31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 12 (Scooby-Doo Where Are You)

Zoinks.

I may have cliffhanger implied something last entry, but as it's a great deal longer than I thought you all get this instead, for the time being. I'll be honest here; Scooby-Doo is not really something I grew up with as a big fond childhood memory. I had some big tape of Hanna-Barbara cartoons as a child, and there was a Scooby-Doo episode on it. I couldn't tell you which or from what series, but Scrappy-Doo was there. I was also aware of The 13 Ghosts Of Scooby-Doo, thanks to Teletoon Retro up in Canada airing the hell out of it. Oh, and then there are a few of those late 90's Scooby-Doo movies, as well as those two live-action ones. That is about my speed with Scooby-Doo, but given that the original show's 50th anniversary is this year, I figured that I should spend some time with that incarnation. No Scrappy-Doo, no real supernatural threats, no John Cena stopping a boulder with his bare hands, just the original show that started it all. With all that in mind, I watched five episodes of Scooby-Doo Where Are You, and here are five little capsule reviews of those episodes.


WHAT A NIGHT FOR A KNIGHT

It's odd, given my cultural memory of this show, how this just starts with Shaggy and Scooby stumbling onto a mystery while walking home one night. I figured the Mystery Machine gang like, took on cases and stuff. Here they just find a mystery, ask around the museum about it, and then decide to break into the museum at night on their own to solve it. What follows is then a bunch of zany slapstick and running around. It's quite charming, really, and parts of it remind me of another show I did watch as a child; Inspector Gadget. There is, on a certain level, the same sort of "oops we accidentally bungled into progressing in solving the mystery with our slapstick" going on. Perhaps Inspector Gadget was inspired by this. The mystery, as it is, is a simple (yet needlessly elaborate) art forgery scheme, and I did appreciate the clue of the other statue's moving eyes once we got to the resolution. Not a bad start!


A HASSLE IN THE CASTLE

Huh. Yet again our groovy 60's kids just sort of stumble upon a mystery by accident while on a boat ride. There's also a joke where Velma says they're "lost in a fog", at which point Shaggy pokes his head out all like "big mood" before saying he's hungry. Now, Scooby-Doo/marijuana use jokes are pretty old hat, but that made me perk up and scratch my chin. We've got a ghost this time, with a cackling weird laugh, and then even more slapstick madness to amuse. I mean, it's Scooby-Doo, you know what you're getting. It's horror-themed comedic lightness with a bunch of scaredy cats running away from monsters in goofy ways while their pals also try to solve a mystery. This episode also has the whole thing with setting up an elaborate Rube Goldberg trap to catch the monster, which Scooby gets caught in while running from the monster as bait, which ends up with them catching the monster anyway. So that's classic Scooby-Doo right there. Oh, and our guy's a magician looking for pirate treasure and using magic tricks to make people think the castle is haunted. Okay. I thought these Scooby-Doo villains like, tried to scare you away for land development. Well, I guess they're still capitalists. On with the show.


THE BACKSTAGE RAGE

Okay I must be thinking of later Scooby-Doo incarnations where the groovy kids "take the case" because this one is yet again them stumbling onto a mystery by accident, in this case Shaggy finding a goddamned violin case full of counterfeit money that gets stolen back. From there our clues lead us to like, the backstage of a puppet theater? It's a pretty neat setting, and it allows for a lot of theatricality in its goofing around. Plenty of life-like puppets and some Phantom Of The Opera-looking motherfucker being threatening, but wow. The scheme is a counterfeit money-making ring. That's a little wild to me. Still, this was good.


SPOOKY SPACE KOOK

As far as monster design and setting goes, this is the best of the ones I watched so far. We have a spooky old abandoned airfield with lots of wrecked planes and other disused equipment, and the monster's a glowing blue skull in a space suit who does a WHOOOLOOLOOLOOLOO cackle. Holy shit, I love it. A bit weird, though, how Fred gets caught on a hook and Velma and Daphne need to go get Shaggy and Scooby to find the lever to get him down. Like, come on, they're capable girls and part of the team. Yeesh, y'all. Oh, and the scheme was all about scaring potential people away so someone could have land all to themselves! And he almost says that iconic meddling kids line! Okay, this is as close to the pop culture osmosis of Scooby-Doo as I've gotten so far. I liked it. Which only leaves...


WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WEREWOLF?

Hey, neat, spooky stuff going on in the woods! With a werewolf who's... green for some reason. Okay, fine. I'll roll with it. Our kids are out camping and then a werewolf scares them. WELL GANG WE GOT A MYSTERY ON OUR HANDS! Stuff moves out of the woods quick, going to an old abandoned mill... and then weird shit goes down. Like, weirder than usual. We get some real fun bumbling into stopping the monster business with Shaggy and Scooby, but then the werewolf is chasing them and... there's a song? This Monkees-ass sounding sound whose lyrics have nothing to do with the zany chase scene other than the word "runnin'"? Wh... what? Also another go of the plan to catch the monster going wrong but working out anyway. Oh, and it was sheep rustlers. Uh. Fine. This one's pretty good, too, but just kind of odd in places. That'll do it for Scooby-Doo. Fine show, and you can see why it's still around. Here's to 50 years, buddy.