Be Cool, Scooby-Doo is one those rare franchise-reimagined success stories.
Reinventing the characters, both visually and in their approach, while still gleefully honouring one of Hanna-Barbera’s breakout shows that has been around since 1969, the producers have given the venerable cartoon series a whole new lease of life.
All of their brilliantly-successful tinkering comes home to roost – literally in this case; the villain du jour is a pterodactyl with flying red eyes – in “Scary Christmas” where the gang arrives in Rockwellville, a town obsessed with Christmas.
Every single centimetre of the town’s exterior and interior surfaces is covered with garlands, lights, giant blow up Santas and neon signs wishing one and all “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays”.
You want Christmas on hyper-steroids? Rockwellville is the place to be, its giant Christmas tree, which sits in the town square, adorned with presents for all the townsfolk (and even the kids at the Big Sad Eyes Orphanage), and peace, love and goodwill reigning on every snow-covered, tinsel-strewn street.
But of course this is Be Cool, Scooby-Doo and so you know, just like if you have Jessica Fletcher in town, that this festive idyll can’t last and so it is that just as everyone is getting ready to fire up the giant lit star on top of the tree, the pterodactyl swoops in, handing Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy and Scooby when they’re not training for the peak eating season that is Christmas, a giant-sized flying mystery to solve.
So far, so Scooby right?
This is where Be Cool, Scooby-Doo takes the lo-fi absurdity and hilarity of the franchise’s previous incarnations, and ramps them up to a delightfully wacky degree.
Fred, in contrast to his previous iterations as more of a supporting character to Velma, Scooby and Shaggy, takes the lead on this one, determined to go all out for Christmas and find a yuletide-y mystery to solve.
He keeps having these gloriously overblown Christmas epiphanies, helped along in their dramatic impact by a town council worker who is always on hand to light the street lamps just so and play pitch-perfect music. (The one time he isn’t there Fred improvises with a neon Christmas tree that glows right on cue.)
Velma, of course, is having none of Fred’s festive obsessions.
She sees a pterodactyl flying through the air, seemingly determined on stealing the Mystery Machine, the town’s Christmas tree and all the presents, and anything else it can get its gigantic claws onto and she is going to find out what’s behind it.
Only Fred somehow keeps dragging them back to the orphanage where he is sure a poignant, emotionally-resonant mystery awaits, and where, narrative coincidences be damned, an archeologist is trying to unearth … wait for it! … pterodactyl eggs!
A whole nest of them in fact; curiouser and Jurassically curiouser.
Fred dismisses any and all links to their flying nemesis since there is not one orphan anywhere near the eggs or the pterodactyl but Velma persist convinced it all means something.
And of course it does, but the mystery keeps defeating their ability to solve it, not helped by Daphne, who is way goofier and airheady than her previous iterations, and absolutely determined that her birthday, which falls on Christmas Day, will not be overshadowed by the biggest holiday like it has been every other year of her life.
So as Rockwellville roasts its chestnuts and sugar plum fairies occupy everyone else’s thoughts, Daphne is going all out to convince Scooby to dress as a clown, to blow out the candles on her birthday cake and to decorate the van with balloons and streamers and not tinsel, trees and baubles.
It’s inspired, comically ill-timed lunacy and it adds a whole other level of crazy to proceedings which, let’s face it, are not exactly following any well-established norms, festive or otherwise, up to this point.
“Scary Christmas” sticks to the standard Scooby-Doo script in so far as it has a bucolic scene rendered nightmarishly awful by a hideous mystery which we all know the gang will solve, and yes once again, they duly do. (How could you doubt them? For shame! No candy canes for you!)
What gives it a whole fabulously nutty edge, indeed the entire series, is that amps the wacky sensibilities that have always percolated through the franchise, and to be fair, Christmas celebrations itself, and goes to light-draped, garland, festooned town with them.
The sight gags are a constant joy – Scooby and Shaggy powering the van along with a treadmill while wearing Santa hats is hilarious as are the appearances of the orphans and Fred’s overly stage-managed epiphanies – the jokes are near-endless and the sense of Christmas-ness somehow manages to shine through too.
If you like Scooby-Doo, and of course you do, and like things pushed a little or a lot off-centre in your festive animated TV viewing, then “Scary Christmas” is a joy, a madcap romp through mystery, mayhem and all kinds of festive silliness, that manages to both deliver and subvert a heartwarming tale, damn near making your Christmas in the process.