On the second single from their debut album, Come Find Yourself, the Fun Lovin' Criminals introduce themselves as dapper felons who are "running around robbing banks, all whacked off of Scooby Snacks." While the term Scooby Snacks originated as the fictional treat given to the title Great Dane in the classic '60s cartoon Scooby-Doo, the band uses it as slang for the prescription drug diazepam, aka Valium.
The song contains several samples from the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, which respectively feature a diner hold-up and a bank heist. Brian "Fast" Leiser, who plays horns and keyboards in the band, has a habit of playing movies in the background while he's songwriting, which led to the Tarantino-inspired rap song.
"I remember having the Reservoir Dogs LaserDisc playing while I was messing with this groove that was just drumbeats and that simple bassline," Leiser recalled in a "How I Wrote" feature for the British magazine Songwriting in 2021. "It sounded cool having this dialogue from Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi. The original song had nothing but dialogue from Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. When I sent it to Huey [Morgan, lead singer] he was like, 'That's the hit! But you need to lose some of the dialogue so I can put lyrics on it.'"
Building on Leiser's Tarantino concept, Huey Morgan came up with lyrics about drug-addled bank robbers, an idea inspired by a security guard who handed out Valium to rowdy patrons at a New York City club called The Tunnel.
"On Sunday nights they had this crazy hip-hop party called Mecca," Leiser explained. "There were fights and people trying to sneak weapons in, guns and knives, so the security guards were always on edge. One of the guards was a crazy dude and he'd be giving everyone Valiums so at least they were all chilled out. He'd hand them around and say, 'Does anyone want a scooby snack?' That's where got the idea for the chorus from: what if this dude and some of his meathead friends were robbing banks, all high on these scooby snacks?"
Along with the movie clips, "Scooby Snacks" also incorporates a tremolo guitar sample from "Movement Of Fear" by the British post-punk band Tones On Tail. According to Leiser, the sample influenced the verses being in minor chords and the chorus going to major chords.
When "Scooby Snacks" was first released, it went to #22 on the UK chart, but a 1997 reissue (a double-A side with a cover of 10cc's "
I'm Not In Love") reached a new peak at #12.
According to Leiser, their early success that portrayed them as cartoonish gangsters was a double-edged sword because fans were disappointed to find out they weren't really the fun lovin' criminals they claimed to be. "We never said we were!" he insisted. "Yeah, we wear suits on stage so we look sharp, but that's out of respect for our mothers."
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At his lawyers' insistence, Tarantino received a songwriting credit (and 37% of the royalties), but he was never actually in the studio with the band. This didn't go over well with Huey Morgan, who often pointed out that Tarantino borrowed from lots of other movies but never gave those directors credits on his films. "He's like the Milli Vanilli of movies, stealing plots from Hong Kong," Morgan told The Independent. "We wanna throw him a beating."
Leiser said the band's approach to sampling is similar to Tarantino's method of borrowing from other movies. He elaborated: "For us, when you sample something you should make it your own, in the same way as when Tarantino takes influences from other movies, he makes them his own. That's why our sound hasn't changed and it never will as long as we make music, because we have a formula that we like and that we think our fans have come to expect."
Two music videos were made. In the 1996 clip, directed by Evan Bernard (Green Day, Violent Femmes), the band pulls off a gambling con. In 1999 clip, directed by Gavin Bowden (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Live), they suit up to commit a bank robbery.
This was used in the TV shows Daria ("Too Cute" - 1997), Mongrels ("Vince And The Helpful Horse" - 2011), and My Mad Fat Diary ("Touched" - 2013).
The Fun Lovin' Criminals are based in New York City, and many of their songs deal with living in the Big Apple. Despite this, most of their fanbase is in Europe, especially the UK. Their debut album was the only one to crack the US albums chart (peaking at #144), but it went to #7 in the UK.
"Europe was much more open to hearing these stories and having to figure out what they mean,"
Fast Leiser said in a Songfacts interview. "We'd come overseas and live these somewhat rock star lives and then come back to New York where everyone's like, 'Yeah, no one gives a f--k about you here.'"
"We'd always travel over to Europe because they were much more willing to offer us decent money for shows and big festivals, which they never really had at the time in America apart from Lollapalooza," he added. "We ended up doing so much work overseas that the offers dried up in the States."