It’s officially October, and you know what that means: pumpkin spice lattes, Spirit Halloween pop-up stores, and Scoobtober marathons.
Scoobtober (a portmanteau of Scooby-Doo and October) is a month-long celebration of all things Scooby-Doo during the spookiest time of the year. Beginning October 1st, Warner Brothers, Boomerang, and Cartoon Network release Scooby-Doo merch, air movies, and play reruns of classic episodes to honor our favorite mystery solvers.
To celebrate Scoobtober, I—your resident expert on Scooby-Doo—bring you the best, the worst, and the forgotten of the Scooby-Doo franchise.
The Best
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island
The gang split ways at the beginning of this movie, but they reunite to celebrate Daphne’s birthday and help her find some real monsters. While in New Orleans, they’re invited to an historic plantation (a little sus but not uncommon for Scooby-Doo media at the time) that claims to have real ghosts, but nothing is as it seems. This is a classic movie that helped revive the Scooby-Doo franchise in the 90s. It’s got a banger soundtrack, fresh concept featuring real monsters, and some of the best animation I’ve seen from the franchise. This movie was a classic when it was first released on video, and it holds up decades later.
Be Cool Scooby-Doo!
Be Cool Scooby-Doo is one of the more recent additions to the franchise; it follows the usual 22-minute mystery formula but focuses more on the gang’s interactions with each other and their mysteries. While the art is off-putting at first glance (many fans have compared it to Family Guy and Big Mouth, and they aren’t wrong), it is, hands down, the funniest Scooby-Doo has to offer. Each episode has hilarious jokes, the art style becomes more palatable as you watch, and the Scooby gang are given new quirks without compromising their core character traits.
A Pup Named Scooby-Doo
A series from the 80s that introduces the gang as elementary-aged kids running the Scooby-Doo Detective Agency. It features wacky mysteries, the best opening theme song of any Scooby-Doo show, and some of the franchise’s funniest gags. This show is so good, it’s even referenced in an episode of What’s New, Scooby-Doo? from the 2000s. This series is a classic, and I still feel the same joy watching it now as I did as a kid.
The Worst
Scooby-Doo and the Boo Brothers
The plot of this movie is simple: Shaggy inherits a supposedly haunted plantation (a little sus 2: electric boogaloo) from a deceased uncle, so Scooby and Scrappy join him to check the place out. It’s from that brief era in the 80s where Shaggy wore a red shirt and is, like most movies from that era, a drag. It features a ghostly parody of the Three Stooges, some tragically stereotypical “hillbilly” characters, and not much else. While the interactions between Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy are entertaining, they're not enough to save this tragedy. This could have been condensed into a 22-minute mystery and nothing would have been lost.
Scooby-Doo Arabian Nights
If the title didn’t give it away, this movie is a parody of 1001 Arabian Nights in which Shaggy and Scooby become a ruler’s poison tester, accidentally eat all his food, and save themselves by telling him stories. This direct-to-TV special is hard to call a Scooby-Doo movie; it’s more like a Hanna-Barbera character crossover Think Yogi Bear and Magilla Gorilla. Scooby and Shaggy only feature in brief segments that loosely connect the different stories they tell, making its quality as a Scooby-Doo movie as bad as the title picture. Worst of all, it’s boring.
Velma
By this point, who hasn’t heard of Velma? It’s advertised as Scooby-Doo for adults because of its humor and general cynicism. Lots of Scooby-Doo fans have opinions about this HBO Max original, but it’s here for one reason: it doesn’t even have Scooby-Doo. Worse, the jokes often fall flat, the characters themselves are unrecognizable, and the villains are lackluster. There’s a reason many fans don’t consider it part of the Scooby-Doo franchise. The only credit I’ll give this show is the moments of impressive animation and the fact that, for a brief moment, it made people like Scrappy again.
The Oft-Forgotten
A 1999 parody of The Blair Witch Project that used real footage of settings and props and animated the Scooby gang on top. It aired in parts during the October 31st Scoobtober marathon on Cartoon Network before being played in whole at the end of the night. It won an award, it’s creepy when you’re a kid but funny when you’re an adult, and it’s a criminally underrated piece of Scooby-Doo media.
Do you agree with my rankings? Have you seen everything I’ve mentioned here?
If you haven't watched any Scooby-Doo lately, what are you waiting for? These titles and more are available to borrow at HCPL!
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