The one change this new series instituted that I consider to be an improvement over the original series is in cutting the running-time back to thirty-minute and episode rather than the bloated hour-long ones of the 1970s show. If you’re not going to be funny at least be short, that’s my motto. This brings me to the major problem with Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? which would be its lack of overall funny material. You can hire comedians like Ricky Gervais and Whoopie Goldberg to lend their voices to your cartoon but you also have to give them something funny to say or react to, not to mention some of the choices the producers made when it came to casting to celebrity' voices is downright bizarre. Now, this was also an issue with The New Scooby-Doo Movies where they’d cast someone like Cass Elliot from the folk-rock music group The Mamas and the Papas when I doubt that even kids in the 70s knew who and the hell she was – I was six-years-old at the time and I sure didn’t – and the same problem exists in the reboot as we get the likes of Australian singer Sia or basketball player Chris Paul as guest stars. I know I’m not the biggest sports fan out there but was Chris Paul the best they could come up with? Were Charles Barkley or Michael Jordan not available?
“Sorry guys, everyone else was working on Space Jam 2.”
Even if such guest stars as Wanda Sykes and Ricky Gervais was an attempt at attracting older viewers the writers still managed to fail at creating interesting mysteries for them to solve. Casting the likes of Jaleel White to reprise his role of Steve Urkel and Weird Al Yankovic to lampoon his already lampoonish personality is a clear attempt at cashing in on the nostalgia factor such guest stars would hopefully provide but if that’s all an episode has going for it then you’ve got a problem. On the plus side, later in the season they’d have Mark Hamill playing himself and in that episode, they'd toss in some nice meta-jokes concerning his time giving voice to such characters as The Joker, which was genuinely clever and funny, sadly, this was not indicative of the writing for the bulk of the episodes as most the celebrities they landed were lacklustre at best.
Jim Gaffigan, seriously?
When it comes to the guest stars of a more fictional nature such as Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, the show fares slightly better, but only slightly. The Scooby gang running into superheroes is nothing new but the series and its lack of any sense of continuity tends to make things a little confusing. In the episode “What a Night for a Dark Knight!” the gang encounter Batman (Kevin Conroy) as if for the first time when they’d already run into both Batman and Robin years ago in The New Scooby-Doo Movies episode “The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair,” and then we have the direct-to-video film Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon which depicted Wonder Woman as a fictional comic book character, yet here she is appearing in the flesh in the episode “Scooby of a Thousand Faces.”
“Suffering Sappho, Wonder Woman, you’re just a comic book character.”
Easily the episode I had the most fun watching was “One Minute Mysteries” where we find Barry Allen aka The Flash (Charlie Schlatter) wanting to spend time eating with Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby-Doo (Frank Welker), because these two are the only ones who can keep up with his super-metabolism, but their dinner is constantly interrupted by the rest of the Mystery Inc. who need Shaggy and Scooby to be bait for their latest trap. To keep his eating buddies on hand Barry dons his Flash costume and proceeds to solve all of Mystery Incorporated’s mysteries using his super speed. Captain Cutler’s Ghost, Miner Forty-Niner, The Creeper and half-dozen other classic villains all fall to the Scarlett Speedster, much to the chagrin of Fred (Frank Welker), Daphne (Grey Griffin) and Velma (Kate Micucci) who find themselves feeling rather useless next to a Justice League member. This episode was not only fun but it had some amazing animation as well – the visuals of time slowing down while The Flash manipulated objects was amazing – and it also had some dramatic moments with the gang all about to be blown to smithereens while The Flash runs to the rescue. This was the kind of thing I wanted out of Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? not so much Steve Urkel from Family Matters and whatever crap he was getting into.
I could have lived the rest of my life without hearing “Did I do that?” on a Scooby-Doo cartoon.
Though I found the episodes starring DC superheroes to be some of the more entertaining entries, which is not surprising considering the rather uninspiring field of guest stars the show had to offer throughout the season, but one of the more interesting entries was when the gang ran into Penn and Teller, the notorious bad boys of magic, in the episode “The Cursed Cabinet of Professor Madds Markson!” where find that the Scooby gang was offered a million dollars if the could stay in Las Vegas' most haunted hotel – clearly a nod to William Castle's The House on Haunted Hill – with Velma eager to debunk the idea of real ghosts, but what makes this episode great is that they've teamed up with Penn and Teller who are renowned for exposing fakery. It’s a charming episode with Penn Jillette truly wanting to be scared but who has become jaded over the years.
If this was a perfect world we’d see a poster of these guys adorning Velma’s bedroom wall.
Stray Observations:• In the episode “Peebles' Pet Shop of Terrible Terrors!” there is a dog resembling Bandit from Hanna-Barbera's Jonny Quest. Could this show be considered a prequel or did Jonny simply get rid of Bandit at some point?
• In previous incarnations of Scooby-Doo the character Sherlock Holmes had been treated as if he were a real person but in the episode “Elementary, My Dear Shaggy!” he’s considered fictional and thus the Scooby gang don’t even meet the “real” Sherlock Holmes, instead, he’s just some nut job impersonator.
• It’s never made clear why in “What a Night for a Dark Knight!” the Joker impersonated Man-Bat to kidnap Alfred, and with the real Man-Bat easily identified as still being in Arkham it didn't even work as a good misdirect.
• Though voiced by Kevin Conroy this Batman drives around in Adam West’s Batmobile for the 60s Batman television series. That was kind of cool.
• In the episode “Scooby of a Thousand Faces” the Scooby gang to do their best to stop Wonder Woman from slaying the Minotaur because they know it’s always a guy in a mask. That they were able to stop Wonder Woman from doing so is the real mystery here.
• The final villain in “One Minute Mysteries” is unmasked to be The Joker but when The Flash points out that Joker is a Batman villain and not one of his rogue's gallery, a second mask is pulled off revealing it to be the Trickster, voiced by Mark Hamill, which is brilliant as he has played both characters in the past, Joker for the Batman: The Animated Series and The Trickster for the live-action Flash television series.
• The show mostly follows the classic format of “Man in a Mask” yet in “A Mystery Solving Gang Divided” we do get an unmasking of a regular crook but there is also an actual supernatural element in the form of the Funky Phantom from the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon the Funky Phantom Crew, which was a blatant clone of Hanna-Barbera’s own Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! so having them show up as a rival mystery-solving gang was rather clever.
“We’d sue you for copyright infringement if we weren’t owned by the same studio.”
As for the show’s overall tone, it was kind of all over the place. The few episodes that have the self-referential aspect of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo where they'd point out some of the sillier tropes of the classic mysteries, but for the most part this aspect was quickly set aside for your standard Scooby-Doo plots and half-assed attempts at comedy. As to the look of the show, the animation is on par with What’s New Scooby-Doo? and is fairly decent as a whole – if you ignore some glaring animation mistakes like the Mystery Machine suddenly appearing in a shot as if by magic – but it’s definitely a step back from the likes of Mystery Incorporated with its stunning art designs, nor did it have the more stylized fun Be Cool Scooby-Doo. There just isn’t anything special about Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? as it simply tries to capture some of that nostalgic feel by tossing in several celebrities of note, most of whom will cause younger viewers to scratch their heads and ask questions like, “Who in the hell is George Takei?”
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