The incredibly successful Hanna-Barbera children's cartoon series Scooby Doo, Where Are You! ran from the late 1960s to early 1970s, during the height of protests against the Vietnam war and Hippie movement, at a time when the generation gap, of Baby Boomers and their parents, was considered to be a serious affair.
In the series, the young protagonists (who conform to various youth stereotypes of the era) drive a psychadelically-painted van (also an emblem of 1960s youth) and solve supernatural mysteries. Nearly every "monster" turns out to be a clean-cut, often affluent older person, with short hair and an uptight demeanor. Is the 1960s generation gap considered to be a major influence on Scooby-Doo? Was there public outcry to a children's show featuring hippie/beatnik characters that differed from what was considered "acceptable" youth behavior?
There was no public outcry about Scooby -Doo. CBS and Hanna Barbara carefully crafted that show to be non violent and shut-up angry parents groups who were complaining about shows like the Adam West / Burt Ward live action Batman show and the rather violent CBS super hero Saturday morning cartoons.
They also kept the four teenagers behavior well within the bounds of acceptable youth behavior. There was no hint of premarital sex and while the small children the show was aimed at did not realize it, any college age person knew that there was no way anybody could have the munchies as bad as Shaggy unless they smoked a large amount of cannabis. They never showed the kids smoking marijuana on the show. In fact, they were pretty much squares. The writers were told to tone down the travelling band aspect of the show to the point where it became nearly non-existent.
If you want to see a cartoon where the characters had a beatnik personality, you could go back as far as the Hanna Barbara cartoon "Top Cat" which was a thinly veiled rip-off of the Sargent Bilko show, with the added element of four cats who could play jazz instruments and spouted beat poetry.
I have a follow-up question: somewhere, long ago I read that the protagonists of Scooby-Doo were based (perhaps loosely) on prevailing stereotypes of the various universities in California. Do any of you know anything about this? Or is it some pet theory?