No description

Scooby-Doo is making a big comeback with several helpings on TV and new videos. The series' writers are smart enough to mildly spoof themselves, and this movie opens with Scooby, Shaggy, Daphne, Frank, and Velma solving a crime that ends with the now-classic Scooby line, "It's... [insert some administrative minion/angry neighbor/disgruntled relative], only to have the criminal bleat, "And I would've gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you kids!" There they meet one of Velma's idols, fright-writer Ben Ravencroft (voiced by an effective Tim Curry). Smitten Velma and gang accept his invitation to his New England hometown festival. When one of Ravencroft's ancestors suddenly swoops down from the supernatural heavens, the gang's on alert. This movie is appropriate for viewers 4 and up (although some of the animated frights may haunt sensitive viewers). It's also for their parents who may have been fans in the series' initial run. The cool and fun soundtrack's catchy tunes include a song performed by the Hex Girls, one of whom is none other than former Go-Go Jane Weidlin. If the theme song's got a country beat, that's because it's sung by Mr. Achy Breaky himself, Billy Ray Cyrus. --N.F. Mendoza

No description

"I would've gotten away with it if weren't for you meddling kids!" Equal parts remake and spoof, this tongue-in-cheek live-action resurrection finds the old Saturday-morning-cartoon gang reunited to investigate the zombie teens of a haunted amusement park. Frantic action and big-screen special effects stand in for logic, but for a while it makes for a spirited send-up. Freddie Prinze Jr., under a blond hairdo and an ascot, turns Fred into a preening pretty boy, and Sarah Michelle Gellar plays with her own Buffy image as eternal damsel-in-distress Daphne (in magenta mini-dress and maxi-boots, no less), but this show belongs to gangly Matthew Lillard, who is the adenoidal beatnik Shaggy. His loyal-to-the-end friendship with the computer-animated Scooby-Doo is the most convincing relationship in the whole two-dimensional goof. Some of the supernatural nasties may be scary for young kids and the humor careens from winking self-awareness to Scooby doo-doo gags, but otherwise this is as harmless as a Saturday-morning chapter and as substantial as a Scooby snack. --Sean Axmaker

No description

No description

No description

The animated pooch detective returns in Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, which packs a wealth of ghostly villains from the Saturday morning cartoon into one movie. When Mystery Inc. opens a museum exhibit of costumes of their old foes, a new masked foe appears and steals everything--and before you know it, all the costumes come to life, chasing Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr., Head Over Heels), Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar, TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Velma (Linda Cardellini, Freaks and Geeks), Shaggy (Matthew Lillard, SLC Punk), and the computer-animated Scooby Doo all over Coolsville. It's no better or worse than the first Scooby Doo movie. Watching live-action scenes that you've previously seen in two dimensions is vaguely uncanny; it's like deja vu turned inside out. Also featuring the weirdly unsynchronized lips of Alicia Silverstone (Clueless), Seth Green (Austin Powers), and Peter Boyle (Young Frankenstein). --Bret Fetzer

No description

Sooner or later, the Mystery, Inc. gang had to take on Mexico's legendary Bigfoot equivalent, El Chupacabra, and that's precisely what they do in this entertaining, feature-length, Scooby-style investigation into the paranormal. Taking the Mystery Van south of the border, Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby-Doo celebrate Day of the Dead festivities, which become less festive when a towering, glowering Chupacabra monster turns up to terrify both tourists and locals. The young snoops smell a conspiracy, and as they chase down clues their search for the truth leads them into sundry Mexican antiquities--ancient tombs and temples--where danger increases exponentially. There are the usual rituals: Our time-warped heroes run like the wind during encounters with alleged ghouls--particularly best-buds Shaggy and Scooby, when they aren't stuffing themselves with delicious Scooby Snacks. The animation is slicker and smoother--and more pleasing--than some other, recent Scooby-Doo features. --Tom Keogh

They're four kids who have next to nothing in common; they have no visible means of support, parents, or responsibilities; they travel as much as they want, wherever they want; they have a dog whom they've addicted to a treat--and they use the dog to do anything they deem too dangerous to do themselves. Oh, and they regularly take the law into their own hands, trespassing and breaking and entering whenever it suits them. This is a kids show?

Looking back, it's sometimes tough to figure out what really made Scooby-Doo so popular, and the four episodes included here--chosen by a Warner Bros. Online poll--don't really go that far in explaining the phenomenon. Hassle in the Castle, the first episode, has virtually no plot (the gang is out boating in the fog when they run aground on a haunted island); in A Clue for Scooby Doo, the fivesome sinks a husband-and-wife pirating scam; The Backstage Rage is a step up, and involves the gang's foiling a puppeteer's counterfeit operation. The last episode, Jeepers, It's the Creeper, asks more questions than it answers--it opens with the gang headed out to their school dance, and no other students ever show up.

It's hard to believe that any collection of fan favorites wouldn't include any of Scooby and the crew's classic team-ups (with Batman and Robin, Laurel and Hardy, etc.). With all the other Scooby compilations available, this one has dubious claim to the title Greatest Mysteries. --Randy Silver

Sometimes it takes a Scooby scramble to satisfy an entire family, and in the peace-to-all holiday spirit, that's what's on offer here. Winter WonderDog spans the Scooby generations. We scroll through a splattering of Scrappy, where the hotheaded little hound hooks up with Scoob and Shag for a few fits of mystery-free bad-guy nabbing, but the classic Mystery Machine players also pull up for several episodes. In "That's Snow Ghost" they meddle at a spooky ski lodge where a mechanical abominable snowman look-alike's on the loose, and "The Nutcracker Scoob's" lineup links the entire groovy gang minus Velma for an investigation into the ghost of Christmas present, who's spooking an orphanage. It's the snowcapped, red-and-green Scooby-snack wrapped, all-era caper-scraper that'll see Scooby fans of all stripes circling the tube. The sort of spirits it ushers in may not be standard issue, but the jinkies-generating snooping and sleuthing are. --Tammy La Gorce

No description

What's new is that the Mystery Machine finally comes equipped with seatbelts, not to mention the newly installed global positioning system. The updated WB series also features a new theme song. But Scooby fans needn't cringe: the basics are still here. Shaggy's still goofy, Scooby's still scared, and the "ghosts" are actually people with devious agendas. In these four 20-minute episodes from the 2002-2003 season, the gang finds themselves snowboarding with Chris Klug (in a cameo voice), hanging with scientists at a NASA-like facility, jetting to a museum in Costa Rica, and making the Mardi Gras scene in New Orleans. Along the way they encounter a snow monster, alien baby, "gigantisaurus," and the feuding Leland brothers, carrying their Civil War grudge beyond the grave. Casey Kasem continues his duties as Shaggy and new cast and guest voices include TV veterans Mindy Cohn, Hector Elizondo, Lauren Tom, and the ubiquitous voice artist Jim Cummings. --Kimberly Heinrichs

"Well, gang, it looks like we're up to our armor plates in another mystery." Oddly enough, this line comes from the very first episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, the part-mystery, part-haunted house animated series that premiered in 1969. The first five episodes are featured on Scooby-Doo's Original Mysteries, in which Freddy, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and of course the practical-joking Great Dane Scooby-Doo drive around the country in their lime-green van "The Mystery Machine" investigating haunted castles, ghost towns, and a host of alleged otherworldly beings. Ventriloquist, gymnast, and resident hippie Shaggy and fraidy-cat canine Scooby provide the comic relief between clues, and can usually be bribed into anything with a yummy Scooby snack (the ingredients of which remain the show's real mystery). Sure, the animation is flat, the music receptive, and the jokes not nearly as funny as the laugh track would have you think, but that's par for Saturday morning animation. If you grew up with Scooby and the gang, these original episodes are like a nostalgia train to Saturday morning yesteryear, yet after 30 years the shows have hardly aged (even beatnik Shaggy could pass for modern grunge). The DVD also features an abbreviated music video (not as good as Matthew Sweet's rendition of the theme song on Saturday Morning Cartoons) and a trivia quiz. The episodes: "What a Night for a Knight," "Hassle in the Castle," "A Clue for Scooby Doo," "Mine Your Own Business," and "Decoy from a Dognapper." --Sean Axmaker

No description

No description

No description

No description

Scooby scholars of the old-school set will find much in the Reluctant Werewolf to give them pause. For one thing, Scrappy and Googy, Shaggy's girlfriend, are subbed for missing members of the Mystery Machine gang, and for another, instead of making like bananas and splitting from the monster at the center of a mystery, this crew slides, peel-style, into a strange circus of benign spooks, no meddling involved. The reluctant werewolf is Shaggy; he's forced to finish first in a monster road race if he wants to rid himself of his fangs and facial fur (a dirty trick played on him by Dracula). A truckload of shenanigans, mostly screwball car tricks, ensue. Wacky wordplay works up a handful of howls here, but not enough to make this full-length feature worth tuning into twice or, ultimately, rescuing from the Scooby-Don't pile. --Tammy La Gorce

Holy jinkies, Batman, just when it seemed superheroes couldn't get any groovier, you collide with the Mystery Machine gang. Such a pairing might normally yield one wacky crime-fighting power struggle, but in these two capers egos take a back seat to classic you-check-this-out, we'll-check-that Scooby-Doo splintering. First, bat-plagued pranksters Penguin and the Joker kidnap a hopelessly tongue-tied professor in a scheme to swindle a high-tech flying suit. Then the conniving criminals return as bit players in a counterfeiting ring run out of a way-wacky funhouse. Soar along in the Batmobile or make like a banana and split with Shaggy and Scoob at these crime scenes--either way, it's a secret-passageway and scary-mask-packed combo even more compelling than the cookies-and-batmilk Scooby snack the pesky kids tuck into during a break in the action. --Tammy La Gorce

While vacationing Down Under, the mystery-solving quintet decides to head into the Australian outback to take in the sights and a rock festival competition held at Vampire Rock. But, of course, that is not to be. "Vampires" have been swooping down from the craggy cliffs and abducting the talent, forcing the detectives to go undercover as a rock band. (Their song? Predictably, "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?") The aboriginal myth of Yowie Yahoo is thrown in, along with two aboriginal characters. Adults may have trouble keeping the glam-rock musicians separate from the vampires, but kids will follow enough of the complex plot and high-tech resolution. This 70-minute movie is a contemporary take on the vintage television series with Casey Kasem repeating the honors as the voice of Shaggy. While some of the flower-power looniness of the original is gone, the basic spirit of classic Scooby-Doo remains intact. (Ages 3 and older) --Kimberly Heinrichs

No description

When Shaggy inherits an old Southern estate from an uncle, he and his sleuthing hounds take a road trip. But they don't even make it to the mansion before the haunting starts. Amid headless horsemen, walking skeletons, and a menacing butler, Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy get majorly spooked. The three Stooge-like ghosts they hire to help them know more about slapstick than ghostbusting and, to make matters worse, neighbor Sadie Mae has the hots for Shaggy while her gun-toting brother Billy Bob is hot to eliminate him. The local sheriff is no help--although an escaped gorilla is--and the jewels that Scrappy uncovers keep disappearing. This new 91-minute movie fuses together episodes from 1983 of the long-running cartoon, which features Casey "Mr. Countdown" Kasem doing the honors as Shaggy. It's classic Scooby-Doo: bumbling good versus slightly-less-bumbling evil with a lot of laughs for viewers 3 and up. --Kimberly Heinrichs

No description

No description

No description

No description

Scooby, Scrappy, and the gang are helping out Tiny Tina and the other young residents of a children's home put on a Christmas pageant when they are interrupted by a spooky apparition. Is it the work of the dastardly businessman who would do anything to buy the home? Or is someone else after the emerald hidden on the premises? You can bet the canine-human team will find the answers inside of 23 minutes--and wind up in tutus on skis to boot. Next, Scooby, Scrappy and Shaggy scare up a monster in Alaska in the seven-minute short "Alaskan King Coward." Filling out the 45-minute tape are two other shorts: an episode of Squiddly Diddly, Hanna Barbera's ghostly version of The Flintstones, and Cartoon Network's Shake & Flick, a mostly wordless caper about a dog and a flea doing battle in the Colosseum and other historic locales in Rome. The first three are fine for kids 2 and older, but the loud violence of the fourth cartoon is for slightly older audiences. --Kimberly Heinrichs

No description

No description