Scooby-Doo: Where Are You?
The Complete Third Season

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

In the 1970’s, children’s television guidelines had become so strict that only the most inoffensive programming made it on Saturday morning TV. Animation studio Hanna-Barbera had by now created a successful formula and dominated the coveted children’s slot on ABC with Hanna-Barbara package shows, like The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour and its successor, Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics.

Since 1976, The Scooby-Doo Show proved to be the most popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the bunch. As a result, ABC decided to air the upcoming third season of episodes in the fall of 1978, under its original CBS series title, Scooby-Doo: Where Are You?, earlier in the morning.

However, using the revived format to air the new Scooby-Doo Show episodes ended up confusing children and turned disastrous. By mid-season, ABC moved the new episodes to air as the third season of the show format on the new package show that had premiered on the network around the same time, titled Scooby’s All-Stars. These episodes are now repackaged, on the box anyway, as Scooby-Doo: Where Are You?: The Complete Third Season, now available on DVD.

The following episodes in this set, are in actuality, the third season of The Scooby-Doo Show, which became the third Scooby-Doo series that premiered in the late 1970’s and was the first to air on ABC. While it remained largely unchanged from the previous series, it had occasional appearances of a rather gimmicky new character, which was Scooby’s country cousin, the rather obviously named Scooby-Dum.

However, by the third season here, the character thankfully doesn’t appear and the series is the closest to its original format since the original Where Are You?. While the episodes featured are still decent enough, the Scooby-Doo formula had grown tired by this point.

It also must be noted that this DVD set is rather clumsily packaged. The two discs of 16 episodes have the second double-sided disc piled on each other’s sides on top of the first.

The DVD’s picture quality is in the 1:33:1 full-screen aspect ratio of the syndicated TV broadcasts. The DVD also contains, as a bonus, the featurette Hanna-Barbera: From H To B. It features great interviews with the surviving members of the famed animation studio’s creative team, mostly talking about working with the studio’s founders, who also appear in a vintage clip.

All in all, while the episodes here proved that The Scooby-Doo Show was still fun to watch due to its familiarity, the formula had worn beyond thin by this point. It lacks the freshness of Where Are You or the campy nostalgia of the hour-long, guest-star-laden second series The Scooby-Doo Movies.

While die-hard Scooby fans will be thrilled with this set, casual fans should simply pick up the first and second season DVD, which contains the original Scooby-Doo: Where Are You? series in its entirety. A season DVD set of Scooby-Doo Movies would also be a more worthy purchase as well, if it was ever released.

Season Grade: B-
Special Features Grade: B-
Overall Grade: B-