By 1998, Scooby-Doo was not a “current” cultural institution. The last series had ended seven years prior and the most recognizable idea of Scooby-Doo, that of the gang of teens solving mysteries with their dog, hadn’t been the franchise’s focus in twenty years. But luckily, while the 80s iterations of the show (like so many 80s cartoons) fell out of rerun circulation, the 70s versions didn’t. And wouldn’t you know it, Scooby-Doo: Where Are You!, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, and The Scooby-Doo Show found renewed popularity with kids on Cartoon Network (or in Canada, on Teletoon, where yours truly first happened upon it). Suddenly, Scooby-Doo seemed marketable again, but Warner wasn’t quite confident enough to risk greenlighting a whole new series or something more expensive. Instead they decided to test the waters through the emerging market of direct-to-video movies, which was proving financially lucrative for Disney.
Assembling a production crew from The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest and SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron, many of whom had previously worked on Scooby-Doo projects, Warner set writer Glenn Leopold and producer Davis Doi to come up with a story with Jim Stenstrum to direct –three people eager to reinterpret the classic cartoon. In adapting starkly 90s sensibilities of cartoon shows taking themselves seriously with real stakes and a heavy tone, attached to the easygoing humour and charm of the original show with a dash of self-awareness, they came up with something unexpectedly fresh and completely enthralling.
I’ve talked about Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island before, perhaps my favourite and certainly one of the boldest entries in this entire franchise, so I don’t want to repeat myself too much here. But suffice it to say, this was what most of those 80s shows that dabbled in overturning the formula and creating real monsters for the gang to combat, should have been. Zombie Island evolved the characters both in their age (they’re now adults in their early thirties) and personalities –Daphne especially, who has become a determined, assertive paranormal investigator with her own show in the years following the break-up of the Mystery gang. And when they reunite early in the movie, there’s no mistake that she, not Fred, is the one in charge as they investigate a series of disappearances in a Louisiana bayou that yes, involve the undead.
The animation from Japanese studio Mook is exquisite, on par with Batman: The Animated Series (and like Mask of the Phantasm, I contend Zombie Island was good enough for a theatrical release). The mystery is a genuinely compelling one involving a rich backstory (with a body count) and comes with a pretty clever twist. Most of all though, Zombie Island was scary: the monsters, the atmosphere, the mood of dread, the genuine stakes freaked me out as a kid, yet I kept coming back. And the movie was all of this while still finding time to be silly and fun and exceptionally well-characterized. It really was peak Scooby-Doo, the best the franchise had been since its inception.
Zombie Island also featured a new cast, most of whom would stick around for the following three sequels this movie would spawn. In addition to “guest stars” Cam Clarke, Mark Hamill, Jim Cummings, Adrienne Barbeau (Catwoman), and Tara Strong, the film featured Billy West as Shaggy, Mary Kay Bergman as Daphne, B.J. Ward as Velma, and in the unenviable position of following Don Messick, Scott Innes as Scooby. But they were great replacements, fitting and reshaping the roles naturally, and of all of the incarnations before and since, I’m still particularly fond of Bergman’s Daphne and Ward’s Velma. The one returning cast member was Frank Welker as Fred –though Casey Kasem would probably have come back had Shaggy been made vegetarian as he insisted.
This troupe would continue on to Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost the following year, sans West (who had some show about the future to do instead), so Innes stepped up to voice Shaggy now too. A worthy sequel to Zombie Island, this one explored New England folk horror in a similar manner, darker, creepier, and with an authentic supernatural element combined with some more traditional Scooby-Doo tropes. It’s certainly scaled back from Zombie Island, Warner Bros. giving the filmmakers less creative control this time, which you can see in some fractured plot structure (there’s two last acts to the mystery for example). But it’s still moody and mysterious and fun and nicely animated. The maturity of the characters lends itself to some adult subject matter; like in the previous film there’s significant sexual tension between Fred and Daphne as well as between Velma and a Stephen King-like writer voiced by Tim Curry. This one also featured one of my favourite Tress Macneille performances and introduced the Hex Girls, a goth band who subsequently became one of the few recurring entities in the franchise.
The next movie to come in 2000 was Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders, which took the mythos around alien abductions as its inspiration -and I love how each of these movies moved their setting around and tweaked their genre. This one kept its darker atmosphere and genuinely scary aspirations to a minimum, focussing more on character and environment -in this case the New Mexico desert; and while it maintains the “real monsters” element that distinguished these early movies, it does so in a different way. Alien Invaders gave Shaggy and Scooby love interests too, in the form of a hippie girl (Candi Milo) and her dog, in a romance that’s ultimately rather sweet. Sadly, this was Bergman’s last portrayal of Daphne before her tragically untimely death in 1999. For the follow-up film she was replaced by her good friend and voice acting protege Grey DeLisle.
Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase though was the end of this run of Scooby-Doo films, the last done by Mook Animation, and the creative team that had been making them since Zombie Island. And while this one didn’t really have any of that subversive moodiness, it was remarkably mature in some of its themes, as well as a lot of fun, taking place entirely within a computer game that the gang are sucked into (because The Matrix was still pretty big), where they have to complete it Jumanji style whilst being pursued by an anthropomorphic virus. The game though is based in-universe on their own exploits (despite all the levels before the last having nothing to do with them), and it eventually becomes this nice tribute to Scooby-Doo’s history, playing with nostalgia both of the audience and the characters; and it’s not a bad place to end a continuity tied to the original show.
It wasn’t the end of course. Zombie Island and the popularity of reruns had given Scooby-Doo new life, and the very next year saw not only a new reboot of the show, but a live-action movie adaptation. And let’s talk about the latter first.
Directed by Raja Gosnell and written by some hack called James Gunn, 2002’s Scooby-Doo was originally supposed to be a more tongue-in-cheek translation of the series, something in the vein of The Brady Bunch Movie. According to Gunn it was at one time R-rated, with heavy marijuana jokes around Shaggy, a cheaply titillating kiss between Daphne and Velma, and edited out cleavage on many of the female characters. That this version of the movie got so far is astonishing, but Warner Bros. forced the filmmakers to keep it modestly family friendly (though now with a bunch of adult jokes that don’t work in context). The result is a very typically bad cartoon adaptation, no better than The Flintstones, Garfield, and Yogi Bear movies. Most annoyingly though is the plot, which picks up after the gang’s initial mystery solving phase reuniting as adults and investigating disappearances on an isolated island that may pose real supernatural dangers, being essentially the same premise of Zombie Island, but done badly -substituting a bayou for a resort and an elegant southern belle for a depressing Rowan Atkinson. And the resolution to the mystery is an unbelievably stupid attempt at pseudo-fan service, essentially the equivalent of taking that Darth Jar-Jar theory with authenticity.
The movie isn’t entirely without merit though. While the hideous CG Scooby, Freddie Prinze Jr.’s arrogant take on Fred, and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s misguided “girl power” take on Daphne don’t work, the film had two terrific castings: Linda Cardellini as just about a perfect live-action Velma, and Matthew Lillard as a pitch-perfect Shaggy. Cardellini and Lillard really make the movie at least watchable -and possibly mildly enjoyable if only ironically so for its early-2000s comedic desperation. It made enough to get a sequel in 2004, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, which is marginally better, taking cues instead from Cyber Chase in bringing back classic monsters as fan service. It’s slightly more in spirit with the franchise, despite still being very sardonic, though most of what I remember are isolated sequences and Seth Green as Velma’s love interest.
In the meantime on television, Scooby-Doo was faring better. The reboot series, What’s New Scooby-Doo? was a fairly simple update on the original premise, and became definitively the next generations’ Scooby-Doo, if lacking that classic Hanna-Barbera charm. A couple character looks were tweaked (notably Fred and Daphnes’), and it had a suitably corny early-2000s soft rock theme song courtesy of Simple Plan. Welker and DeLisle were retained from the movies, though Ward was replaced by Mindy Cohn of The Facts of Life, and Innes by two veterans: Welker taking over as Scooby (a part he had long wanted) and a returning Casey Kasem as Shaggy. This was the new show when I was a kid and it was perfectly decent if not ever truly thrilling, but quite funny at times.
The direct-to-video line continued (albeit at a lesser, flatter quality than the first four films, returning to the classic formula and tone) with about one or two per year. The Legend of the Vampire and The Monster of Mexico (both 2003) were notable in reuniting the entire surviving original cast, giving Heather North and Nicole Jaffe a couple last chances to be Daphne and Velma (North passed away in 2017). After this, the next seven movies were essentially just feature-length episodes of What’s New Scooby-Doo?, extending beyond even the show, which ended in 2006. None of them were great but none of them were particularly awful -I liked The Loch Ness Monster, and Where’s My Mummy? had an impressive twist. With The Samurai Sword in 2009, Kasem retired Shaggy once again, though under better circumstances. He passed away in 2014.
Of course there was one incarnation of Shaggy during this time that Kasem didn’t voice. In 2006 Kids WB premiered one of the strangest Scooby-Doo shows, and certainly the least of the twenty-first century variations. Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue was perhaps the most radical departure in the series history, completely abandoning both the mystery aspect of the show and any connection to supernatural phenomena, real or fake. Instead it reimagines Shaggy (voiced by Scott Menville) as the inheritor of a vast fortune fighting off evil villains determined to steal it, with Scooby, a transforming Mystery Machine, and nano-enhanced Scooby Snacks. It’s utterly bizarre and terrible, but in a bewilderingly fascinating way, clearly operating out of the same executive mindset that created such abominations as Loonatics Unleashed, albeit with a sense of humour. I distinctly remember being turned off by the first episode and never touching it again. It ran two seasons.
The two years that followed were relatively low-key for Scooby-Doo. A couple of direct-to-video movies came out during this time that were tied to a show no longer airing, and a live-action T.V. movie called The Mystery Begins that was a prequel to the live-action movies (with an even uglier Scooby) -this itself got a sequel called Curse of the Lake Monster.
But in 2010, Scooby-Doo once again returned to television with Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which I’d be hard-pressed not to call the best Scooby-Doo series! Ostensibly another prequel, the show follows the gang as high schoolers solving mysteries in their home town of Crystal Cove. But they’re not the kind of minor conundrums of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, rather they’re elaborate mysteries with greater stakes and sharper tones than has ever been done with the traditional formula. And through these seemingly standalone cases there’s an overarching mystery tied into the history of the town itself that the gang are gradually working to solve. This show could get quite dark and serious on a level equalling the early direct-to-video films (at least a couple secondary characters die over the course of its two seasons), and it delved further into the characters, exploring their relationships, backgrounds, and personalities more than ever before.
Yet Mystery Inc. was also the funniest version of the show, self-aware and self-effacing, consciously ridiculous at times, and exceedingly clever in its use of homage. Almost every episode parodies or pays tribute to some genre property, or otherwise references Scooby-Doo’s or Hanna-Barbera’s history. There’s an episode where in a fever dream, Scooby meets all of his 70’s knock-off characters, and stops a bad guy with them. Because this was a show that really catered to fans of the property while also doing bold new things with it. It’s inspirations are clearly shows like Twin Peaks and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I wouldn’t be surprised if the original pitch was merely, what if the Scooby gang from Buffy was the actual Scooby gang?) and with its serialized mystery and enigmatic west coast setting it’s fairly analogous to Gravity Falls as well, which came a couple years later.
The cast was fantastic, Welker, DeLisle-Griffin, and Cohn, being now joined by Matthew Lillard reprising his role of Shaggy from the live-action movies (with Kasem voicing his father in a few episodes); and a recurring cast that included Cardellini (as a rival of Velma’s), Vivica A. Fox, Patrick Warburton, Udo Kier, Gary Cole, and Lewis Black. I also really loved the stylish animation on this series, the character redesigns and the colourful look of the world were so vividly fresh and appealing. If there’s a critique to be had it might be that this show is no longer Scooby-centric, being instead an ensemble as the title implies. But I think that really works for the series, and if this media property is to evolve, Scooby can’t always have the limelight -even if he is the title character. This show did an excellent job demonstrating that.
Over in direct-to-video land, the Scooby series kept pumping out more movies of varying qualities, Lillard taking over as Shaggy in them too. The What’s New aesthetic was ditched in favour of a general look that evoked the original series but with crisper animation. As such these movies at least look fairly nice. Six of them came out while Mystery Inc. was on the air, and then in the interim between the end of that show in 2013 and the next in 2015, Warner Bros. returned to an old Hanna-Barbera formula: the special guest star, teaming up with the WWE to make WrestleMania Mystery, complete with a dozen or so wrestlers (including a pre-movie star John Cena) voicing themselves. Reinforcing a cliché of the Scooby-Doo franchise and looking like an out-of-ideas desperate sell-out in the process, I’m not a fan of this creative direction, which thus far has resulted in both a direct sequel and similar team-ups with KISS (because they were still relevant in 2015), Batman (from The Brave and the Bold), and Lego twice. Between 2013 and 2018, only six out of thirteen movies weren’t tie-in products.
Luckily there was a little bit more originality on television, even if fans were ignoring it. Be Cool Scooby-Doo! had the most drastic redesign since A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, and was very much a spiritual successor in its reliance on offbeat humour and slapstick. It looked like the polar opposite of Mystery Inc. and was perhaps unfairly derided for this. The broad comedy doesn’t really fit in the Scooby-Doo formula but it was occasionally pretty funny. This series certainly wasn’t intended for the same audience as Mystery Inc., but did adapt that shows’ ensemble focus and imagination, albeit utilized for a different purpose. It also reinvented some of the character types, particularly Daphne as the standard cartoon quirky character popularized in series like Gravity Falls and The Looney Tunes Show. For this series, Cohn was replaced as Velma by the delightful Kate Micucci, simultaneously taking over in the concurrent movies.
And that brings us to the current state of Scooby-Doo in its fiftieth year where the theme appropriately seems to be looking back. The latest incarnation of the show, Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? is effectively a reboot of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, centred as it is on guest stars and with an explicitly retro animation style. Personally I think this is more a step in the wrong direction than Be Cool was, and yet I admire that it seems to come full circle on the franchise -as I mentioned before, even just through its opening titles. On the movie side of things Warner has released two sequels to previous iterations of the franchise: The Curse of the 13th Ghost, which follows up on and concludes the narrative of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo (while gaslighting its audience about Scrappy’s involvement in that show) and Return to Zombie Island, an offensively retconning follow-up to the movie that started this whole line of films. But surprisingly and disappointingly, there isn’t really anything homaging Scooby-Doo: Where Are You? or the vast history of the franchise, warts and all. And I do believe this is a media property that deserves a Doctor Who level of effort on its 50th, especially when it still involves one person (Frank Welker), who’s been there the whole time.
Nevertheless, Scooby-Doo persists and continues to grow in interesting ways. The most recent live-action effort last year was a Daphne & Velma spin-off about the girls solving a Nancy Drew-type mystery in high school; and there’s an animated movie in the works for next year called Scoob! which has as much going for it (a script by Kelly Fremon Craig, veteran Scooby director Tony Cervone, Welker voicing Scooby) as going against it (CG animation -which has never been done for Scooby-Doo, a celebrity voice cast, a “Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe”). Whether that fails or succeeds, the next effort will be right around the corner. Because Scooby-Doo, in spite of its highly specific premise and formula, has wound up becoming weirdly universal and intergenerational -the only Hanna-Barbera property to be so. It’s lasted through dozens of television shows and movies, and that’s not even accounting for the video games, theme park rides, parodies, that weird comic series, and that one Supernatural crossover episode.
Scooby-Doo’s status as a pop culture staple is rivalled perhaps only by Looney Tunes. No other classic cartoon has had the consistency of presence that Scooby-Doo has enjoyed, even through its lesser incarnations. I don’t know, it’s comforting that a show I loved as a kid is still around and continues to thrive on some level. The people behind Scooby-Doo have always known that evolving to changing styles and sensibilities is necessary, and it’s fascinating to look at the history of this franchise as a study in the development of American cartoons over the past fifty years. 70’s Scooby-Doo was cheap yet charming, singular and simple yet endearingly silly; 80’s Scooby-Doo was transparently commercial and condescending yet fascinatingly weird; 90’s Scooby-Doo was risk-taking and revolutionary, 2000’s Scooby-Doo was belligerently dumb (the movie), then safe (What’s New), then misguidedly subversive (Get a Clue); and 2010s Scooby-Doo has been intrepidly modern (Mystery Inc.), then energetically wacky (Be Cool), and now brazenly nostalgic (Guess Who?). And whatever the future of the medium brings, no doubt Scooby and the gang will adapt to that as well.
That’s how you achieve immortality.
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