Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated

This David Willis post convinced me I needed to see Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.  Unfortunately, twelve episodes in, it's far from perfect.  It's not even the best incarnation of Scooby-Doo**.

While there are flashes of brilliance, the problem is that it doesn't commit wholeheartedly to a direction for the show.  On the one hand, it gets wacky, is full of pop culture and self-references to the earlier incarnations of Scooby-Doo, and mercilessly treats Fred like an idiot.  On the other hand, it tries to tell an ongoing mystery and flesh out the backstories of the characters and explore their relationships.  These are not compatible directions; you can either go all Harvey Birdman or all Veronica Mars, but unless you're a genius and the stars align, you can't go all-out in both directions, and so the show comes across as halfhearted and a bit slapdash. 

Since A Pup Named Scooby-Doo already covered the "let's get wacky" ground about as well as it could be covered, I think this series needed to commit wholeheartedly to completely rebooting Scooby-Doo, writing a good season-long storyline and taking all the characters of Crystal Cove a little more seriously.  Then we might have something both brilliant and new in the Scooby-Doo universe.

Still, it's moderately entertaining, and through twelve episodes, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated hasn't fallen into the trap that the live action movies and many of the direct-to-videos features have fallen into.  It's deep in the subtext at times, but as I've said before, one of the enduring values of Scooby-Doo is the triumph of Reason.  It's good to see the SDMI folks seem to understand that.

** That would be the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.  While repetitively episodic with cheap animation, an irritating laugh track, and dumb mysteries, the original Scooby-Doo series had strongly written characters, good voice work, good sound effects, and good music -- there's nothing subtle here, but it sets the tone for each scene and clearly signals how you're supposed to react.