Animated Atrocities: Shags to Riches

Show: Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!
Episode: 1
Year: 2006

Writer(s): Ray DeLaurentis
Director(s): Jay Allens

Whose fucking idea was it to bring Scooby-Doo back like this? It wasn't even that long after What's New, Scooby-Doo?, and you bring him back like THIS? I don't hate Scooby-Doo, even with its over saturation of movies and TV shows over the last 20 years, but there's got to be a limit somewhere! This is right off the bat the worst Scooby-Doo cartoon ever made, it has a level of bad to it I haven't seen since the black sheep era of the franchise back in the 80’s! As hated as he is, you can't deny Scrappy-Doo essentially saved a franchise that was dying and he sprung up a lot of movies and series back in the day, many of them being classics like Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School and The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo.

 

The first thing of note of why this show is so terrible is its theme song. MrEnter already carefully explained why it's so bad in his Top 20 Worst Theme Songs list pretty well, so I won't dawdle on the details. The singer outright sounds like he's really really pissed with his constant shouting getting more and more obnoxious, faster and faster like he's reading off a TelePrompTer. Secondly, and most importantly, much like how Johnny Test's theme is basically stolen from Green Day's "American Idiot", the theme song here steals from The Offspring's "One Fine Day"! In fact, it's almost note-for-note. It doesn't help that the guy singing the song is the lead vocalist of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, and this really disappoints me. At the very least Johnny Test's theme made "American Idiot" its own thing in a way, and it fits because, well, Johnny really is a fucking idiot!

 

The show itself? It doesn't resemble ANYTHING from Scooby-Doo! The designs of this show are actually really fucking terrible; considering the style tries to copy the live-action movies, it brings it right into the uncanny valley. I didn't hate the first Scooby movie, but the sequels are awful. Secondly, this one of the few times when he was alive that Casey Kasem didn't voice Shaggy in a piece of Scooby media; instead, he's voiced by Scott Menville, and to be honest, he makes him sound way too young. It's like he's just going through puberty and not like a 16-17 year-old slacker. The funny thing is that Mr. Kasem is still in the show, but as Shaggy's Uncle Albert, which brings me to the very first episode.

 

It starts off at a breakneck pace with Shaggy right away being informed he's inherited "like, a billion dollars" from his Uncle Albert and his mansion. Naturally, this gets him into hysterics telling the gang they can get everything they ever wanted. Hey, if you just got the news, wouldn't you act this way? The funny thing is Albert didn't die; he just vanished and left everything to him. And at the mansion, we meet... the worst character of the show. Robi the robot butler... He basically destroys everything he touches and cannot cook worth a shit... happy that he basically cooks poison. He's actually more annoying than Scrappy-Doo because of his voice and that never vanishing grin! Why do the worst pieces of Scooby media need to give Shaggy and Scooby a third wheel? Oh right, because these two can't hold a show by themselves!

 

Through some remote-controlled filler, Shaggy and Scooby happen upon Albert's secret lab kick-starting the REAL PLOT of the show. They learn that he's on the run from the mad scientist villain Dr. Phineus Phibes, no doubt named after Vincent Price's role as Anton Phibes without any sense of a reference or knowledge of The Abominable Dr. Phibes. He wants his nanotechnology, which has the ability to give the user of this tech shape shifting abilities and other superpowers. I don't think that's how nanobots work, guys... I always thought they were little robots that went into your bloodstream to fight diseases or control your mind. Also, Phineus Phibes is revealed straight out in the first episode despite them trying to make Albert's disappearance a mystery! That's, like, the LAST THING you want to do in a mystery show by revealing your main villain so early on!

 

Phibes and his henchmen are essentially rip-offs of the Monarch and his henchmen from The Venture Brothers, and Phibes' henchmen really are poor imitations of 21 and 24... It's sad really because those two had such a great dynamic to them where you felt a true attachment to them, whereas these guys try too hard to imitate their antics. And the rest of the episode is mainly Shaggy and Scooby having to fight them off through a good dose of filler and nothing happening until they get captured. It does try to pull off many of the classic Scooby chase gags, but because the animation is so stiff and weird, they aren't funny. I'm not sure whether the show is flash animated or not, but it definitely looks flash.

 

Anyhow, we learn that Uncle Albert's formula is meant as a nanotechnology mutagen of sorts, and as it turns out, he put them specifically in his Scooby Snacks, which means only Scooby gets to use them. And thus, this turns into a superhero show with bad animation put towards the actual transformation sequences. At the very least, as unorthodox and debatably terrible as it was, Loonatics Unleashed was well animated to at least TRY and work as a superhero cartoon! With this show, not only do the characters move at a pace that seems like it's on speed and with the least detail as possible, but also the overall design aesthetics doesn't work for any sort of action beyond poor slapstick. Of course, given Scooby is invisible, it means they don't have to put too much effort into actual animation for him.

 

On one final note: even though Fred, Daphne and Velma say that they'll be around to give the boys a helping hand, they never appear again beyond small cameos throughout the show. This means that Shaggy and Scooby start acting like their friends a la Planet Sheen! For the record, the reason this show only lasted 20 episodes isn't because of bad ratings; it did very well because as we all know the Nielson system is rigged. It was cancelled in 2008 because by that time, Kids WB was dead, and 4Kids moved right on in to desecrate its corpse! This was around the time Saturday morning cartoons officially began to die out when digital media began to come on the rise, and you can just pirate the good cartoons. Now you know why none of the direct-to-video Scooby movies ever used this shows art-style. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare to put ANOTHER stupid dog cartoon down Old Yeller-style!

Cringe-Inducing Audio: 4
Cringe-Inducing Visuals: 3
Lackluster Writing: 7
Annoyance: 7
Disturbing Content: 4
Unecessary Cruelty: 0
Rancid Morality: 0
Low Production Values: 5
Unfortunate Implications: 0
Character Derailment: 4

Final Score: 34/100


Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue is owned by Warner Brothers and Turner Broadcasting.

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