	Scooby-Doo
Casey Kasem	Shaggy Rogers Col. Beauregard Sanders Cousin Slicker Sheriff
Frank Welker	Fred Jones
Stefanianna Christopherson	Daphne Blake
Nicole Jaffe	Velma Dinkley
Hal Smith	Cosgoode Creeps/ Phantom Shadows
George A. Robertson	Nephew Norble
Actor	Duck
Non-speaking roles
Cousin Simple
Sweet Cousin Maldahyde
Mr. Crawls
Goldfish

Villains

• Phantom Shadows/Cosgoode Creeps & Mr. Crawls

Suspects

Suspect	Motive/reason
Cosgoode Creeps	Creepy appearance.
Cousin Simple Cousin Slicker Sweet Cousin Maldahyde Nephew Norble	To inherit the million alone.

Culprits

Culprit	Motive/reason
Cosgoode Creeps and Mr. Crawls as the Phantom Shadows	They wanted the money in the will all to themselves.

Locations

• Beauregard Sanders's mansion
  • Fred, Shaggy, and Scooby's bedroom
  • Bathroom
  • Coal cellar
  • Cousin Simple's bedroom
  • Underground cave
  • Cousin Slicker's bedroom
  • Cellar
  • Laundry room

Notes/trivia

• This is the penultimate episode of the first season of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.
• This episode was adapted into the comic book story "Night For A Fright" (Gold Key issue #8, October 1971). 
• A sound byte of Big Ben chiming is used for the grandfather clock striking the hour. 
• The plot of this episode is almost like The Flintstones episode, A Haunted House is Not a Home. The only difference is that in the latter, the deceased wasn't deceased at all, but was playing a practical joke.
• The message on the mirror is: The first is gone, the rest will go. Unless you leave the island, and ROW! ROW! ROW! Signed, Phantom Shadow.
• The Shaggy Super Sandwich sounds virtually the same as the Super Shaggy Sandwich from Hassle in the Castle, but they look quite different.
• The Phantom Shadow is re-used in Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights.
• This is the first episode to show multiple members of the gang in pyjamas, or in different costumes at all- previously only Daphne had worn something different- a tutu in Bedlam in the Big Top.
• The scene where the walls begin to close in on the Gang is eerily resemblant to the one in Star Wars: A New Hope, released 8 years after this episode aired.
• Scenes from this episode, particularly the unmasking, are used in Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy, which features Mr. Crawls in a conspiracy group of other former convicts setting up a highly elaborate revenge. His first name is revealed to be "Cuthbert".

Miscellaneous

• Disguises: Confederate couple
• Food: Shaggy Super Sandwich; haunted bone
• Scooby Snacks: 1
• Zoinks: 3

Animation mistakes and/or technical glitches

• The table with the phonograph disappears.
• When Shaggy takes out his sandwich, the fishbowl beside him is completely empty, no water or fish. But a few seconds later, when he grabs the box of fish food, the bowl has water and a goldfish that bares teeth and snaps at Shaggy!
• During the scene where Scooby is trying to tell and about the bathtub tipping into the basement, Freddy is wearing his regular clothes when he tells them to look in the bathroom instead of his pajamas. It also happens again briefly when the gang peak out their rooms after they hear spooky noises coming from Cousin Simple's room.
• When the drainpipe is falling towards the ocean, the pipe hits the ocean like it is glass. There is no splash!
• When Velma tells Shaggy to follow the Phantom Shadow's footprints, her glasses have no lenses or the tint is missing from them.
• When the uniform is chasing Shaggy, Scooby and Velma, the shoulder strap changes shoulder whenever the uniform changes direction, even though it should remain on the same shoulder as the uniform is always seen from the front.
• The Phantom Shadows' chains often switch from arm to arm, and sometimes vanish altogether.
• When Shaggy and Scooby pull the corks from wine bottles, the racks hold four bottles in each row but in the next shot, they hold three bottles per row.
• Velma asks Shaggy, "How'd you get that green stuff on your hands?", but there is no visible "green stuff".

Inconsistencies/continuity errors and/or goofs/oddities

• None of Beauregard's relatives have a problem competing with a dog, or at least aren't very vocal about it.
• The goldfish in Beauregard's home should've been removed after his passing, yet still remains in one of the (presumable) guest rooms. After that it's completely forgotten as is typically the case.
• The first time a Phantom Shadow appears, just before the bath tips, it isn't a shadow. This isn't supposed to be known until later in the episode.
• Although the boys wear pajamas for bed, the girls remain unchanged.
• Velma claims that the dummy Scooby looks just like the real one, when it very evidently does not- the only resemblance is the shape of the dummy.
• When the Gang find the coffins, Fred says "The cousins!", when one of them was a nephew, rather than a cousin.
• When running away from the Phantom Shadows, after Scooby faints, the Gang run to the left through a doorway, dropping Scooby. Shaggy leans back through to wake Scooby up, and is then chased by the Shadows who float through the doorway from the left. Next, the shadows are in front of them, running to the left again.
• When priming the wine bottles to fire them at the Phantom, Shaggy says "Don't fire 'til you see the green of his eyes", yet the Phantom's eyes are red/orange.
• How did the cousins escape the island? There were no boats, or any form of transportation for that matter, at least in sight, in the scene that overviewed the mansion at the start of the episode, aside from the gang's. The supposed boats may have been docked behind the mansion or out of sight elsewhere, but this seems unlikely, since the wooden dock that should have been and is typically used was shown in front of the house, completely unused, in the aforementioned scene.
• When Velma is running from one of the Phantom Shadows, a phone rings and she picks it up. Why would anybody be calling the mansion if nobody lived there anymore? (Perhaps it was a nuisance caller, or, as it sounded, one of the phantoms)
• When "flying" on the washing machine, Shaggy proclaims "I can't steer this crazy machine!" followed immediately by "We'll take the shortcut", which implies a level of control.
• Given the lawyers were Colonel Sanders's attorneys they should have known the money was Confederate and therefore worthless.
• Begining in the late 1980's Confederate started being sought after by collectors so Velma's "worthless" comment might puzzle modern viewers of this episode.

Home media

• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons DVD set.
• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: Volume 4 - Spooked Bayou DVD.
• Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Complete Series DVD set.
• Scooby-Doo! and the Haunted House DVD released October 23, 2012.

Quotes

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External links

• Buy from iTunes (US)

Previous episode:	Series:	Next episode:
Spooky Space Kook	Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Season 1	That's Snow Ghost