#peregoy | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

scooby-review · 3 months ago

Text

Scooby Doo Where are You? S2 E1-E4

1. Nowhere to Hyde

Nowhere to Hyde kicks off season two of Where are You? in a spectacularly mediocre way. This episode is just fine to me, it doesn’t really do much to stand out against the previous seasons episodes, likely oding to this season releasing in September of the same year the finale of season one aired. However, there are some changes to the previous season, which I'll mention as they arise.

The episode follows the gang encountering a fabled jewel thief, The Ghost of Mr Hyde, and latter running into Dr Jeykll, where he admits to being afraid he is turning into the ghost of his father’s infamous dark reflection.

The first big change for the series is the different background style. Part of what gave the first season its charm and gothic aesthetic were the gorgeous backgrounds by Walt Peregoy, who defined what the show looked and felt like. Strangely, it’s difficult to find too much information about the artworks, but I believe he painted all the first seasons, and then this season had other background artists painting them. Stylistically, they are a more blatant acrylic style, with some locations harkening back to the originals more than others. Ultimately, these paintings are still great, even if it took me a while to adjust to the change. Within this episode I especially love the crypt-like laboratory, which odes to the gothic aesthetics of Frankenstein and of course, Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde.

This season also sees the introduction of new writers, with a trio taking on the reigns to write the batch of eight episodes. I’m still unsure how I feel about this writing style, which is incredibly close to the original. I think as far as the stories go, they are far tighter, again similarly written, almost exactly so, but you can tell the differences in how they write, such as the frequent use of locations like the malt shop and beach as ways of initiating the mysteries and framing the episodes. I think the mysteries are mostly better written here, at least when I watched this one I wrote it as being more of a fluid story! However, I prefer season one by a mile, mostly coming down to how bland a lot of these characters and locations feel. I’ll elaborate on those throughout the season, but I found myself somewhat bored while watching a handful of these episodes, and so I wonder if the writing is better or more streamlined? When researching other people’s thoughts I saw a lot of people saying they preferred season one, but two did have a lot of defenders! In fact, people were pretty split on the topic! One of the main reasons people love season two however, are the chases, which I’ll expand on soon.

I would also say that the animation changes a bit here, or at least I noticed the animation looking different. Hanna Barbera cartoons look cheap, they feel cheap, yet they also harness this excellently. There’s a certain charm to it when watching back much after it was released, everything about this season especially feels of the time, for better or worse, but I find the animation has taken a step up in how fluid it is! I think it looks worse. I love this cheap looking style, it’s so fun to see how even on such a small budget, the animations can be made, they can be fun to look at and love and labour was poured into these! But this upgrade comes without a lot of necessities to back it up, therefore, characters moving more isn’t always a positive thing, it simply makes the animation stand out more, causing the characters to go off model even more. It’s whatever, but it’s worth pointing out.

But all that can be said about the entire season, this episode itself is entirely just fine.

The villain’s design is kind of whatever to me; creating a good looking Mr. Hyde is something rarely done well I feel. The entire basis of his character is being human evil, this suppressed piece of ourselves we hide from the world, however, this guy is just a green ghoul. To be fair, I do like that he is the ghost of Mr. Hyde, like the actual character, with the culprit being the son of Dr. Jekyll, also called Dr Jeykll. It’s funny! And it’s the only part of this entirely boring design that I enjoy. Returning to the writing quickly, this is maybe the best mystery of the season, with the writers framing Helga, the maid, as being the villain, constantly setting up clues alluding to her, subverting your expectations! It’s great and makes the episode more enjoyable to watch.

Plus, I like Shaggy in this one. In the opening we see him about to eat his food, before Scooby steals it, where he grows furious, before melting and hugging Scooby happily. It’s the best encapsulation of their relationship in this iteration. When I was younger, I used to think Shaggy could be overly mean to Scooby here, but looking at it in a vacuum, their relationship is instead just slightly different, he isn’t mean or malicious, just less willing to accept all his antics. I like it!

Of course, this all leads to what season two is best known for: their chase scenes. Backed to bubblegum pop inspired by the British Invasion, in seven of the eight episodes we see the gang chased by the villains, wacky hijinks ensue. Consistently, these are the best parts of the episode, it makes them come to life in such a great way! Although these would only later return many, many series down the line, I do love them! Their purpose was likely just to sell an album of bubblegum pop - hell, The Archie’s were only a band to make money for the studios, and most bubblegum pop is corporately churned out behind animated faces or characters to sell to early teens. However, it’s fun, and I like it a lot!

Overall, just a whatever episode! It’s not bad, but it’s forgettable and weak against some of the episodes of last season that were poorly written and kind of wonky! But as is, it’s okay!

2. Mystery Mask Mix-Up

I didn’t want to include everything in the previous episode, but I am going to start this one negatively again. God, the intro to this one sucks. Not the cover of the theme song, that’s all good! But the way it’s edited is awful. Like it’s really bad.

Rather than cut a new intro, they edit the previous one, which makes sense! However, they include the old intro’s skeleton, throwing still images of the new villains over the old one’s. No joke, there’s a point where Scooby runs into Charlie the Robot, the original intro then pans up to his face. Here, he runs into Charlie’s legs, the camera starts panning up, and instead there’s a still image of the Hawiian Medicine Man. Like, it’s awful man. Sometimes it works fine, but other times it’s egregiously bad, only harbouring a little charm as a result of this! As a child it used to creep me out whenever this one came on, it just felt wrong and off somehow.

Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t win me over too much either! I think I prefer the previous episode.

This episode follows the gang buying a mask in Chinatown, only to learn it’s supposedly haunted, with Daphne subsequently kidnapped by The Scare Pair.

Just reading that the characters enter Chinatown in an episode aired in the 70s should be enough to tell you what happens. It’s impossible to return to the mindset of the children watching these, unaware of the way the material is depicting people! I never try to return to these periods of time to understand what it would have been like to watch, because I’m sitting, streaming this on my laptop at midnight in 2024. Without having been there, I cannot return to this place, and honestly, that’s a good thing! This episode made me uncomfortable, it simply made viewing what would have otherwise been a fun episode frustrating! We see this a lot throughout the series, especially with Native American characters, and trying to remove the knowledge that this is poor is simply irresponsible and not how I enjoy watching art! It’s there, and sometimes it’s still entirely possible to enjoy something despite its themes and characters reflecting poorly, however, in this case, very little was left for me to enjoy regardless!

While I do enjoy the setting, I’m very lukewarm on the villains, The Scare Pair are the more interesting of the two, their designs a simplistic black robe with a white mask, but the simplicity works for them; they act like many other silent, hulking villains, although these ones in particular are down to murder, which is always fun the rare time it’s done! They are completely fine, I don't feel too positive or negative about them!

I feel similarly about their leader, The Ghost of Zen Tuo, who receives far less screen time than the others. His white and lime green robe is striking against both the scare pair and his own golden mask, an intricate design that automatically signals his place in the hierarchy against the pair perfectly - he is more defined through his appearance, while the others are a nameless pair of followers. Again, he’s violent and has a blood thirst to him, but beyond this i don’t get loads from this set of villains!

This episode's chase, again, the most consistent aspect of this season to me, is a car chase, which is so unique and not something we see again this season! I love them spicing up the formula already!

Another great aspect of this episode is the aforementioned peril the characters are placed in! It makes this scenario feel so perilous and places a high level of importance upon the masks! This entire episode parallels the 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu, and so I imagine it was used as inspiration, possibly leading to this feeling and tone.

Also, there was a great POV shot in here which was crazy to me.

Overall, it’s about the same level as the previous episode! Just kind of whatever, with a few great elements constantly bogged down by all its tedious aspects. While watching I actually had a flashback to watching it on Cartoon Network or Boomerang (RIP) as a child! I think I enjoyed it more then? But still, it was evidently a forgettable episode!

However both episodes so far have had mouse jokes so maybe this season is better than the last.

3. Scooby’s Night With a Frozen Fright

Unfortunately, again, the negativity doesn’t end here (I promise the following episode is wholly positive!) because I found this to be one of the worst episodes of the series.

Simply, I found this one super boring! Despite all my notes being positive here, I took less than a quarter of my usual notes, because ultimately I had so little to say! I’ll focus on the positives here, because most of the negatives are just that I was super bored by this one, and there’s not too much more I can elaborate on there.

The episode follows the gang on a beach where Shaggy reels in a frozen caveman. Upon handing him in, they soon learn the ice has melted, and the caveman is gone.

I’ll rattle through all the positives first, and then end on the villain and briefly, the setting.

There’s a mouse in this one, so that’s a good start.

We see both the malt shop and the beach in this episode, two locations they love using this season and that I love seeing them use! Both are able to elevate the gangs relationship and create a stronger bond between them, giving a greater feeling of their relationship and specific friendships.

I also love the chase again too! They’re so dynamic and gaggy, they lean so much into the best slapstick that the show has to offer, and the bubblegum pop sound is something I’ve come to love and be really fascinated by recently! Even if I wouldn’t listen to any in my spare time, God do I find it interesting!

Okay I’m now realising the rest of my notes are about Tusk because Scooby and Shaggy pretend they’re seals at one point, and so I found the parallel funny.

The rest of the episode feels muddy if not boring, such as the gang being afraid of one of the scientists talking to a dolphin and fear for their lives when a room they’re in starts having large ice cubes funnelled into it.

The villain is an archetype I can’t say I’m too interested in! I just find them super uninteresting, always used to tell the same slew of jokes and ultimately not doing anything interesting! This guys monster design is just a man from the past who looks incredibly human, wearing only a single garment of clothing. It makes his design uninteresting and I just don’t care for this kind of character! In searching whether or not there’s another caveman villain, it’s not too clear but it seems like there’s not! Which is all good with me!

The setting here is oceanland, which with a more interesting villain could have stood out way more! But as is, I hope we see it again, this one just didn’t leave too much of a mark.

Not a great episode! I never felt invested in anything going on here, but even in the worst episodes, there’s still something I like! I think I’ve disliked the past three as a result of their central concepts feeling far less inspired than season one, or maybe just doing less for me! I think there’s two more episodes which I really dislike in this season, and they come from a similar place of finding their villains very drear, and I think these episodes lack creativity in where their plots go! They are tighter written, but that only highlights the flaws of the series current structure, which is all a result of budget.

But I cannot wait for the next episode.

4. Jeepers, it’s the Creeper

This episode follows the gang heading to a school barn dance; although all appears fine, they soon find the dance interrupted by The Creeper.

This episode is the second highest rated episode on IMDB and it deserves all the praise it gets! This shows the best of what the season two writers can do, again, when the monsters, settings and mysteries are truly pushed.

I think most love this episode as a result of its great villain, The Creeper. Inspired by the jazz song “Jeepers Creepers”, and possibly a character from Dr Terror's House of Horrors, the villain is difficult to describe, he’s unique in what he is, being a hunchbacked zombie-like creature. He’s human enough, in fact, if his skin weren’t green, he could easily be human, which is a criticism I had of Elias Kingston, but I think this design is way more interesting, the theming of colours is perfect, the greens complement each other perfectly, but the reddish brown hair grounds the earthy tones of the design. His expression is also evocative of a zombie, it again makes him stand out uniquely where a character like Elias falls for me.

Also! The first ever computer virus was called The Creeper, named after the villain from this episode.

Honestly, I like the Creeper but don’t love him! He’s a good villain but isn’t in my top ten, and not even my favourite of this season, yet the episode works so well because of the creativity he represents. Sure, we’ve had a fun variation of settings before, but here it’s pushed to its limit, it’s so much more creative than the gang visiting Chinatown because they use it to introduce a larger world, create a feeling of isolation and despair and using the setting as a vehicle for its gags, whereas Chinatown is used to tell a series of racist jokes before leaving it to sit away from the bustling streets and in a closed temple.

I adore the barn sequence, where we see the gang dancing alongside their classmates, it’s so fun to see this world expanded even if these nameless characters feel like background characters from something like The Archies, although I couldn’t confirm anything about their whereabouts - very little concept art for the series is readily available! Regardless, it’s so fun to watch, and I love Velma and Shaggy’s relationship a lot generally, but they excel here!

After the party goers notice The Creeper, Fred suggests they move the dance to the malt shop. I love this authority he shows and how popular he appears against his peers! This leads into what’s likely my favourite chase scene, maybe with a single exception, showing the gang running through the countryside, using this location to show hen houses and giving Scooby a chick for the rest of the episode as well as having the gang in horse wagons. It’s just so fun to watch!

Most of my favourite episodes balance the series’ sometimes unique sense of humour with fun horror aesthetics, a great villain, character interactions and setting. This episode is in my top ten, yet it doesn’t make me laugh all too much! Yet it’s delightfully fun, something that I’ve missed so far this season!

Although, my favourite joke in the episode has to be when Scooby and Shaggy flee from The Creeper across a bridge, entering a cave where they encounter the hermit of the hills. He never returns after this sequence where he offers them his food, his purpose feels more so geared towards being an inconsequential suspect, showing off the writer's enjoyment of framing one character before revealing another, again. Yet, I find him so funny - he appears out of nowhere, he’s got such a sweet design and personality, he’s my favourite side character for sure, I adore this man.

I also love the running plot thread in this episode of Scooby just having a chick following him throughout. This culminates in him returning this little chicken to his mother, where the episode ends with more eggs hatching and them flocking to Scooby.

What a great episode to end on! It deserves the popularity it has, and I love the legacy it’s left behind through the creation of the virus, alongside his reappearance in the Mystery Incorporated episode The Legend of Alice May, which is great!

Love this one!

Episode Ranking:

Jeepers, it’s the Creeper

Nowhere to Hyde

Mystery Mask Mix-Up

Scooby’s Night with a Frozen Fright

Villain Ranking:

The Creeper

The Scare Pair

Ghost of Zen Tuo

Ghost of Dr Jeykll

Caveman