So we caught the brand-spankin'-new Scooby-Doo cartoon last night, Scooby-Doo, Mystery Incorporated! on the Cartoon Network last night. It was okay. Not great, but okay, and certainly not as good as the original series. The animation for this new series is a little different, making the characters look not quite like their old selves but definitely recognizable.Probably the weirdest things about the new show are that 1) I don't think Casey Casem is voicing Shaggy in this series, but I could be wrong. I've tried doing a little research on the matter and my results are inconclusive. 2) Apparently VELMA has the hots for SHAGGY. ?!?!?!?
And that's basically what I want to get into here: A rant about Scooby-Doo.
The original series was groundbreaking, if you think about it. Four cool, idpendent kids and their dog, solving mysteries and never for one second believing that those ghosts or ghouls or witches or werewolves or vampires were real. Not really. For another thing, even though they were teenagers, and sure, Shaggy was quite goofy, none of the characters were at all dumb, and none of them really stood out as being smarter than another. (No, not even Velma.)
But the show's been through several incarnations now, and some of the new writers aren't staying true to the spirit of the show. In the new live-action made for television movie, Scooby-Doo!: The Mystery Begins, for instance, there are REAL GHOSTS in the movie. ?!?!?!??!
And again, Mystery Begins is OK, nothing special, though I do like the kid they got to play Shaggy.
The Scooby-Doo movies that were made for the theater and are available on DVD were better (Scooby-Doo and Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleased), with Mathew Lillard and Linda cardellini doing FANTASTIC jobs at being Shaggy and Velma respectively. We own both of these, and though I'm downright sick of them now, it took a while for them to wear me down.
No comments:
Post a Comment