Scooby Doo Mystery Inc. - New episodes 3/25

[Saga]

i just sat down and watched the last five episodes. man, great stuff. Freddy using Kirk's 'What have i done' line after blowing up the Mystery Machine was nice. that final episode was pretty trippy. shame we won't get a third season. i can only imagine what kind of time tripping adventures they would have with the new Mr. E.

 

[Corran Horn]

CN has canceled the only four shows I watched on it. Clone Wars, Young Justice, Green Lantern: TAS, and SD:MI? Nice.

 

[Christopher]

Really, SD:MI was a Scooby-Doo series for people who don't like Scooby-Doo, such as myself -- so it follows that it might not appeal as much to people who are fans of the more conventional Scooby franchise. Sure, there were elements of homage, but also a lot of revisionism and deconstruction, and the stories, despite mostly following the standard formula, tended to be darker and edgier. And especially this last batch of episodes got increasingly dark and strange, and departed further from the sort of thing most people looking for a show about Scooby-Doo would expect or want to see. Honestly, I can see why CN might've been uncomfortable with the darkness and scariness of those last few episodes.

That's interesting. I am a (mild) fan of the original Scooby-Doo and some of its sequels and I liked this a lot. Your description makes it sound like something I'd dislike on various levels, and yet this was a re-imagining that I found to be as good or better than the original.

And I'm sure a lot of adult fans of the Scooby franchise felt the same way about it. This was definitely a show made for older, more sophisticated viewers, people who would appreciate references to Twin Peaks and Lovecraft and Harlan Ellison and Star Trek, people who would be able to look back on the silliness and contrivances of earlier versions with enough irony that they could appreciate this show's affectionate deconstructions, and who'd be receptive to the deeper and more thoughtful characterizations.

But viewers like you and me are not the demographic that Cartoon Network and its advertisers care about. The target audience of preteens, and the parents choosing suitable viewing material for their preteens, might have found this version too dark, too weird, too confusing, too far removed from their expectations.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Perhaps. Or at the execs thought so. Too bad they couldn't have moved it to Adult Swim.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

It sounds sensible but is there actual evidence that it wasn't meeting target demos?

 

[Christopher]

It sounds sensible but is there actual evidence that it wasn't meeting target demos?

It just seems to me like the likely explanation, given that three of the smartest, most adult-skewing shows on the network -- SD:MI, Green Lantern, and Young Justice -- all got cancelled within the same season. That does suggest a pattern.

A similar thing happened with the Ben 10 franchise. Alien Force in its first couple of seasons was a considerably darker, older-skewing version of the concept, one I liked a lot better than the original series. But then the third season of AF and the following Ultimate Alien, while continuing the basic elements and approach of that show and being made by the same people, seemed to bring back more of the ideas and attitudes of the original show; and now the replacement series Omniverse has gone back in a lighter, younger, goofier direction and the storylines don't seem as complex, so I've lost interest in the franchise again. Cumulatively, it just seems to me that CN is aiming more and more at a demographic that doesn't include me.

 

[Corran Horn]

If they are aiming for the demo that the new Teen Titans show seemed aimed at I guess you can count me out of CN caring about me. (and my two kids, since they watch what I watch)

 

[USS Mariner]

If they are aiming for the demo that the new Teen Titans show seemed aimed at I guess you can count me out of CN caring about me. (and my two kids, since they watch what I watch)

New Teen Titans is insultingly stupid, and that's considering it's target audience.

I'm sick of "younger demographics" being used to excuse piss-poor entertainment. You'd think that you'd want better quality for younger viewers, given how influential it can be.

Then again, I had a stead diet of 90's CN, and I've yet to build a jet out of scrap metal and kill hundreds of people per episode via collateral damage.

 

[Christopher]

I'm sick of "younger demographics" being used to excuse piss-poor entertainment. You'd think that you'd want better quality for younger viewers, given how influential it can be.

Now, that's an unfair generalization. There are some kid-oriented shows on CN that are quite high in quality. I hear all sorts of raves about Adventure Time, even claims that it's the best-written show on TV right now, but it's just not a show I personally get into. There's a big difference between "not to my personal taste" and "badly done."

 

[RJDiogenes]

Adventure Time is a good show, though I don't get to see it often-- it doesn't grab me like other shows do. Phineas & Ferb, on the other hand, which is on Disney, I will watch whenever possible. One of the best shows ever.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

Just caught up with my DVR and saw the finale. This was a fun series, and I really loved how they ended it. I like Mr. Adventure's idea that this could be seen as a prequel, of sorts.

I can see why, for some, the edgier material may have veered a bit too far in some cases:

Spoiler: For example

Hot Dog Water's execution

But overall, I enjoyed the darker tone.

Good stuff!

 

[Christopher]

On the "prequel" idea, this wouldn't really work as a prequel to the original series, since there they weren't on a cross-country road trip, just living in their hometown. Also, in the mainstream Scooby continuity, the gang lives in Coolsville rather than Crystal Cove, and they have different parents and families than they were shown to have in SDMI. (For instance, Fred's parents are Skip and Peggy Jones, and Daphne doesn't seem to have any sisters.) Maybe you could treat the ending of SDMI as a loose lead-in to the modern What's New, Scooby-Doo? and DVD movie series, but those contain occasional references to the mainstream continuity so it'd be a rough fit.

Maybe the idea is that now the Mystery Incorporated gang is going to have adventures very much like those of the mainstream Mystery Inc., but not the exact same ones we've seen before.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I'm pretty sure Coolsville didn't come until later series. It certainly felt like they were going from place to place instead of being in one town.

I'm not saying it's perfect, or fits the whole entire run of Scooby Doo, but I think it could be seen as a lead-in to Scooby Doo, Where Are You at least.

 

[USS Mariner]

On the "prequel" idea, this wouldn't really work as a prequel to the original series, since there they weren't on a cross-country road trip, just living in their hometown. Also, in the mainstream Scooby continuity, the gang lives in Coolsville rather than Crystal Cove, and they have different parents and families than they were shown to have in SDMI. (For instance, Fred's parents are Skip and Peggy Jones, and Daphne doesn't seem to have any sisters.) Maybe you could treat the ending of SDMI as a loose lead-in to the modern What's New, Scooby-Doo? and DVD movie series, but those contain occasional references to the mainstream continuity so it'd be a rough fit.

Maybe the idea is that now the Mystery Incorporated gang is going to have adventures very much like those of the mainstream Mystery Inc., but not the exact same ones we've seen before.

The prequel idea is problematic in another way because the Dinkley's museum establishes that all of the classic monsters we're familiar with are already "history" as far as MI's timeline was concerned. "Alice May" took this idea and made an episode out of it (a great one in my book), and for me it implied that the series was going to be a "soft sequel," i.e. only keeping elements that were integral to the series formula, but ditching stuff no one remembers like Coolsville or the ages of the gang (which frankly makes more sense for the 60's gang to have been teenagers rather than adults.)

 

[Christopher]

I'm pretty sure Coolsville didn't come until later series.

It originated in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Which was sort of an antecedent to SDMI, because it was another revisionist Scooby series designed to appeal to people who weren't Scooby fans, done in much more of a Looney Tunes style and with more satire and self-reference (by some of the people who'd go on to do Tiny Toon Adventures and the like). But apparently the background it established has been treated as canonical by the later films and shows.

It certainly felt like they were going from place to place instead of being in one town.

If you say so. I'm just going by the Wiki descriptions.

The prequel idea is problematic in another way because the Dinkley's museum establishes that all of the classic monsters we're familiar with are already "history", which at the time implied that the series was going to be a "soft sequel", i.e. only keeping elements that were integral to the series formula, but ditching stuff no one remembers like Coolsville or the ages of the gang (which frankly makes more sense for the 60's gang to have been teenagers rather than adults. )

It's an alternate continuity, drawing on some elements of earlier ones yet remixing them. Just like the various other alternate Scooby continuities out there like the live-action films.

Scoobypedia seems to recognize four distinct alternate continuities that aren't counted as part of the mainstream: the two live-action film continuities (one for the two theatrical "sequel" films and one for the two made-for-TV "prequel" films), and the last two Cartoon Network series, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue! and SDMI. That is to say, the versions of the main characters in those four continuities all have their own separate entries from the core-continuity versions of the characters. (Also there's some ambiguity about whether "the Scrappy-Doo years" are counted as canonical by later mainstream works.)

I'm not sure why the Wiki treats the two live-action continuities as separate. Maybe it's because Velma is Asian-American in the prequel movies.

 

[Bob Morton]

It was a great series, from start to finish. There were some clunker episodes but not many. I wouldn't have expected such an ending, considering the start, but it was really enjoyable. I also think the ending doesn't denigrate the entire series. The characters still remember everything and were changed by the events they experienced in another reality.

My favorite part of the final block of episodes was in The Horrible Herd:

Fred: Those things are part fish, remember, they can swim!
Velma: Whoa, what have we done?
Shaggy: You mean, like, other than release unnatural super-predators into the ecosystem?
Sheriff Stone: It's best just to walk away from this one, kids. Just walk away...

That's what would have scared me as a kid, even as an adult, it's quite unsettling.