I haven't seen any Scooby Doo cartoons since I watched some of the feature length animations made in the 1990s, but I was lured into this one by references to Frankenstein Junior and The Herculoids on the DVD cover (wasted on most U.K. purchasers, to whom these characters are virtually unknown, unless they are incurable fanboys or cult TV nerds like me). I doubt the number of people who have heard of the Herculoids or remember Frankenstein Junior and the Impossibles from the late '60's in Blighty run to three figures. Anyhow, this is all a bit of a letdown, as these characters are represented purely by a hot air balloon of Frankie and an amusing sequence when Freddy, Daphne and Velma dress up as three of the Herculoids to get into the rather sparsely attended Comic Convention where this particular adventure takes place (I wasn't really expecting the originals to be shoehorned into the format, but still...). There are numerous background gags involving other H-B characters, and it's all good fun for freeze-framing fans, although South Park did it first and better with Imaginationland.
Warners, like Paramount with Star Trek, are very good at biting the hand that feeds them, and the rest of the cameos by obscure 1960s characters are represented by ill-fitting costumes worn by overweight and shabby convention-goers. These caricatures are quite funny and on-the-nose, and provide most of the fun in this routine yarn, which revolves around Scooby and Shaggy being fans of Dynomutt and the Blue Falcon, a sort of robot Scooby clone and deliberately bland super-hero from what Jimmy Carr memorably termed "the Scrappy-Doo years", that awful dead period of the 1970s and 1980s pre-Simpsons and Cartoon Network, when virtually all animated cartoons were unwatchable.
Fanboy writers Marly Halpern-Graser and Michael Ryan, and director Michael Goguen, all with much similar fare behind them, litter the background with posters and sight gags recalling all the obscure Hanna-Barbera creations of the 1960s I love, and appear to feel the same way I and many of my generation do about the vicious and nasty versions of our childhood heroes presently being offered to today's deprived youth. Ironically, while successfully making their point, they've produced a film far more cynical than all the episodes of Family Guy and South Park combined, in which every character outside the regular cast is bitter and twisted and phoney. Star Trek fans and Comic Convention attendees have been so cruelly (and often accurately) lampooned over the last two decades that they must have the hides of rhinos to still be showing up at these things.
What's left to say? Matthew Lillard's Shaggy is as pitch perfect as ever, but I'm not so sure about the new audible Scooby Doo, who is much more coherent than he used to be. When did that happen? It's not dull, and the animation is fine (the green goo sequence is particularly well done, and a long way from when the characters simply ran from left to right), but the welcome critique of the ludicrous Batman situation, whereby the classic and most popular version of the character from the '60s is being deliberately sat on while Warners persist with endless reboots of the one who dares not even speak his name (while providing a bonanza for bootleggers as the most pirated TV series in history) will obviously go over the heads of the kids... and may even have gone over the heads of the Warners suits! Jeff Bennett provides such a perfect imitation of Adam West that I actually assumed it was him doing the voice--not unreasonable, as he's played similar roles on numerous other occasions merrily sending himself up. And Billy West of Futurama does a mean Paul Lynde impersonation!
