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

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, the gang checks into a deserted inn. The owner explains that everybody has been scared off by the Miner 49'er. They wind up in another mystery involving an abandoned mine, a ghostly, moaning miner and oil.

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 tyhem for candles), yhey 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 realistic 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, and the Miner is 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. But they foiled his plan, and now Hank is in jail. The episode ends with Scooby using the stilts Hank used when impersonating the miner to nab some apples from a tree.

Villains

 * Miner Forty-Niner/Hank

Locations

 * Gold City
 * Saloon
 * Inn
 * Gold City Guest Ranch
 * Gold City Mine

Notes/trivia

 * Disguises: Train
 * Scooby Snacks: 2
 * Zoinks: 6

Inconsistencies/continuity errors and/or goofs/oddities

 * Shaggy enters the combination to the lock, but Fred never read the numbers off like he said.
 * 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.
 * In the scene where Hank is talking to Mystery Inc. about the Miner, Velma is shown wearing lipstick like Daphne's, next scene Velma is back to her normal no-lipstick appearance.

Quotes
"Aw, dag nab it!"
 * - Hank