(originally posted June 30, 2022)
I am a big fan of Scooby Doo. Not in the fanatical sense but definitely in the “Scooby Doo is comfort food for me” camp. So usually I downright devour any series or movie they put out. Well, unless they’re absolutely ridiculous. Looking at you Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue! That one is just too weird to watch. ‘Nuff said.
But when Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated first came out, I actually didn’t like it. At all.
In fact, I could easily say I actively hated it. And wondered what the creators were smoking. (Oddly not in the same way as Get a Clue! but that’s a given. Heh.)
Anyway, I didn’t like SD!MI until it was finished, that is.
To be honest, I can’t remember if I even watched it all the way through when it was first airing. It irritated me that much. But after it was finished, I sat down and did a binge just to see where it had gone. When I got the last five or six episodes everything changed for me, though. I remember thinking “Whoa! They pulled off something very special here.”
That I did not see coming at all.
But you literally have to watch the entire thing all the way through to appreciate it. Because the two seasons are absolutely a full story, not individual disconnected episodes.
There are a lot of reasons why it works and I’ve found a video that goes into all of them in-depth so I’m not going to list them here. For me, though, it was the villains. Well, villain, I guess. Put it this way, masked villains pretending to be monsters are a cornerstone of the Scooby Doo franchise. That’s basically their formula in a nutshell. And it’s a formula that has worked and still works. It even works very well in SD!MI. It’s also something that fairly regularly gets made fun of in some of the series and movies too.
This series, however, takes that masked villain premise and turns it on its head. But not in an obvious “every villain is real” way either. Instead there is a slow build up to something very big. Very real. Very dangerous. And very supernatural.
Well, for a Scooby Doo cartoon anyway.
Now I won’t say it’s my favorite of the Scooby Doo TV series. At least not yet. For now I’m still partial to What’s New, Scooby Doo? That one hits my sweet spot big time. But every time I binge all of SD!MI, because I can’t seem to watch an episode here and there, I realize anew just how good it is. So it may eventually make it to that top spot.
Oh, and here’s that video I mentioned earlier. I figure if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already seen it so spoilers don’t matter. Or you’re here because you’re curious and the video actually might convince you to give this little jewel of a series a try. But, yeah, there are probably spoilers in it, so this is your warning.