After three years of trying to reboot Scooby & Scrappy-Doo and Shaggy as their answer to the Three Stooges, Hanna-Barbera finally decided to bring back Daphne Blake to give the viewers a little girl power in The New Scooby & Scrappy-Doo Show.
Otherwise, it was more of the same nonsense of the previous three seasons, with two 11 minute shorts in each episode.
Following is the intro. Looks like Daphne got a driver's license while she was away.
Fred (Frank Welker) would return in the holiday episode, "The Nutcracker Scoob", while Velma would return much later. Even bringing Daphne back didn't bring all the fans back.
One wonders, though, if Daphne had considered getting busy, if ya will, with Shaggy behind Fred's back over three years. The series would undergo a title change to The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries the next year, before giving way to the short-lived 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo.
Rating: B-.
4 comments:
Even as a kid I'd always believed Fred & Daphne were meant to be together!
Dare I say I always imagined Shaggy & Velma were more than friends! Unlike the events of SDMI, however, things worked out better ;0)
The problems with the Scrappy period will still be the same no matter how many times it's reviewed: Mistake number one was breaking up the gang (bad enough Fred, Daphne and Velma were pushed further in the background when Scrappy was first introduced). To me the gang was never complete with only Shaggy (and later Daphne) as regulars. Mistake number two was not changing the formula in the right way. If only the gang has been rewritten to be a bit more mature and made to attract an slightly older audience (rather than skewing to a younger one with Scrappy's addition), perhaps these years would be less cringeworthy. It could have been a great way to transition those viewers who watched the earlier adventures and see that SD and the gang weren't just kid stuff.
I know the broadcast rules at the time would have prevented something like "Zombie Island" from being produced (I doubt any of the network suits at that time would have dared wrap their heads around THAT concept!), but I still think the gang's spooky mysteries were stale and needed to go in a different direction than the one ultimately chosen.
So true, but it seems network suits were a little too queasy about thinking outside the box back then.
@Marshallsify: Not interested in the petition.
@magicdog: all good points
On another note, I always thought Daphne, Shaggy and Fred had driver's licenses in the older shows...
Velma meanwhile, I always thought had a permit, and then by The Scooby-Doo Show, had gotten her actual license...
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