- The whodunit format was a daring new frontier for an animated series, but the members of the Mystery Inc. team have grown to become authentic popular-culture icons. To solve their newest mystery – finding the most awesome Scooby-Doo DVD ever, with 25 vintage episodes and snackin’ good extras on 4 discs – you need only follow this simple clue: you’re holding it!Running Time: 549 min. Format: DVD
The whodunit format was a daring new frontier for an animated series, but the members of the Mystery Inc. team have grown to become authentic popular-culture icons. To solve their newest mystery – finding the most awesome Scooby-Doo DVD ever, with 25 vintage episodes and snackin? good extras on 4 discs – you need only follow this simple clue: you?re holding it!Chuck Jones and other great studio animators sneered at the cheap look and lazy craftsmanship of Hanna Barbera’s television cartoons in the 1960s, but there’s no question HB’s original, 35-year-old Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is enduringly beloved. The Complete First and Second Seasons includes all 25 stories first broadcast from September ’69 to October ’71, a growth period in which canine hero Scooby’s voice (by Don Messick, who also voiced The Jetsons‘s pup, Astro) was gradually refined from murky garble to Scoob’s more familiar, “Rrroowwrr”-inflected, human-like speech. This set also represents the pre-frills Scooby-Doo: no guest appearances by Don Knotts or Batman, no Scrappy-Doo–just adventure and occasional bubblegum pop tunes by Danny Janssen and sundry co-writers (e.g., “Pretty Mary Sunlite” in the episode “Don’t Fool with a Phantom”).
Watching all the shows back-to-back reveals evolving complexity in the scripts. Over time, Scooby-Doo‘s creators added multiple bad guys in cahoots with major villains, and developed sub-plots, backstories, and even appealing allies and friends of Mystery, Inc., a traveling band of young debunkers of supernatural phenomena. Riding around in their psychedelic Mystery Van, preppie leader Fred and his friends–haughty Daphne, brainy Velma, quasi-hippie Shaggy, and Shaggy’s best pal, Scooby, an excitable Great Dane–chase down and are chased by alleged ghouls who generally turn out to be venal humans running various scams.
Included here is Scooby-Doo‘s premiere, “What a Night for a Knight,” in which the gang looks into the disappearance of a noted archaeologist and end up in a “haunted” museum. The fun “Go Away Ghost Ship” finds our heroes helping a shipping company daunted by the apparent ghost of pirate Red Beard, while the silly classic “A Tiki Scare Is No Fair” concerns a Hawaiian vacation for Mystery, Inc. disrupted by a witch doctor. –Tom Keogh
Buy “Scooby Doo, Where Are You! – The Complete First and Second Seasons” For Only $25.99
March 6, 2008
#1
This cartoon series sucks. Adequate animation, horrible scripts, even for a cartoon. Always the same plot, always the same resolution, and always the same line “I would have gotten away with this if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.”. Generation X grew up watching this tripe (along with Superfriends), and they continually obsess about it to this day on how bad it is. They have yet to admit that it destroyed their young minds with its mediocrity. The series is ridiculously redundant, tiresome, and about as interesting as a rice cake. Now you may say “it’s just a kids’ show”, but does a kids’ show have to be so bad? Schoolhouse Rock is a great example of how good children’s programming can be. This is just repetitive and boring….
March 6, 2008
#2
This is the most over-appriciated cartoon in history. Why a show featuring no-dimensional characters and atrocious writing is still haunting serious animation fans 30 years later is beyond me. Thanks for wasting our time, Warner Bros. Where’s our Batman: The Animated Series DVD box set?
March 6, 2008
#3
Question??? Is Scubby Dee in any of these?? My Granddaughter loves Scubby but I haven’t been able to find anything with Scubby Dee (so I can PROVE she did exist.)
MeMAW
March 6, 2008
#4
I’ve been an admirer of most of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but ‘Scooby Doo’ is one whose sucess seems a real mystery to me.
The plot of every single episodes is just exactly the same. The gang is working on solving a mystery of a lost treasure supossedely taken away by a monster, ghost, or any other creepy character. In the end the find out that such creature doesn’t exist and it’s a person in disguise trying to steal the treasure. Frankly I don’t understand what is so good about this crappy show.
If you wanna see Hanna Barbera at their highest level of creativity, get ‘The Flintstones’ boxed set, because by watching one episode of Scooby Doo, you might as well have seen them all.
March 7, 2008
#5
Although the content of this DVD set looks great, the pricing leaves much to be desired. The amount of content on the DVD is similar to other DVD sets released from the Hanna Barbera catalogue (ie, Jonny Quest, Flintstones), but while these sets are reasonably priced at $29.99, Scooby Doo, Where Are You is priced closer to $50. Why doesn’t the company in charge of this quit jacking up the price? Considering their production costs on rereleasing this old material, they’d still earn a sizable profit if they’d just price their product a little more reasonably. I, for one, would buy this DVD if it sold on Amazon for $29.99.