GamesRadar+ has just posted the full August 2024 comic solicitations, featuring two new Scooby comics for the month. THE BATMAN AND SCOOBY-DOO MYSTERIES #8 Written by SHOLLY FISCH Art and cover by ERICH OWEN $2.99 US | 32 pages ON SALE 8/7/24 Copyright © 2024 DC Comics and Hanna-Barbera. Gotham’s Finger Memorial Museum, home of giant appliances, giant games, and giant sports equipment, has been robbed…by giants! Are Batman and Scooby up to the challenge of tracking down the mythical robbers, and solving the (quite literally) biggest crime of their careers? SCOOBY-DOO, WHERE ARE YOU #129
Written by DEREK FRIDOLFS Art and cover by VALERIO CHIOLA $2.99 US | 32 pages ON SALE 8/7/24 Copyright © 2024 Hanna-Barbera. Following a string of successfully solved mysteries, it’s time to celebrate, and Fred is treating the gang to dinner at his favorite local hangout! But Fred’s childhood haunt isn’t quite what he remembers—the pizza parlor has gone through a complete renovation. Gone are all the fun things Fred fondly remembered: the ball pit, ticket games, and especially the animal mascots in the band… until one of those angry animatronic performers comes to life!
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Agent 2 is given two different names throughout Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue. In "Super Scary Movie Night," he is named Jeff, after Jeff Bennett who is the voice actor for both him and Dr. Phibes. However, one episode prior in "There's a Doctor in the House," he is named Zachary. Since both names only were used once, it is unclear what Agent 2's actual name is.
To keep the scope of this poll manageable, I'm only including villains that were presented as robots the entire episode. Villains that were unmasked as robots at the end of the episode are not included.
Last week's "best Mexico episode" poll wasn't even a slightly close race lol. Here are the results: Monster of Mexico - 49 The Fiesta Host Is an Aztec Ghost - 13 El Bandito - 8 Twenty Thousand Screams Under the Sea - 2 Scooby's Bull Fright - 2 The Dinosaur Deception - 2 Acapulco and England - 1 Coming right on the heels of the recent announcement that MeTV will launch a new channel airing Scooby, the MeTV Mall (the channel's official online store) has added quite a bit of brand new Scooby merch! The new merch includes a variety of different Scooby-Doo clothes, including t-shirts, hoodies, and tank tops. In addition, the store is also selling Scooby toys, including a few action figures, board games, jigsaw puzzles, and a Mystery Machine toy! All of the products are officially licensed. You can check out the new merch in MeTV's store here. Thanks Jinkies for the information!
Quite a bit of new Scooby-Doo content has made its way over to the free streaming service Tubi recently. This marks an exciting milestone for the service, as they now have all of the 1960s-2000s Scooby-Doo series with the exception of The Scooby-Doo Show and "Wednesday Is Missing". Laff-a-Lympics and Get a Clue, which were previously missing from the service, are now both available for free. No subscription is required to watch the episodes, and it is a free service that only has occasional ads. Interestingly, Straight Outta Nowhere: Scooby-Doo and Courage the Cowardly Dog was also added to Tubi, after being removed from Max a few months ago.
Last year, I discovered the Numuki website that managed to archive all the old Scooby-Doo Flash games that were removed from the Cartoon Network website. I attempted to play Crystal Cove Online, however, the game was incredibly glitchy and would freeze mid-game, to the point where it wasn't really worth trying to play. A couple weeks ago, on a whim, I thought about the fact that I had been playing on my old computer, which ended up dying last October, and I've since gotten a new one. I attempted to play the game again, and either my old computer just wasn't able to handle the game or they fixed the glitches (I'm assuming the former), because the game works perfectly now. If I remember correctly, I hadn't played the game since around the mid-2010s, so it was a really fun blast from the past to play the game all the way through again. In playing it again, I was reminded of how well-made and incredible the game is, and decided that it might be fun to write up a review of it. This is a game I have a ton of nostalgia over, to the point where it's my favorite Scooby-Doo video game of all-time, including the console ones. For those who never played it, the game was a full adaptation of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated season 1, in which you got to play as Shaggy and Scooby and solve the mystery. The full town of Crystal Cove was the game's environment, and while the layout was slightly different from the show, pretty much all of the frequent locations the gang visited in the show were made into settings. The game consisted of you going back and forth to these different locations to talk to various people, and follow the plot of each week's episode as a player. Of course, the plot was truncated and adapted so it would be more appropriate for a game, but the same basic plot structure and events were followed. Sometimes, elements of the plot that didn't translate well into the game (such as the romantic drama) was removed. Besides talking to people, the game would also send you on quests that tied into the episode. For example, in the Aphrodite episode, the quest was that you had to find materials to make the love potion antidote. To conclude the mystery, you would have to enter into a boss battle against the monster of the week. The boss battles were varying levels of difficulty, some of them being easier and others being harder, due to some villains having special abilities (i.e. Aphrodite had the power to put you under her love spell, the Shadowy Figure could turn out the lights so you couldn't see, etc.). Every episode of season 1 was made into a level, and was posted weekly the day after the episode aired. What impressed me most when replaying this is the level of detail that went into building each level so that it had the same feel of the episode. Judging by some of the Internet games that were coming out around the time, many of them were becoming increasingly low quality compared to the early Flash games, such as Scooby Trap and Bayou Scooby-Doo. There's one in particular that I think I've expressed my dislike for in the past, but the games we'd get would be things like Jinkies Jelly Factory, which was basically just a low-quality rip-off of Candy Crush where you had to match jelly squares by color. Crystal Cove Online, on the other hand, had an incredible amount of time and quality put into it, and you can tell that the developers had a blast building this game. The amount of worldbuilding and accuracy to what happened in the episodes puts this is a completely different league than any other Scooby Internet game imo. One thing that really stood out to me when I replayed is the backgrounds. The backgrounds are really high quality and feel the same as the atmosphere in some of the episodes. My favorite of the backgrounds would be the Old Spanish Church, Fred's house, the oil platform, and Gatorsburg, all of which really captured the feeling of the episodes well. In addition, I loved that the backgrounds weren't just a "one-and-done" thing; they'd actually include stuff like billboards advertising (fake) things relevant to the episode each week. They'd also change elements of the game sometimes based on the theme of the episode, for example, making the townspeople have hearts above their heads to show they were lovestruck in the Aphrodite episode. I'll include pictures of my favorites below, but back in the day, I also made a pretty extensive guide to Crystal Cove Online, where you can check out all of the minions' designs. Another element of the game that I thought was really cool was that each week, there would be different minions of the episode's main villain that you'd have to battle. For example, the Slime Mutant's minions were sewer rats, the Gator People's minions were miniature toy gators, etc. These minions would relatively easy to defeat (you only had to hit them three times), but they would pop up during the quests that you'd do to solve the mystery in each episode. My favorite minions were the shrunken heads (the Headless Horror's minions), and something a friend and I have nicknamed the "Evil Robot Drummer Monkeys of Doom" (minions of The Phantom), which are basically evil toy monkeys that play the drums, as well as a few others I'll get into at the end of this post. The boss fights were perhaps the most anticipated part of each level, and I thought they were really well done. While there'd be times where you knew you had to defeat the monster, other times, the game would frame it as a complete surprise, which I thought was a neat touch. There would be times where you would talk to the rest of the gang, and you'd think you were going on another quest, but the game surprises you by having the boss fight come up. Many of the monsters were similar levels of difficulty, but there would be fights that were more difficult due to the villain having special powers. For example, Char Gar Gothakon could launch you into a corner with its screams, and the Manticore could fly and hurt you by landing on you. There would also be some levels where there were multiple boss fights if there were multiple villains, like the Humungonauts and the Gator People (although only two of the gator people were bosses, the gator woman was not). There would also occasionally be a shortcut to defeating the villain, such as the Cicada Creature level, where you could turn on vacuums placed around the room to make it lose half of its life. One mystery, the ghost truck, also had an alternate villain of the ghost truck driver (due to the fact that it would have been a bit ridiculous to have Shaggy and Scooby attempt to battle a truck with an umbrella lol). Towards the end of the game in levels 23-26, the boss fights became harder. The villains became more powerful and consistently had special abilities, such as Dead Justice being able to kick you with his horse, and the Obliteratrix having the ability to drop bombs to take away a significant portion of your life. In the final two levels, there were also two boss fights instead of one. In addition to the mysteries, there are also two sidequests to go with each mystery. The sidequests consist of helping various Crystal Cove citizens (Fred, Daphne, Sheriff Stone, Mayor Jones, and Angel) do one-off activities not related to a mystery, such as collecting items or performing tasks. The side-quests often involved the return of minions from the mysteries. In return for doing these tasks, you'd get either Scooby Snacks or a pieces of a map (or in one instance, a power-up). Once all the pieces of a map were found, you would have to find the location of a red X, which would have either Scooby Snacks or a costume under it. For those that don't know, I've been in the online fandom quite a while (since 2008), so I remember tuning into watch the SDMI episodes each week as they aired on Cartoon Network. While that was an exciting tradition in itself, part of the experience for me was also playing the level that went with each episode the day after. I remember being super impressed by the programmers' extensive worldbuilding and dedication to making these levels as accurate to the episodes as possible. To conclude this review, I thought it might be fun to do brief reviews of my five favorite levels. 5. Nightfright & Obliteratrix (Tie) Starting with Nightfright, I thought the atmosphere of Vincent Van Ghoul's mansion stayed really true to how it was in the episode. The level was able to capture the same feel of Shaggy and Scooby being isolated in a creepy mansion, and I really liked the background designs here. I also thought Nightfright's ability to charge you like a bull was a cool power. Similarly, the Obliteratrix level was fun because I felt like it captured the same feel as the episode, but also, I liked how the level was split across so many different locations (Darrow University, Hatecraft's Mansion, the Train Station and the Spanish Church). I also really liked the Obliteratrix's powers during the boss fight; the bombs presented a really cool challenge that hadn't been present in previous boss levels. 4. Fish Freaks This level was one of my favorites, because I thought the oil rig setting was particularly well-designed. I also thought the boss fight was one of the most interesting of the entire game, in order to accommodate the fact that there were multiple fish freaks. The level frames it as if there is a whole army of fish freaks (rather than just four), which are the minions of the week. In addition, the final boss fight is against a giant fish freak, who has the ability to jump into the water during the fight, and send three fish freaks to attack in his place (once you defeat them, the giant fish freak returns to fight you). I felt this level provided a particularly cool interpretation of the mystery in the way that other levels didn't. 3. The Freak This level was quite the finale to go out on, and they did a great job adapting this for the game, despite the episode not really having the traditional format of a mystery. The level is set up to be much more challenging than the previous ones. There are two boss fights, one of which was a scene added for the game where The Freak attacks them in the old Spanish Church. After the boss fight, you have to go through the underground caverns, which are extremely long compared to most settings in this game. As you make your way throughout the caverns, you are attacked by The Freak's shadows. Because this part of the game is so long, it can really drain your life fighting all the various minions, especially after just having the first boss fight. Once you reach the end of the caverns, the player is surprised by the fact that the second boss fight happens immediately. In this boss fight, The Freak is significantly more powerful, and has the ability to put a curse on you causing your own shadows to attack you. When he does this, you are unable to attack him until you break the curse by turning on the torches so you can't see your shadows. To this day, I still can't defeat the level without some sort of powerup lol. The level is designed to be so challenging that it drains most of your life before you even get to the second boss fight. That said, it's a fun kind of challenging, hence why this level is one of my favorites. 2. Shadowy Figure My favorite levels in the game tend to be the ones that capture the feeling of the episode the best, and I feel this level is the perfect example of that. Jones Manor is really well designed here, and I particularly like the living bear rugs being one of the minions lol (this is one of few levels that have multiple types of minions, the other one being ghost chairs). I also thought the Shadowy Figure's power to turn the lights off during the boss battle to be really neat. I don't have much else to say about this one; the atmosphere of the level feeling so much like the episode is the main reason for this being here. 1. The Bonus Mystery
Sadly, the game didn't continue after season 1, which was a huge disappointment because it would have been so cool to see some of the season 2 mysteries adapted into levels. Given the weapons in this game were things like umbrellas and ham bones, it also would have been hilarious to see Shaggy and Scooby try to defeat the Evil Entity with an umbrella haha. Despite the game not continuing into season 2, the gamemakers made one additional level, dubbed "the bonus mystery," as a grand finale to provide closure to the game. The bonus mystery consists of seven boss fights of different villains from season 1, including the Man-Crab, the Fright Hound, Char Gar Gothakon, the Cicada Creature, Aphrodite, the Manticore and The Freak. Throughout the mystery, the screen begins to get more and more foggy. At the end, once you win all seven boss fights, it's revealed that it was all a dream. Shaggy and Scooby wake up in the Spook Museum, and have a final conversation with Velma that "Crystal Cove is a safe town for now," which concludes the game. I thought it was super cool they'd give the game closure by making a final level, because they certainly could have just called it good with The Freak level and never updated the game again. It was a really nice little sendoff, and to me, shows how much the game developers put their all into this game. Overall, this was a really incredible game that I feel is the best Scooby-Doo Internet game we've ever gotten. The backgrounds were so well-designed, and it absolutely succeeded in adapting SDMI's mysteries into a fun, interesting video game. With how intricate and detailed the programming was, I feel this easily could have been a console game. This was such a cool tie-in to get viewers even more hyped up about the episodes each week. With Matthew Lillard confirming there's an upcoming project that allows kids to put themselves in a Scooby-Doo mystery, I would love to see something like this happen again. I realize this was a bit of a obscure piece of media to review, since I rarely hear anyone bring this game up anymore, but nonetheless I hope you enjoyed this review! Some concept art from the Velma Halloween special has been shared, giving some information about what will be in the upcoming special. According to Diário do Scooby on Twitter, the Halloween specials will feature zombies, as well as a performance from the Hex Girls. While Thorn appeared in the second season, it is now confirmed that Dusk and Luna will make an appearance. This concept art comes from artist Nuri Durr's website, which also includes pictures of Scrappy and the Great Gazoo, who may appear in the special.
In "A Bicycle Built for Boo," The Daily Babbler newspaper is misspelled numerous times throughout the episode. When the gang first follows the tire tracks, the sign outside says the "Daily Babble." There is a flashback to this scene later in the episode, and in the flashback, there is still an animation misspelling the name of the newspaper. However, it's actually a different animation error than the original one. In the flashback, the sign now reads "Daily Babber," which is still incorrect.
Our results for last week's poll were surprisingly close!
What is your favorite episode featuring a bear as the villain? Scarebear - 20 WrestleMania Mystery - 19 Hairy Scare of the Devil Bear - 19 One Minute Mysteries! - 4 TheDesk reports that the television network MeTV will be branching out and launching a new channel dedicated to classic cartoons, called MeTV Toons. The channel will feature classic Hanna-Barbera toons including Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and more. The channel will be launching on June 25, both on broadcast television and the streaming services Frndly and Philo. The press release was sent to Variety and TVLine yesterday. However, the articles were deleted because according to TheDesk, the press release was accidentally sent out too early. Since it has still been reported by a number of other smaller news outlets, I decided to make this post, however keep in mind that because the major news outlets did delete this article, there is a small possibility that plans will change for this channel since there has been no official press release confirming it.
The official website for the network is also now up: metvtoons.com |
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