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FotW: SDMI - Beware the Beast from Below

Welcome to Freak of the Week, where every Sunday I tackle something Non-Skylanders since that series has a billion characters I need to give their own individual reviews. Fotw is my way to get more content out on a decent schedule, tackling the Monsters, Villains, and Foes who take turns every week to harass the Hero of their specific media.

For these first few months we'll be covering a series dear to my heart, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated. Every episode covers a crook who, for reasons that will become known eventually, decides that the best way to successfully commit a crime is to dress up as a giant crab or Cthulhu while doing it. Luckily a gang of budding stoners and college dropouts are there to solve the mystery and do the job the police are too lazy to do themselves.

Points to realism.

Let's begin with our introduction episode, and first baddie, The Slime Mutant!

Backstory: Sewer Workers working underneath the town of Crystal Cove knock down a wall revealing a hidden cavern system that contains barrels of unknown, radioactive material. These caverns seem to run underneath the entire town and will come back in several episodes holding their own mysteries.

The Sewer Workers, playing into their roles as the pre-intro horror movie victims they are, decide to pop open one of these barrels to investigate further. This seemingly unleashes a mutant made of radioactive slime, who thanks their help by cocooning them in vibrant green goo.

Please appreciate how horrific these cocooned victims look and remember this when we get to the reveal.

Design: The Slime Mutant is a humanoid creature with exaggerated human anatomy whose skin is see-though. It's covered in a coating of iridescent green slime and has a muscular body type with a cinched waist. Its skull has needle-like fangs and glowing red pupils in its empty eye sockets.

While most of the anatomy we see through its slimy epidermis is bone, similar to a cartoon x-ray gag, some of its skeleton still retains muscle tissue around limbs, neck and lower jaw which gives the monster a really cool appearance reminiscent of someone who's been half-melted in cartoon acid. The muscles also seem to exist as a way to explain how the creature moves, as its body lacks the full viscous stretchability most slimes have. It instead lumbers around like a zombie, with muscle tissue remaining in places where they'd be needed for movement. This attention to detail is especially fun when you realize who the culprit is and why they'd include that detail.

Combined with the show's sharp art style, it turns a pretty simple creature concept into an iconic new monster. Its powers include the ability to petrify, and also mummify(?), victims in its green slime - which it blasts from its palms like a Dragonball character.

Reveal: Mystery Incorporated is hailed as one of the best interpretations of Scooby-Doo, taking the concept and allowing its characters to exist in a setting that changes every episode as it ditches the episodic formular of past series for a story-driven reboot with multiple arcs and an overarching mystery each season. It's still Scooby-Doo however, so every episode follows the same formula more or less.

You get two or three suspects (oftentimes just additional named side characters tied to the plot of this episode), whoever the gang settles on prematurely as the culprit is innocent, and the gang traps the crook and unmasks them at the end of the episode.

Our first suspect is Franklin Fruitmeir, a strange clown man who recently moved into town to sell his dessert product, which is neither ice cream nor gelatin, but something else entirely. Scooby ends up tasting the slime mutant's goo and discovers that its ooze is not radioactive waste, but radioactive frozen treats.

One can only imagine what it does to your insides if getting covered in the stuff turns you into a pickled corpse.

We never really get to see what happens to the sewer workers in this episode, so I assume they died.

Our first culprit is Professor Emmanuel Raffalo, who worked as a science teacher at the gang's school. Turns out that he was going to use the caverns to dig under Crystal Cover bank to rob it - framing Fruitmeir for the crime by using the dessert product in his scheme.

Yes, it is because a teacher's salary isn't cutting it anymore.

5/5 -Great Start with a unique execution of a classic monster, who doesn't love slimes?