My four year old is now obsessed by all things Scooby Doo, and I've been downloading various incarnations of the show from Amazon. It's astonishing how many reboots the show has been through.
The latest is called Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, and the main Scooby Doo wikipedia page describes it thusly:
The most recent revival series, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, premiered July 12th, 2010, with Matthew Lillard (the actor who played Shaggy in the live-action theatrical films) replacing Kasem as the voice of Shaggy; the rest of the cast was retained from What's New, Scooby-Doo?. The series, while still following the basic mystery-solving format of its predecessors, also adds a serial format in which each successive episode reveals a portion of a greater secret, as well as romantic relationships between the lead characters. The series, which is the first Scooby-Doo series to directly debut on cable television, is considered a "reboot" of the franchise, and as such, there are several continuity errors with the rest of the series, such as the change of location and different names for the parents of the lead characters.
This really does not do the show justice.
With the exception of Pixar (and I'm not counting Cars 2 as Pixar film) I usually hate animation that aims both at children and adults. I've just seen too many Dreamworks animals with wry expressions that merely exist to signal parents that the animators are in on the joke, a joke that is way too often one of those "Scary Movies" type non-jokes where people just laugh to show that they get that there is supposed to be a joke there.
But the new Scooby Doo is something else entirely. The animation is old school yet stylish in the post Batman kind of way. The continuity from episode to episode builds a really weird world that again retains some of the original series' innocence without succumbing to the Groundhog Day feel of the series (horror tropes that end up being robots and/or holograms, "if it weren't for you meddling kids," etc.). And the aimed-at-adults humor is fairly subversive, especially with regards to the romantic entanglements and Fred in particular, whose character is fleshed out for the first time in any of the series I've seen. Likewise the families of the main characters I've seen thus far are pretty hilariously dysfunctional.
As of episode 4, I'm completely unsure whether or not Fred is in fact gay. It's actually kind of sad, since the new Daphne is so hung up on him, but also some of the funniest sustained tropes I've seen in one of these shows. The tightrope they walk is maintaining the series' essential innocence while actually being entertaining by containing things like these romantic tensions.
Anyhow, I hope this reboot lasts. Joe Bob says check it out.
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