Scooby Doo, Where Are You! - The Complete First and Second Seasons

Starring:Don Messick, Casey Kasem, Frank Welker, Stefanianna Christopherson, Heather North, Nicole Jaffe, Lennie Weinrib, Jean Vander Pyl, John Stephenson, Susan Steward, Jack Angel, George A. Robertson, Barry Richards, Michael Stull, Vic Perrin, Hal Smith, Susan Blu, Alan Oppenheimer
Director: Howard Swift, William Hanna, Joseph Barbera
Studio: Turner Home Ent
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
Chuck Jones and other great studio animators sneered at the cheap look and lazy craftsmanship of Hanna Barbera's television cartoons in the 1960s, but there's no question HB's original, 35-year-old Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is enduringly beloved. The Complete First and Second Seasons includes all 25 stories first broadcast from September '69 to October '71, a growth period in which canine hero Scooby's voice (by Don Messick, who also voiced The Jetsons's pup, Astro) was gradually refined from murky garble to Scoob's more familiar, "Rrroowwrr"-inflected, human-like speech. This set also represents the pre-frills Scooby-Doo: no guest appearances by Don Knotts or Batman, no Scrappy-Doo--just adventure and occasional bubblegum pop tunes by Danny Janssen and sundry co-writers (e.g., "Pretty Mary Sunlite" in the episode "Don't Fool with a Phantom").

Watching all the shows back-to-back reveals evolving complexity in the scripts. Over time, Scooby-Doo's creators added multiple bad guys in cahoots with major villains, and developed sub-plots, backstories, and even appealing allies and friends of Mystery, Inc., a traveling band of young debunkers of supernatural phenomena. Riding around in their psychedelic Mystery Van, preppie leader Fred and his friends--haughty Daphne, brainy Velma, quasi-hippie Shaggy, and Shaggy's best pal, Scooby, an excitable Great Dane--chase down and are chased by alleged ghouls who generally turn out to be venal humans running various scams.

Amazon.com

Chuck Jones and other great studio animators sneered at the cheap look and lazy craftsmanship of Hanna Barbera's television cartoons in the 1960s, but there's no question HB's original, 35-year-old Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is enduringly beloved. The Complete First and Second Seasons includes all 25 stories first broadcast from September '69 to October '71, a growth period in which canine hero Scooby's voice (by Don Messick, who also voiced The Jetsons's pup, Astro) was gradually refined from murky garble to Scoob's more familiar, "Rrroowwrr"-inflected, human-like speech. This set also represents the pre-frills Scooby-Doo: no guest appearances by Don Knotts or Batman, no Scrappy-Doo--just adventure and occasional bubblegum pop tunes by Danny Janssen and sundry co-writers (e.g., "Pretty Mary Sunlite" in the episode "Don't Fool with a Phantom").

Watching all the shows back-to-back reveals evolving complexity in the scripts. Over time, Scooby-Doo's creators added multiple bad guys in cahoots with major villains, and developed sub-plots, backstories, and even appealing allies and friends of Mystery, Inc., a traveling band of young debunkers of supernatural phenomena. Riding around in their psychedelic Mystery Van, preppie leader Fred and his friends--haughty Daphne, brainy Velma, quasi-hippie Shaggy, and Shaggy's best pal, Scooby, an excitable Great Dane--chase down and are chased by alleged ghouls who generally turn out to be venal humans running various scams.

Included here is Scooby-Doo's premiere, "What a Night for a Knight," in which the gang looks into the disappearance of a noted archaeologist and end up in a "haunted" museum. The fun "Go Away Ghost Ship" finds our heroes helping a shipping company daunted by the apparent ghost of pirate Red Beard, while the silly classic "A Tiki Scare Is No Fair" concerns a Hawaiian vacation for Mystery, Inc. disrupted by a witch doctor. --Tom Keogh

Description

The whodunit format was a daring new frontier for an animated series, but the members of the Mystery Inc. team have grown to become authentic popular-culture icons. To solve their newest mystery - finding the most awesome Scooby-Doo DVD ever, with 25 vintage episodes and snackin? good extras on 4 discs - you need only follow this simple clue: you?re holding it!

Customer Reviews:

"Nostalgic" doesn't always mean "good.".......2007-06-23

Like oodles of other GenXers now entering middle age, I spent a half-hour or hour of my 1970s Saturday mornings watching the gang roll around in a cool-looking van; run into a mystery involving an inexplicable monster of local legend; do the 3-2 split of Fred, Velma, Danger Prone Daphne and Shaggy and Scooby; have Shag and Scoob looking for food when they weren't running scared; watch Fred and Velma, the two brains in the outfit, solve the mystery and somehow trap and unmask the monster.

It was a hunk of my youth and I'll still make jokes about Scooby snacks, Shaggy's apparent munchies, Fred's questionable sexual orientation and loved that the bunch saving the world on Buffy the Vampire Slayer called themselves "The Scooby Gang." And watching these episodes does take me back to those Saturday mornings.

But doing so after watching the recent "What's New, Scooby Doo" episodes on Boomerang (8:30 p.m. Eastern) shows up how weak they really are.

And, as another reviewer noted, the extras are bupkiss. For me, great extras are what separates a true DVD from just being "VHS on disc." I want background on the creation of the character, certain episodes and how the creators felt about working with what quickly became a pop culture icon. None of that here. In fact, these extras are the worst of any Hanna-Barbera set I have and I'm not necessarily crazy about the extras on any of the other sets.

Back to the actual episodes. I bought this set because the Boomerang episodes got my daughter hooked on Scooby Doo and I needed Scooby eps available on demand. As I watched these, I realized that the newer episodes showed up the deficiencies of the original in animation, plotting and dialogue.
Stiff animation you could forgive, as the era's technology and television budgets forced Hanna-Barbera into limited animation and they did the best they could with it. But the plotting was repetitive, the characters two-dimensional and the dialogue stiff with wit that would just get by in a suburban schoolyard (it's almost painful to watch an early Scooby Doo after watching a Yogi Bear, Huck Hound or Quick Draw McGraw cartoon. Maybe because those old Warner writers, Mike Maltese and Warren Foster, didn't do Scoob's adventures).

This DVD set is worth the money to me only because it lets me satisfy requests for "Scooby Doooo!" from my two-year-old daughter. For show quality, however, I'd advise setting the TiVo for channel No. 297 on the dish, 8:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Best Scooby Doo.......2007-06-05

This is the original Scooby Doo that actually frightened me as a kid, it remains the scariest mystery type show for kids. This features that classic episode with that frightening witch. Witch Witch Is Which?

awsome!.......2007-06-04

We love watching these episodes from our childhood. Our son loves them, too. They are awesome!

Scooby Doo, Where Are You! - The Complete First and Second Seasons.......2007-05-12

These are Great! - just as I remembered them from when I was a kid. Now I'm sharing them with my kids and they love them too. Sure beats a lot of the new cartoons on TV these days. Wish they still made them like this.

Grandsons b-day.......2007-05-06

I was a scooby fan when I was little.
Now my grandson is 4 yrs old and absolutely loves scooby doo !
This was a great gift he can't get enough of it.

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