Toon Tuesday : The New Scooby Doo movies

Almost definitely one of the top three incarnations of Scooby Doo, the New Scooby Doo movies were two part shows featuring guest appearances by a wide array of famous names.

From Batman & Robin, to the Harlem Globetrotters, to the Three Stooges, the show ran the gambit of fun but also did some with great celebrities like Don Knotts, Sandy Duncan and even country music star, Jerry Reed.

It was truly a fun show but even then a lot of fans asked why there wasn't more, why they didn't have more of the other Hanna-Barbera characters in the mix, like Captain Caveman and Space Ghost.  In more recent (and pretty lousy) incarnations of the shows, they did bring in more characters but it isn't even close to the magic of the originals, not at all.

There was a host of greats that could have been part of this series, although some might have taken a bit of a stretch for the, Scooby-verse, a character like H&B's version of Godzilla could have been a guest hero and it would have been more in the scope of the gangs adventures.

A character like Carl Kolchak (from Kolchak the Night Stalker) might have been a bit over the top but the character was wide open in that era for such a crossover, perhaps the character needed to crossover from Scooby Doo to a group that goes after real monsters, it could have been a great move.

The 80's was no shortage of insane possibilities for the show, the Ghostbusters is an easy one to toss out, or the gang of kids from, The Monster Squad, or even Gizmo & Billy from, Gremlins.

Today, the fools who horribly run Hanna-Barbera & The Cartoon Network do some decent films once in a while, Scooby Doo meet KISS, was a pretty good crossover, but so many others are just plain ridiculous and written for very dull intellects, no matter the age.

One of the great team ups from Hanna Barbera I always thought was an automatic winner was the Scooby gang meeting Blue Falcon & Dinomutt but they have already tried and screwed that up, bad.

Hopefully someone will come along and take the reigns at Hanna Barbera/Cartoon Network that will stop making programs/movies that just dumb down the audience and glorify stupidity rather than enlighten and entertain! 


 

Family Movie Night PLUS - GHOSTBUSTERS

 I'm not old enough to remember the days of a cartoon & news reel before the motion pictures in the theater, but I do remember some theaters still running a cartoon before a Disney movie here and there, when I was a kid.

With today's technology and the availability of so much on DVD/Blu-Ray/Youtube we can really enjoy things better than ever before.

Instead of just a plain old movie night, why not pair the movie up with some other bits of the past to make it even better?

Pick a cartoon short that goes with the general theme of the movie your watching and a half-hour episode of a television show that does the same.

For an easy one, I went with this set that, to me, is a great mix....

"Ghostbusters", released June 8th 1984, the comedy/adventure classic as the main showing, it's a really fun family film that almost everyone still enjoys, it's got a great history and we just had the new sequel, "After Life", just came out.

Before Ghostbusters, go all the way back to Christmas Eve, 1937 when Disney released "The Lonesome Ghosts", starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck & Goofy as the Ajax Ghost Exterminators Agency, who are called to a house to rid it of ghosts, trouble is, it's the four trouble-making ghosts who called them in.  You can find the short version of this short, with about 2+ minutes cut from the original, on Youtube.

Then after Ghostbusters, an episode of "The Real Ghostbusters" animated show, "Citizen Ghost", where Peter tells the story of how Slimer came to live with the gang at the firehouse and follows directly up after the original film.  The suits the Ghostbusters wore to battle Gozer were supposed to be disposed of (oops Venkman) and take on a life of their own, with doubles of the team that try to take out the originals and take their place.  It's available on the DVD Series collection.

Watched together, it all just flows and makes for a really fun night for the family along with your favorite pizza (New York style, of course).  And it should all take less than 2.5 hours but it's something that the family should remember. 

What combinations can you think of that go together?

Just a quick historical note of irony, as "Lonesome Ghosts" debuted on Christmas Eve 1937 in theaters,  With no mention in the schedule at all, HBO gave its subscribers a major surprise Christmas present on Christmas Eve 1984 with a single airing of, "Ghostbusters", which didn't make it's official HBO debut until March 1985.  It's a Christmas Eve tradition of a surprise showing that they would continue for several years.