I don't think this has been posted about here. (I haven't checked Cartoon Research, Animation Scoop, Cartoon Brew, Yowp or Tralfaz.) Both of them died in 2020, within months of each other. Joe Ruby died on August 26, 2020 at age 87. Ken Spears died onNovember 6, 2020 at age 82

Of course Joe Ruby and Ken Spears will always be known as the creators of a certain cowardly, junk food-loving Great Dane and his mystery-solving friends. They started out at Hanna-Barbera writing the bumpers that aired between cartoons on The Huckleberry Hound Show. Both of them were editors on The Flinstones. By the time they created Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, both of them were showrunners. They left Hanna-Barbera sometime in the mid-1970's. (Maybe they were tired of Hanna-Barbera trying to make lightning strike twice with countless Scooby Doo rehashes like Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids, Clue Club, and even Jabberjaw, which substituted a cowardly Great white shark for a cowardly dog. Even their adaptation of an existing property, Josie and the Pussycats, pretty much turned it into a Scooby Doo clone, complete with Casey Kasem doing the voice of Alexander Cabot, who in the Josie comic books looked like a more muscular version of Reggie Mantle.) They did a brief stint with Sid and Marty Krofft, where they created segments for The Krofft Supershow:

http://www.archive.org/d...he-krofft-supershow-ep-1 

http://www.archive.org//details/krofft7 

Then they formed their own studio. Some of the shows made by the Ruby-Spear studio:

Fangface
The Plastic Man Comedy Adventure Show (Segments: "Plastic Man", "Mighty Man and Yukk", "Fangface and Fangpuss" and the cringeworthy "Rickety Rocket")
Thundarr the Barbarian
The Heathcliff and Dingbat Show
The Heathcliff and Marmaduke Show
The "Rubik the Amazing Cube" segments of The Pac Man/Rubik the Amazing Cube Hour (Yes, there was a cartoon based on Rubik's Cube.)
The Mr. T Saturday morning cartoon
Saturday Supercade
Turbo Teen
The Punky Brewster Saturday morning cartoon
The 1980's revival of Alvin and the Chipmunks (Though this was later taken over by another studio.)
The "Miss Switch" ABC Weekend Specials

After the mid-1980's I lost track. I don't even know when the Ruby-Spears studio closed. Maybe sometime in the 1990's?

To this day the end credits of the modern Scooby Doo TV series and direct-to-video movies include "Special thanks to Joe Ruby and Ken Spears".

I believe their own original studio closed in 1990 with most of their assets going to H-B themselves. They did some animated shows after that including the animated series based on Capcom's "Megaman" games (which I thought was better than "Saturday Supercade").

I should mention that right before they opened their own studio Joe and Ken briefly worked at Depati-Freleng Enterprise where they created "The Houndcats" and Bailey's Comets" (the latter, according to some DFE staff, the least favorite project the studio worked on).

Even their adaptation of an existing property, Josie and the Pussycats, pretty much turned it into a Scooby Doo clone, complete with Casey Kasem doing the voice of Alexander Cabot, who in the Josie comic books looked like a more muscular version of Reggie Mantlle.

Here's what Alexander Cabot looked like in the comic books:

http://www.readallcomics...-the-pussycats-1969-105/ 

The Hanna-Barbera version looked (and sounded) like one of Shaggy's relatives: