Scooby fans I really didn't think i'd be making this review today (because I planned to make it this weekend) but here we are the scooby franchise has spawned alot of TV shows and when I say alot I really mean it heck there even working on a new show altho i'm not sure what there calling it but here is my review of the franchises second incarnation The New Scooby-Doo Movies.
Honestly when it comes to the plot it's the exact same as Where Are You so if you've seen any episode of Scooby-Doo then you pretty much no the plot to this series. There's a case to be made for "if it ain't broke don't fix it" but with this series you can see a pattern coming out heck you can even argue that you start to see a pattern in Where Are You but it's something that does work so I can't be two harsh on them for sticking to what works.
Starring as The Mystery Inc crew are the late Don Messick as Scooby-Doo , the late Casey Kasem as Shaggy Rogers , Nicole Jaffe as Velma Dinkley , the late Heather North as Daphne Blake and the legend that is Frank Welker as Fred Jones. Yeah it really is sad that more then half of the main cast for this particular series is sadly no longer with us but that said some of the line delivery's in this show aren't that good there's a lot of awkward pauses between sentences.
This was the last time that Velma was played by Nicole as she chose to retire from acting and she later started up for own hollywood agency but she did return to play Velma in the films Scooby-Doo! and the Legend of the Vampire and Scooby-Doo! and the Monster of Mexico for me she is the best Velma but I do respect her choice to stop playing the character.
This show was animated by Hanna-Barbera so you'd think that being animated by such a prestigious studio as well as being directed by the famous pair would mean that there would be no animation errors but sadly that's a huge mega ultra no because there's a lot of animation errors in this series characters disappear and reappear , Velma's glasses get colored white for some reason and batman's signal gets an unwanted color change.
My personal favorite error tho occurs in the very first episode "Ghastly Ghost Town" the gang and the Three Stooges notice that Velma is missing but who should walk right by WITH them as they go looking for her but Velma herself that one scene had me yelling "she's right there you don't need to look for her" how a huge error like that made it past everyone I don't know but it doesn't end there as a few scenes later we then cut to Velma going missing.
One thing that this show I guess is famous for is it's guest stars this whole series was built around the fact that there would be a new guest star in every episode and I have to say that while some of them do feel natural it is conceivable that the gang would into Batman & Robin but how in the heck would you run into the Harlem Globetrotters not once but twice and how in the heck would you run into The Addams Family.
Now what really did shock me was the fact that alot of these celebrities were voiced by themselves those include Don Adams , Sonny & Cher , Tim Conway and the late Jonathan Winters and if your a Star Wars fan Luke Skywalker appears in an episode but of course alot of the guest characters died some time prior so they did get alot of impersonators and I have to say they did a good job since alot of them do sound like there real life counterparts altho for some reason they recast Batman & Robin which makes no sense to me since the Batman and Robin in this show reference a character made for the 60's show so why not just bring in Adam West and Burt Ward.
I have to admit tho when I was a kid the Robot Gunslinger from the first episode used to scare the heck out of me and yet when I see him now all I can think of is The Man In Black from HBO'S Westworld and I have no idea why that is maybe it's because like The Man In Black he's dressed in a black coat and hat maybe.
This franchise is most well known for it's mysteries and I have to say that the mysteries in this series are very mixed for me some are pretty easy to solve but then you get a few that are really freaking hard to solve and I don't mean hard for a little kid to solve I mean hard for an adult to solve there's no middle ground with this show when it comes to the mysteries it's one way or the other.
This show ran from September 9th 1972 to October 27th 1973 and the reason why this has the word movies attached to it is because unlike the previous series each episode of this series is forty five minuets in length and that's both a good and bad it's good because it means we get more chances to work out who did it but it's bad because it drags out the pacing at times and I honestly think any Scooby show should be no more then twenty two minuets total.
One of the things that this show has going for it is it's theme song it's catchy as hell heck on more then one accusation I found my self singing along to it that's how good it is and for a show that can get pretty creepy it's a very upbeat song and the visuals make the show more epic then it really is.
Sadly tho there will not a complete series release of this series any time soon because of the fact that there conflicts with some of the guest stars it's sad really because this show is really good and it does deserve a complete series release but we shouldn't really hold our breaths but we can hope that it will happen one day.
Overall this isn't the worst series in the franchise but it's also not the franchise at it's best this was made at a time when Scooby-Doo was really popular and it shows because of the fact it feels like the team aren't putting in there best efforts so with all that in mind this series gets a 6 out of 10 from me.