Distributor: Cartoon Network
Be Cool Scooby-Doo! – Series Preview
The essential ingredients of earlier series on Scooby-Doo have remained: Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and their dog Scooby drive around in their Mystery Machine to solve mysteries, involving ghosts and monsters. Loaded with sarcastic anecdotes and funny comments, this series seems to have dug up ancient relics.
Five close friends are travelling around with their Mystery Bus to solve numerous mysteries. Somehow, wherever they go, ghosts and monsters seem to be present to torment their victims with their scary appearances. Fred, Daphne and Velma usually manage to solve the problem, whereas Shaggy and Scooby, the scaredy-cats of the bunch, are trying to shake the monsters off.
No need to be afraid though! It seems ordinary people are using legends and monsters to get what they want, getting themselves apprehended by our smart friends and handed over to the police.
Each episode’s duration is about 20 minutes, allowing the story to build up a profundity worth following. Starting off with a short prelude to the story, explaining the problem at hand, it’s followed by the opening song, which is fun to watch and listen to. The episodes are stories on its own, not really having a thread that links them, so not being able to see an episode won’t pose a problem.
Introducing a variety of characters, you can solve the mystery along with our friends, as each and every one of them can be a suspect with their own motives. Using humour to keep the story light, it also provides its audience with an occasional chuckle.
The main characters have remained people we can all identify with; within an episode there’s room for a little bit of character development, deepening the sense of ‘getting to know’ each of them.
As for the older audience, who might have been afraid the newer version would be a complete mistake: the producers have kept a lot of the original aspects in tact. The characters and their clothing, the Mystery Bus, the sarcastic touches, the story build have all remained as they were. However, the original series has been ongoing from 1969 to current day, so it needed to evolve throughout the years. For the younger audience, they’ve upgraded the graphics and sound substantially, creating a series worthy of this era, matching other animated series.
Conclusion
Even though the new ‘Be Cool Scooby-Doo!’ seemed to be an exploitation of previous success, this spin-off is actually surprisingly well made. In creating this series, the producers provided the next generation with a series the older audience would want them to watch, for the sake of nostalgia. Both young and and older audience will enjoy this new animated series; therefore, watching this together with your kid would be an ideal passing of the time
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