Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated Stand and Deliver Review

if you've been reading ComicsAlliance for a while, yous might recall that I am a dude with some potent opinions about the Scooby Doo franchise, and to be honest, the primary reason for that is Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated . This week, the second half of the kickoff season finally made it to DVD with a fourteen-episode set up called Crystal Cove Curse , 2 discs worth of pretty compelling reasons why it's ane of the best animated serial in recent memory. Seriously. What it really comes downwardly to is graphic symbol. Mystery Inc. is one of the showtime times in the 43-twelvemonth history of the franchise that anyone's been allowed to develop the gang every bit characters, and it'south something that changes the entire tone of the prove.Before Mystery Inc., they were actually just archetypes with few additional twists added for the sake of gags, like brainy Velma who always lost her spectacles. But with Mystery Inc., the characters are rebuilt from the ground up, with private motivations, new relationships and interaction with each other that go beyond one person telling some other how the mysterious fog was really created by dry ice. They fifty-fifty go bodily families that be for a reason beyond providing a rich uncle with a haunted ski resort. They're fully realized for the first time.

That plays out in the format of the show, too. Information technology'southward structured and so that there's a single, overarching mystery that runs through the unabridged series, assuasive those characters to build and alter over time, simply at that place are still private mysteries that follow the traditional formula to the letter of the alphabet, with all the goofy fun that goes forth with it. In fact, as far as the individual mysteries get, Mystery Inc. embraces that goofiness and takes it to an entirely new level.

For instance, there'south an episode called "The Dragon's Clandestine," where the reveal of how the masked crook was fooling anybody into thinking he was a ghost who could levitate and shoot lightning out of his hands is explained past the fact that he has a jetpack and "homemade Tesla coils" strapped to his hands.

When this is revealed, the gang mutters "of course!" in unison, despite the fact that the existence of jetpacks was never mentioned before and is never mentioned again.

It'southward not exactly what yous'd call a "fair play" mystery, simply there are a couple of reasons why it doesn't have to be, and they boil downwardly to the thought that in the grand scheme of things, this "mystery" doesn't really matter. Very few of the individual mysteries do; they're meant to be fun, to give the gang entertaining things to do and react to. Even in the episode itself, the jetpack-powered "ghost" isn't the primary focus -- that would be the girl on the right in light-green and how she scoops upwards Shaggy later he breaks up with Velma. The crooks in masks are just the framework supporting the larger plot unfolding in the series, and that's the one mystery that does affair.

That structure, similar almost everything else in the show, is brilliant. Information technology allows the evidence to be funny and sinister and thrilling all at the same time, and sets upwardly a pattern where the lies are exposed and the bad guys brought to justice in a way that's harmless and fun, right upward until the terminal episode where that same construction takes a surprisingly heartbreaking plow.

It's about impossible to talk about what actually makes this show so peachy without getting into some MAJOR SPOILERS, then if you haven't seen the evidence, keep with caution.

The premise that gives the show its proper noun and sets it apart from the rest of the franchise is that Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby aren't the outset group of mystery solving teens in Crystal Cove. There was an original Mystery Incorporated that, complete with their ain talking beast sidekick, was up to some serious meddling 20 years ago -- a 1992 that looks suspiciously like the '50s. The problem? They all disappeared, never to be seen again, and no one knows why.

That's the thread that unites the series, and in terms of the grand metaphor that sits at the middle of Scooby-Doo -- kids defying their fearfulness in order to search for the truth -- information technology's done phenomenally well. The knowledge that something bad happened to people who were doing the exact same thing that they're doing at present adds an element of danger, particularly since they don't know what it was. It'due south the Terror of the Unknown that tin but exist fought past discovering the Truth.

And in this instance, the gang learns that the truth has its ain consequences.

There'southward another theme of the serial that's emphasized in Mystery Inc., too, the idea that it always comes downwardly to kids looking for truth and adults lying to them, something I've discussed earlier. Without neglect, near every adult in the show is lying to them (with the notable exception of legendary writer and even more legendary angry person Harlan Ellison, who appears every bit himself earlier in the series equally the show's tribute to celebrity guests of the past). Adults are either outright liars or complicit in some kind of charade, and because that this is a evidence that gives the gang parents for the first time, the consequences are often personal. Especially when the most powerful person in town turns out to be the biggest liar of all.

For me, it's actually interesting that the 2d half of the offset season comes to focus so much on Fred. He'southward always struck me equally sort of bland and boring, a paper-thin cutout atomic number 82 character put in because the Concerned Parents of the '60s wouldn't similar a scruffy crackpot as the central figure of a cartoon, fifty-fifty if he was the ane who owned a talking dog. But whether Mystery Inc. took that blandness every bit an opportunity to develop him afresh, or whether at that place was but a hint of depth in that location that I never noticed as a kid, he somehow ended upwardly being the most circuitous and emotionally affecting graphic symbol of Mystery Incorporated.

In the first half of the season, Fred is given a beloved of traps that comes off every bit almost equally i-annotation equally Shaggy being hungry all the time. It'south built for gags, giving him a funny obsession that so that he tin can exist cheerily oblivious to Daphne'due south professions of love because he so focused on loftier-tensile steel or the latest in spring-loaded net technology. But equally the show goes on, and it'south revealed piece by piece that Fred's father has told him that his mother abased their family unit, his obsession with keeping things from getting away from him takes on a whole new light. It shifts from something that's pure one-act to a joke with an undercurrent of genuine sadness that grows ever larger as the truth near his life starts to come out.

The series is total of some neat vocalization acting, including work from Lewis Black, Vivica Fox, Gary Cole, Patrick Warburton (who is contractually obligated to appear in every blithe serial produced in the 21st Century) as the cadre cast, but Welker deserves a special nod for his work, especially in the flavour finale. He's been voicing Fred for over xl years, and he still manages to deliver something new in this series, hitting the emotional notes that he needs to sell the scene.

The whole thing ends in a pretty nighttime identify, with Mystery Inc. disbanded, Shaggy packed off to war machine school and Fred'southward life in accented ruins, but it'south not the kind of darkness that feels cheap. Every bit strange as information technology might sound for a testify about a talking domestic dog debunking ghosts, it'south treated with a maturity and intelligence that but makes it skillful. Information technology earns its darkness, and shows it in the context of the framework it'south built and then that it has actual significant for the characters.

But even though that'due south where it ends -- and where information technology's going to stay until the 2nd season finally kicks off in May -- the DVD fix isn't all doom and gloom. In fact, it'due south got what might be the single funniest piece of the Scooby-Doo franchise e'er made: "The Mystery Solvers Guild State Finals. "

This affair is amazing. It's the but episode in the season that has absolutely zero to do with the overarching plot, but it is pure genius. The premise is that there'southward a competition among teenage meddlers, and when all the teenagers go kidnapped, Scooby has to squad upward with the other sidekicks from the diverse knockoffs of the Scooby-Doo formula that Hanna-Barbera produced after the show's initial success: Jabberjaw, Speed Buggy, Captain Caveman and The Funky Phantom.

It'southward the squad-up that I have wanted for years, and when y'all throw in the fact that information technology also involves the Foxy Brownish-esque Angel Dynamite and a bespectacled administrator who transforms herself into a difficult-driving, hell-raising vixen in the grand Russ Meyer tradition, it is merely the best. It'southward fifty-fifty an exception to my long-standing rule about the supernatural never existing in the universe of Scooby-Doo, because it's prepare up specifically to address that concern.

In short -- too tardily, I know -- it's a fantastic set up of episodes. The only trouble I have with it is one of format: Crystal Cove Expletive was released every bit "Part 2" of Flavour One, and while I generally prefer to get full seasons, fourteen episodes that y'all tin can pick up on for around $fifteen isn't a bad deal. The problem is that Part ane does not actually appear to be. Instead, the previous 12 episodes are nerveless on three other DVDs with a dissimilar manner of numbering, which means that the simply way you tin get the whole season is to buy Volume 1, Volume ii, Volume 3, and Part 2. It doesn't make a bit of sense.

Hopefully it'll all exist sorted out in time for everyone to catch upward before the second season, but the weirdness in format doesn't change the fact that the episodes within are the best Scooby-Doo has ever been. It's one of those rare things that manages to bring back something from your childhood and brand it even better than your memories, and that's no easy feat.

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Source: https://comicsalliance.com/best-scooby-doo/

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