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STUDIO: Warner Bros.
MSRP: $44.98
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 758 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Eerie Mystery Of Scooby-Doo And Dynomutt’s History featurette – the history of both dog wonders
• In Their Own Words featurette – the original voice actors share memories from their days on the shows
• The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Files – unseen treasures from the Hanna-Barbera vault including original character sketches
The Pitch
A cornucopia of canine capriciousness comes to crackdown on criminals.
The Humans
Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, Blue Falcon.
"Hey, Scoob, you remember those two pieces of Chihuahua ass we nailed down in Tijuana?
"…Reah, and ro rou remember rat one rime rith rose rwo Rekinese ritches rho riked it roggystyle in Rochester? Rood rimes, Rynomutt, rood rimes…"
The Pooches
Scooby Dooby Doo and Dynomutt too.
The Nutshell
Scooby Doo and the Mystery, Inc. gang return in one of their many incarnations, this time sharing a double billing with crime fighters Blue Falcon and Dynomutt. Of course the Mystery, Inc. gang is composed of Scooby and his main hipster pal, Shaggy, both a couple of chow hound, fraidy-cat adventurers who seem to support themselves and travel all over the world without having jobs. Rounding out the crew is Fred, the square jawed, self-appointed leader, Velma, the brains of the group, and hottie, Daphne, who’s also known to get kidnapped from time to time and cause the occasional mishap. They like to stick their noses in on the affairs of (dis)honest, hard-working criminals who take the time to throw in a little theatricality to their capers by donning elaborate costumes such as some of our Founding Fathers, a ghostly captain and his sea monster crew, a Black Knight, a mummy, a 10,000 volt ghost, etc. Usually they split up and look for clues, which Fred, Velma and Daphne usually find while Shaggy and Scooby spend most of the episode running from the villain(s) of the piece.
Ladies and gentlemen, my new computer wallpaper.
On the flipside are the Blue Falcon, an even more square-jawed, upright superhero; and his faithful mechanical dog sidekick, Dynomutt, the “Dog Wonder.” BF’s alter ego is Radley Crowne, a playboy with a great penthouse apartment with a pool that also serves as the Falcon’s Lair base of operations. They get around in their Falcon Car, a futuristic, souped-up flying hotrod and patrol the skies of Big City. While BF is the by-the-book, straight-man superhero, Dynomutt is the bumbling comic relief who malfunctions with any of his thousand gadgets such as radar ears, super sniffing nose, legs and head that can extend forever and pretty much any type of crime fighting gizmo you can name.
It was then, as she watched him getting ready to take a shit on his pal Shaggy’s head, that Velma knew there was something definitely off about ole’ Scoob…
The Lowdown
There’s really not much I can say about Scooby Doo, other than the fact that it was – and still is – one of my all-time favorite cartoons. I find Scooby and Shaggy’s antics just as enjoyable now as I did 25 years ago and I’ve probably seen any of their adventures a hundred times or more. This is one of the silliest and most enjoyable cartoons ever on TV, and pretty much at the top of my list of the mountain of Hanna-Barbera cartoon creations, with Tom and Jerry right behind. I watched Scooby through his many incarnations growing up, and while the best of all of them was Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, there’s plenty of good episodes here, many of which I hadn’t seen in years. Some of the better ones were What a Shocking Ghost (the 10,000 Volt Ghost), The Headless Horseman of Halloween, There’s a Demon Shark in the Foggy Dark and The Spirits of ’76.
For his own sick reasons, Blue Falcon’s favorite Dyno-gizmo was the Victoria’s Secret attachment.
There were supposedly over 350 episodes of the various Scooby Doo cartoons produced, and I probably watched them all at one time. I think any true Scooby fan will say that the ones where the entire gang was together in the early years were the best. I even used to watch the shitty New Adventures of Scooby Doo, where they’d have guest stars in two-part episodes such as Jerry Reed, Sonny and Cher, the Harlem Globetrotters and Batman and Robin. Scooby and Scrappy Doo is also down on the overall Scooby scale, but I also watched that. Not sure what the general consensus is out there, but Scooby Dum makes a couple of appearances here. Personally, I always liked him, although he did tend to muscle in on Scoob’s action at times. At least he wasn’t Scrappy. Anyway, I also watched A Pup Named Scooby Doo and The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo back in the ‘80s. Hell, my favorite team on the Laff-A-Lympics was the Scooby Doobies, so I pretty much saw it all.
"Shit, Daphne, Fred’s whacking off again…"
On Dynomutt, my opinion has changed quite a bit since I was a kid. I definitely remember watching this along with Scoob back in the day and thinking it was great, but now I see that this show just was nowhere near Scooby Doo. The villains were lame, such as LowBrow, the caveman who wanted to be King of Crime by stealing books and using them to get ideas for capers; and the Red Vulture, who committed air robberies. The overall tone of the show seemed very much a holdover from the Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the ‘60s and the writing wasn’t even on the same level as the Scooby episodes. The show relied way too much on Dynomutt’s bumbling to carry it and that one note that the show relied on got old way quick. It’s exactly the same reason why I can’t stand Inspector Gadget. In fact, I can’t see how the makers of that show never got sued by Hanna Barbera for intellectual property theft, because these shows are very similar in central theme. Dynomutt was, however, created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, two former Hanna-Barbera writers who went on to create such cartoons as Thundarr, Rubik, the Amazing Cube (the very notion that they could create a show from that piece of shit fad was a miracle), Mr. T, Turbo Teen and Saturday Supercade.
Obviously Akiva Goldsman was influenced by this episode at one time.
Like many Hanna-Barbera properties, the music for both shows was done by the legendary Hoyt Curtin, and what’s noticeable here is that much of it for Scooby Doo is recycled in the Superfriends episodes of the same era. You’d half expect Superman to appear at some point and get waylaid by whatever villain had kryptonite that week. The episodes were also headed by Iwao Takamoto, an animation icon. This set is the complete 16-episode run of the show from 1976 and definitely a better buy than some of the three-episodes offerings of other cartoons that have come out in the last few years. Hanna-Barbera sets rarely disappoint and this one is no exception.
Total shot in the dark here, BF…you wanna get together later and watch Spartacus?
The Package
A staple of these Hanna-Barbera sets are colorful box art and semi-animated menus, and this set has both. The audio is acceptable in Dolby Digital Mono (yes, Mono). The Scooby episodes are also noticeably crisper than the Dynomutt episodes. Don’t know whether that’s due to the original animation or the condition of the negatives, but it is noticeable. There’s three features: Eerie Mystery Of Scooby-Doo And Dynomutt’s History and In Their Own Words, the first of which is a 13-minute piece on the history of both shows and the latter being a seven-minute piece from the original voice cast of both shows. Both of these features are good, although I always get creeped out by voice actors when they do their character voices and contort their faces in the process. Anybody remember those horrid Charles Flesicher interviews from 1988 when he was whoring himself out on any talk show spewing out Roger Rabbit? Frank Welker kind of heads in that direction here doing Dynomutt. Anyway, for the hard core fan, there’s also The Scooby-Doo / Dynomutt Files, which features pages of original character sketches from both shows.
"Hey BF, sorry to ruin the orgy plans, but I left my Dyno KY Jelly at home again…"