What's New, Scooby-Doo? - The Complete First Season

Buy This Item What's New, Scooby-Doo? - The Complete First Season by WB Television Network, The  Available from Amazon  $10.99  on 11-14-2008     Clever sleuthing has led you to treasure: the very first season of What's New Scooby-Doo? Enjoy all 13 episodes of spoofy hilarity and mystery with the crime-busting gang --from scary snowboarding in There's No Creature Like Snow Creature to the season finale The Unnatural, with the voices of real-life baseball greats Mike Piazza and Luis Santiago. As Scooby-Doo fans know, popular stars often lend their vocal talents in such takeoffs as Riva Ras Regas (co-starring teen pop singer Lindsay Pagano) and American pop idol JC Chasez from super group *NSYNC. But everyone knows who the biggest heartthrob of the show is reallywho else? Scooby-Doo! Reader Reviews Imagine you were a career biologist in your 30s or 40s. A general interest magazine asks you to rewrite a long bio report you cranked out in the middle of seventh grade on a typewriter while doing stuff for your other six or seven classes. How much will you be able to improve on the original report now that you're wittier; know more about the subject and have a good gauge of what the general public knows of the subject; will be working on a laptop; have access to noted, interesting people in and around your field for interviews on the subject? That's why, just considering it as entertainment, What's New, Scooby Doo? dusts the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? and The New Scooby Doo Movies from 1972-73. This isn't some Gen Y kid engaging in presentism. I'm a Gen Xer who was in the first generation to grow up watching the original Scoobies on Saturday mornings. Fine enough entertainment for most of us, though it was a weakly-animated, formulaic product of the Hanna-Barbera made-for-TV assembly line. Our standards were pretty low at the time. In doing the update, the current creators did the job that some of the Scooby Doo movies from the 1990s began. They fleshed out the characters, giving them backstory, interests, families. Velma (voiced by "Facts of Life" star Mindy Cohn) is a brilliant scientist with the kind of "smart girl" wit we always suspected she had. We find out where Fred's from and even what he can bench. Daphne was moved from the Danger Prone Daphne of the original toward being a resourceful, style-conscious Buffy the Vampire Slayer-type. (Coincidentlaly, Sarah Michelle Gellar, TV's Buffy, played Daphne in the two live-action Scooby Doo movies, and Buffy's pals called themselves "The Scooby Gang."). Shaggy, still voiced by Casey Kasem, and Scooby still are forever hungry and scared, but even Shaggy gets a few interests we didn't know he had before. The animation, undoubtedly assisted by better technology, isn't movie studio animation level, but is superior to the stiff stuff of the original. The plotting is improved. For example, whether the gang is in Egypt or Las Vegas, there's a reason they're there. Most of all, there's a willingness to poke fun at pop culture, each other, themselves and the original Scooby formula while still following it. Like much of the best animation, the humor works on the kid level and on the adult level. Because of balkanized TV viewing and the varying circumstances of viewing -- some on DVD, some on Boomerang, some at night, some during the day -- it's doubtful future generations will consider this version of Scooby Doo as a piece of bonding, iconic nostalgia that Gen Xers consider the original. It'll just have to settle for being much better.

What's New, Scooby-Doo? - The Complete First Season Available from Amazon Price: $10.99 Updated on 11-14-2008.

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