What's New Scooby-Doo?
Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is probably the biggest animated surprise I've seen in recent years. Before watching it I would have never thought there was a way of recreating these characters in a new, interesting way. The show managed to not only breath new life in to archetypal characters everyone already knows by heart, but also manages to put them in engaging stories and develop them as characters. I cared about the characters in Mystery Incorporated, and wanted to know how they'd get through things. Pretty impressive given this is the Scooby gang we're talking about.
I'm 20 years old now, and I'm not a hardcore Scooby fan. Of course I loved the Hanna-Barbera cartoons when I was a child, but they didn't exactly have incredible lasting power as I got older. Various other attempts to revise the characters likewise didn't impress me much either. 2002's "What's New Scooby-Doo?" tried updating the stories, and character designs for modern viewers but fell flat,...
Why not Blu-Ray?
I was pleasantly surprised with Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated when it debuted on the Cartoon Network. The clever writing paid homage to the original series and much of the cartoon's long history. We even saw glimpses of other vintage Hanna Barbera cartoons pop up now and then. The animation style of the characters is a little too stylistic for my taste, being a bit too angular but it is nice to see them in their original clothes. The backgrounds are bright and a bit impressionistic but they work well and add greatly to the artistic feel of the series.
Unfortunately much of this artistry is greatly diminished on standard definition DVD. These brilliant colors and great animation scream for Blu-Ray presentation. As a long time collector of nearly every Scooby presentation from Warner Brothers, I struggled to put off buying the piecemeal release of this iteration of the franchise but succumbed eventually. Now we have a new release of the first season in a complete package, but...
New Life for an old show
I think this was a show written for the long time fans. There's definitely more character development and some adult themes, but my 3 year old does fine with the show. I like that there is now a story arc and character development. The mysteries are, as expected not terribly hard to solve for an adult, but the sheer number of voice talents from Harlan Ellison, George Takei, Lewis Black, Vivica A. Fox, Mark Hamill and Patrick Warburton and others. This isn't just a cheap thrown together show. Everything seems to have been fairly well thought out and plotted, keeping to the spirit of the original series while adding just a bit more meat to the story. It makes the series and characters seem so much more than 2 dimensional cartoons. I'm looking forward to seeing season 2.
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