Too long

Takeshi666

I know that's an odd criticism to make, but that's just one of the many problems with the New Scooby-Doo Movies. About a year or so ago I decided to sit through all the Scooby-Doo cartoons up to the present day, but I haven't even reached the Scrappy episodes yet and my interest is already wearing thin. Unfortunately I'm too stubborn to simply give up either.

The biggest problem with the series is the episode length. They call them "movies" but they're only about 40 minutes long - but they could still stand to be a great bit shorter. The actual stories themselves - the mystery - feel like an afterthought, playing second fiddle to the non-stop hijinks of Shaggy, Scooby and whoever the guest star happens to be this week. Fred, Daphne and Velma seem to be there just to provide us with a running commentary. The mysteries, such as they are, are considerably less well-thought out as the original, where the monster would somehow fit into the local mythos. Here you get the ghost of a German WW1 pilot haunting an American airfield for some reason.

The other major problem is the guest stars. More often than not, the celebrity guest stars are voiced by somebody else, making me wonder why they're included at all if we're just gonna get some impersonators. It feels very much like the kind of horrid 70's variety show that is very dated now, where we're introduced a "celebrity guest" as if they were the real deal, but instead we get a lousy lookalike act. It's especially noticeable with the likes of Laurel and Hardy or the Three Stooges, most of whom were dead at the time this series was made. When the celebrity guest is a fictional character themselves, like Batman or the Addams Family, it works a lot better since it becomes just a crossover cartoon.

When I watched the original series, I inadvertedly watched some episodes from the late 70's which were labeled under a third season, and they definitely feel like this series but considerably cut down in length and without the unnecessary guest stars hogging up all the screentime.

score 4/10

Takeshi666 6 December 2018

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4497727/