Mine Your Own Business (Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!)


 * This article is about the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode. For the segment from The Scooby & Scrappy Doo Puppy Hour, see Mine Your Own Business (Scrappy & Yabba-Doo).

Mine Your Own Business is the fourth episode of the first season of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.

Premise
When the gang get lost in the desert, and end up in Gold City, a spooky ghost town, they check into a deserted inn. The owner explains that everybody has been scared off by the Miner Forty-Niner. They wind up in another mystery involving an abandoned gold mine and a ghostly, moaning miner.

Synopsis
Thanks to Shaggy's bad navigation (as he was holding the map upside down), the gang get lost and wind up in an old west ghost town, Gold City, on a stormy night. They check into a guest ranch whose owner, Big Ben, is delighted to see them; it seems that he's had no guests for quite a spell. When the gang wonder about this, Ben's assistant, Hank, explains that it's on account of the "Miner Forty-Niner", the ghost of an old prospector who haunts the local mine searching for the last vein of gold. He's been scaring all the guests away—and Hank himself intends to light out soon.

With nothing else to do, the gang head into Gold City to look around. Initially, they don't find anything—though in the saloon Shaggy is startled by a player piano and a tree branch—until they regroup at the hotel. There, Scooby is panicked by the appearance of the Miner in a two-way mirror and knocks over a cigar-store Indian, dislodging a map of Gold City with what appears to be a safe combination scribbled in the corner. Opening the hotel safe, they find a secret elevator which takes them down into the mine itself. After Shaggy causes a dynamite mishap (he has mistaken them for candles), they explore, and the Miner appears and disappears behind some doors and chases Scooby and Shaggy in a rail car. Fred also manages to accidentally scare Shaggy and Scooby, thanks to him falling into a room full of baking flour. But the pieces start to fall together when the gang follows a wire that leads them to a room containing a tape recorder, a microphone/loudspeaker set up, and jars of crude oil. With these, they lay a trap for the Miner.

While Shaggy imitates diesel train noises over the loudspeaker, Scooby pilots a rail car with a loudspeaker and flashlight attached, mimicking a freight train barreling through the tunnel. He chases the Miner into and through a shack (destroying the old shack in the process), and the Miner's boots fall off to reveal stilts, and is thus unmasked as Hank. He had discovered that the mine, though exhausted of gold, is sitting on oil reserves; he had decided to try to scare off everyone so he could cheaply buy and exploit the land.

Scooby uses the stilts, used by Hank when impersonating the miner, to nab some apples from a tree.

Characters
Main characters:
 * Mystery Inc.
 * Daphne Blake
 * Fred Jones
 * Scooby-Doo
 * Shaggy Rogers
 * Velma Dinkley

Supporting characters:
 * Big Ben

Monsters and other villains:
 * Miner Forty-Niner /
 * Hank

Other characters:
 * Mouse
 * Vulture

Locations

 * Gold City
 * Gold City Guest Ranch
 * Gold City Mine
 * Store room
 * Hotel
 * Secret elevator
 * Mine tunnel
 * Inn
 * Saloon
 * Indian Springs
 * Lonesome Ledge
 * Roan River

Objects
Clues:
 * Cigar store Indian
 * Map of Gold City
 * Tape player
 * Wire connecting speaker and tape player

Food and drinks:
 * Apples
 * Mousetrap
 * Scooby Snacks
 * Swiss cheese

Other objects:
 * Dynamite
 * Flour
 * Hank's stilts
 * Map of western ghost towns
 * Microphone
 * Jars of crude oil
 * Lanterns

Vehicles

 * The Mystery Machine

Full credits
The following credits are how they are seen on-screen (or as close as possible).


 * Produced and Directed by: Joseph Barbera and William Hanna
 * Associate Producer: Lew Marshall
 * Story: Ken Spears, Joe Ruby, Bill Lutz
 * Story Direction: Howard Swift
 * Voices: Nicole Jaffe, Hal Smith, Casey Kasem, John Stephenson, Don Messick, Jean Vander Pyl, Vic Perrin, Frank Welker, Stefanianna Christopherson
 * Animation Director: Charles A. Nichols
 * Production Design: Iwao Takamoto
 * Production Supervisor: Victor O. Schipek
 * Layout: Bob Singer, Alvaro Arce, Paul Gruwell, Mike Arens, Alex Ignatiev, Ric Gonzales, Bill Lignante
 * Animation: Bill Keil, George Rowley, Oliver E. Callahan, Ed Love, Rudy Cataldi, Bill Nunes, Zdenko Gasparovic, Joan Orbison, Bob Goe, Jay Sarbry, Hicks Lokey, Ken Southworth, Lloyd Vaughan
 * Background Styling: Walt Peregoy
 * Backgrounds: Ron Dias, Gary Niblett, Daniela Bielecka, Rolly Oliva
 * Title Design: Bill Perez
 * Titles: Robert Schaefer
 * Musical Director: Ted Nichols
 * Technical Supervisor: Frank Paiker
 * Ink and Paint Supervisor: Roberta Greutert
 * Xerography: Robert "Tiger" West
 * Sound Direction: Richard Olson
 * Film Editing: Gregory V. Watson, Jr., Ted Baker, Chip Yaras
 * Camera: Dick Blundell, Bill Kotler, George Epperson, Cliff Shirpser, Charles Flekal, Roy Wade
 * A Hanna-Barbera Production
 * © 1969 Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc.
 * a hanna-barbera production
 * A Taft Broadcasting Company

Notes/trivia

 * The episode title is a pun on "Mind your own business".
 * This episode uses different music for the title card. The music is only used again for The New Scooby-Doo Movies premiere.
 * This episode's title would be reused many years later for an episode of Scrappy & Yabba-Doo.
 * There's a real Indian Springs ghost town in Kern County, California, possibly placing this episode in the Mojave Desert.
 * Present-day incarnations spell "Miner Forty-Niner" as "Miner 49er".
 * Train noises is another imitation skill of Shaggy's.
 * The Miner Forty-Niner makes a cameo in the DC story, It's A Wonderful Fright, from Scooby-Doo #115, and is featured on the front cover based on that story, along with all the other first season monsters.

Miscellaneous

 * Disguises: While not actually a disguise, Shaggy and Scooby imitate an incoming freight train by the latter riding on a rail car with lights and the latter making sounds
 * Scooby Snacks bribe: 2
 * Zoinks count: 6

Adaptations

 * In the live-action film, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, the gang are now adults and have achieved celebrity stardom in their hometown, where they have donated the costume to the Coolsonian Criminology Museum. It's later brought to life by Professor Jonathan Jacobo who's out for revenge against the gang. In this incarnation, it's called Miner 49er and can now breathe fire.
 * In the continuity of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, the gang now live in Crystal Cove where the monsters they have revealed to be just costumes have been put on display (including Miner 49er) at Velma's parents' tourist attraction, Crystal Cove Spook Museum. It features many of the early monsters the standard continuity gang had faced, only in this series it was localized to one place.

Animation mistakes and/or technical glitches

 * In the side-view of the Mystery Machine first shown riding along, Shaggy and Fred both talk, but it's just a static pose.
 * Daphne's lips are higher than they should be when she asks, "What should [they] do now?"
 * When the gang is first at the entrance of Gold City Guest Ranch about to ring the bell, Daphne's scarf is purple.
 * When Fred asks Big Ben if he has any rooms available, Daphne's eyebrows are drawn higher, underneath her bangs, making her look off-model. Her eyes were possibly drawn differently as well.
 * Velma is wearing lipstick (like Daphne's), when the girls react to first hearing the Miner Forty-Niner's name, and then when she asks Hank what the Miner Forty-Niner has to do with the ranch.
 * When Scooby gulps after hearing about the mine "calling" for the Miner Forty-Niner, the pink inside his right ear (or his left) is missing.
 * When Scooby is reluctant to enter the abandoned hotel, Shaggy pushes him in, knocking the spots right off his back. Temporarily, anyway.
 * When Scoob switches with Shaggy and opens the other's closet door, the knob is on the wrong side.
 * The railroad tracks go into the tool shed in which the miner is trapped, but the door looks too close to the ground for them to fit under.
 * The couple of times Scooby moves to pick apples, his left foot flashes blue like the mountain behind him in the far distance.
 * When Scooby falls into the water trough, it's not the same trough shown a moment before; this one has a spigot nearby.
 * As Scooby holds up the apples while in the trough, his nose flashes brown.

Inconsistencies/continuity errors and/or goofs/oddities

 * Shaggy is spooked by hearing that Gold City is a ghost town, even though he's holding a map of western ghost towns at the time.
 * Gold City is more like a town than a city.
 * Shaggy enters the combination to the lock, but Fred never read the numbers off like he said. In the end it's just a plot hole to further the story along and get them to the safe since they didn't need it after all.
 * In the excitement of finding the map, Scooby never tells the gang of his encounter with the miner.
 * Shaggy opens one side of the swinging saloon door, and the other opens by itself.
 * Daphne says of the cigar store Indian, "It's hollow", although she is looking at it at such an angle that she can't see the hollow part. Similarly, Velma says, "It's a map of Gold City", while looking at the back of the map from three feet away. Perhaps it says "Map of Gold City" on the back.
 * When Fred fell through the floor, he was covered in flour. But after the rail-car chase, Freddy is cleaned off.
 * Hank used stilts to make his legs longer, but nothing was ever said about how he made his arms longer.
 * Hank was the only person who knew about the oil in the mine, so why did he wind up getting arrested? He wasn't exactly doing anything illegal, unless he was charged for trespassing in the abandoned mine.
 * The first shot of the gang talking to Big Ben at the end has the Mystery Machine behind them all, but in the second shot it is gone.

Home media

 * 🇺🇸 Scooby-Doo's Original Mysteries DVD released by Warner Home Video on March 14, 2000.
 * 🇺🇸 Scooby-Doo's Original Mysteries VHS released by Warner Home Video on June 4, 2002.
 * 🇺🇸 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons DVD set released by Warner Home Video on March 16, 2004.
 * Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons DVD set released by Warner Home Video on June 20, 2005.
 * 🇺🇸 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: Volume 1 - A Monster Catch DVD released by Warner Home Video on January 27, 2009.
 * 🇺🇸 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Complete Series (limited edition) DVD set released by Warner Home Video on November 9, 2010.
 * Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Complete Series DVD set released by Warner Home Video on November 21, 2011.
 * 🇺🇸 Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: The Complete Series DVD set released by Warner Home Video on November 13, 2012.