A charming little cartoon.
While many Scooby fans will disagree with me, I have a real fondness for the Scrappy-Doo! era. What I love about this era is that the storylines were not simply confined to mysteries and bad guys in masks. While that formula works and I love it just as much as anybody, there us something nice about seeing what Scooby and Shaggy do when they don't have to figure out who done it.
In this episode Scooby, Shaggy and Scrappy visit a history museum and get locked in there overnight. The three fall asleep and we see their history influenced dreams. Shaggy dreams that he is Benjamin Franklin, Scrappy dreams that he is fighting the dreaded Red Baron (who ever heard of a dog fighting the Red Baron?) and Scooby dreams he is back in caveman times.
With a runtime of eight minutes each dream is just a few brief gags. However these gags work quite well. This may not be a laugh out loud cartoon but it certainly made me smile. All the segments are appropriately pure cartoon silliness. The basic premise is a very charming one and it is handled pretty darn well.
Yeah, it is a cute sleepy little story. Even though on one hand, you can understand people thinking this is the lowest point in Scooby's career, because not only do many of them hate Scrappy and think he ruined everything, but the original mystery and the rest of the gang were gone, and the insult to injury being that Scooby was even second billed to someone else (Richie Rich).
ReplyDeleteBut as I always argue, the mystery format need to be given a break, and once it was, it came back in a few years with fresh new ideas, in a nice streamlined form.
But prior to Scrappy, the mysteries had become all about Shaggy and Scooby and their chase antics (sometimes they spent the entire episode separate), and here, it is all chase, and they are still their same selves. It doesn't pretend to be a serious mystery anymore, and Scrappy is the nice contrast to their cowardice (compared to Fred and the girls, who just got impatient with them, as they stayed togerher and usually got the less dangerous situations).
The background score also goes well with these new adventures. So overall, they are prettty nice (and are like classic cartoons in some respect), and should be given a chance.
All good points. I strongly agree.
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