Scooby-Doo! Haunted Holidays - Toonstalgia

Scooby-Doo! Haunted Holidays

Premiered December 4, 2012

Quickly

The gang saves a toy store and Christmas.

Thoughts, Details and Recap

The opening parade balloons remind me of the Joker parade in Batman 1989. And the mystery of the toy store owner who has changed and is facing failure feels like Christmas to me. Christmas is my favorite holiday because I like the magic of it but every year that magic is paired with a possibility of something bad. Maybe that's just my adult awareness of the world. Blegh. Okay, that's my last bit of angst for this post.

This isn't the gang's first snowman monster. It's not even the third snowman. But it is a pretty good snowman though. 

The toy store owner is pretty creepy. He gives off Harbinger of Impending Doom vibes. The owner's nephew explains a family curse that he's blaming for the events.

The gang marches on tennis rackets out into the night in a blizzard to investigate a mansion that is filled with ice. I can only think about how much damage that house has suffered from the ice.

They return to the toy store to capture the bad guy and problems ensue.

As is traditional with these kinds of specials Santa shows up to help Shaggy and Scooby.

Anyway, they solve the mystery. Unmask one of the five other characters in the episode and the only reasonable suspect. Solid little episode. They didn't reinvent the wheel but they made a pretty nice wheel.

I wish all problems could be solved with an unmasking.

Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! - S02E25 - Pizza O'Possum's/The Curse of Half-Beard's Booty - Toonstalgia

Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! - Pizza O'Possum's/The Curse of Half-Beard's Booty

Season 2, Episode 25

Premiered March 18, 2014

Quickly

Two episodes in one.

Thoughts, Details and Recap

Scooby-Doo never seems to work well in shorter formats. Some episodes do use filler like extra chases to pad out the usual run time. But when they switch to half episodes, the episode can feel like it's over just as it started. When they switched to cartoon short style segments for the middle Scrappy-Doo era, they mostly dropped the mystery conceit in favor of...just stuff.

There are some episodes that don't have enough mystery to fill the typical 22 minute format but Pizza O'Possum's was not one of those episodes. It was a great concept (although it is just a Five Nights at Freddy's/Chuckie Cheese plot). The gang revisits Shaggy's childhood arcade. They find out an animatronic rat is terrorizing the arcade and driving away customers. This is a solid half sized episode but I would have preferred it to be a full episode.

The second half of the episode works much better because it built on the original Cutler episode from Scooby-Doo, Where are you!, A Clue for Scooby-Doo and the Easter eggs from other episodes in this series. The show earned this episode. 

Overall, this was half okay and half wonderful. And the surprisingly fun and good Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! ends with a step, step, splash.