What’s New Scooby Doo?
- The Complete Third Season

Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Almost inexplicably, Scooby-Doo has proven to the present day to be famed cartoon studio Hanna-Barbera’s most enduring franchise. It’s endured in recent years through the success of annual straight-to-video movies and Cartoon Network’s continued airing of Scooby-Doo series past and present.

In the response to the success of the live-action Hollywood film adaptations of the series, Hanna-Barbera created the first new Scooby-Doo TV series in over 10 years. The result is What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, of which the third and final season is now available on DVD.

The series continues its time-tested formulaic premise. Teenage sleuths Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy, along with their dog Scooby-Doo, drive around in their van dubbed “The Mystery Machine”. They solve mysteries involving would-be ghosts and monsters that are almost always revealed to be costumed perpetrators.

What’s New is the first Scooby-Doo TV series since 1988-1991’s comically kid-sized A Pup Named Scooby-Doo to feature the entire cast. It’s also the first since the original Scooby-Doo And Scrappy-Doo series in 1979 to feature them in their original form.

What’s New continues to be little more than a modernized version of the original 1969-1971 series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? As such, the series continues to be hardly much beyond gimmicky and cosmetic variation of the same old formula.

They are relatively distracting and flat and add little to the by-now cheap, flimsy, and absolutely stale series. However, on the plus side, the cameos this time out are fairly interesting, including Rachel MacFarlane from American Dad and sister of Seth MacFarlane, the creator of that show and Family Guy. The other more interesting cameos include Married…With Children’s David Faustino, Eddie Deezen of the movie adaptation of Grease, figure skating star Tara Lapinski, and former talk show host Arsenio Hall.

The DVD’s picture quality is in the 1:33:1 full-screen aspect ratio of the original television broadcasts, with the sound quality in standard Dolby Surround Stereo. There are also a few special features included in the DVD as well.

The first special feature is a special holiday-themed episode of the series that aired back during the first season titled “A Scooby-Doo Christmas”. This bonus episode should have been included with the first season and is fairly by-the-book. Rounding out the special features is a rather lame trivia featurette hosted by an incredibly terrible host named Doug McSwagger called “Do You Know Your Scooby?”, which is so incredibly bad that even children will get very little out of it.

All in all, What’s New Scooby Doo?: The Complete Third Season doesn’t contain anything overtly embarrassing and is tolerable enough for its modern-day child audience. However, the seemingly endless incarnations of