Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon

Having grown up watching Scooby-Doo on weekend morning TV and having a son that loves Scooby-Doo as well, then it took no convincing of me to sit down and watch "Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon" when my son asked me to watch it with him.

"Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon" is true to every other Scooby-Doo animated adventure, for better or worse. Sure, there is the familiarity aspect to it, but at the same time there is also something new, as it was quite nice to see superheroes make an appearance in a Scooby-Doo adventure.

The animation is good and the art style is very much in tune with the traditional art that defined Scooby-Doo ever since the early beginning.

As it always is with a Scooby-Doo animated movie, the voice acting is great, and they got a good ensemble of cast members to perform the voices of the various characters. It is always nice to have the familiar voices of Frank Welker, Mindy Cohn, Grey DeLisle and Matthew Lillard in these movie.

There is an abundance of references and nods towards other Hanna-Barbera cartoons. And it was actually a fun way that they put them into this particular Scooby-Doo adventure.

"Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon" is definitely one of the better animated Scooby-Doo movies I have seen in a while.

My rating of "Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon" is 6 out of 10 stars.

This movie is incredibly boring right from the get go. The art style in this film was so washed out and old. I would think that at the time it came out it would stay updated. The story about going to the comic book convention was awesome, but once it started it just lost it's way. The side characters were dull and held no meaning. Not to mention Velma was rude the entire movie. It was so out of character for her to be so mean. The voice acting was great and that's the only great thing about this film. Overall, this movie is forgettable.

Would it be fair to say: "They had me at 'hello'"? Here we have Scooby Doo catering to comic book nerds like me, the type of adult fan boys that remember when Magneto ran the X-Men, the type of fan boys that still drool over the classic Hannah-Barbara superhero cartoons that warped us as children, molding us into fanboys even though most of them came out a decade or two before we were born...

And Scooby Doo goes to a comic con full of references to those beloved cartoons, even dressing as one of the characters in a Scooby-Cosplay.

Then, the Big Bad is in the same vein as the classic Scooby and...my floor is covered with drool and my girlfriend is wondering what she's doing with a ten-year-old stuck in an adult's body.

it is super fun, it is a total throw back to the Classic Scooby of old...and unlike the Goblin King, is still has enough to appeal to the fans that were created from the movies and not from the old cartoons.

I haven't seen any Scooby Doo cartoons since I watched some of the feature length animations made in the 1990s, but I was lured into this one by references to Frankenstein Junior and The Herculoids on the DVD cover (wasted on most U.K. purchasers, to whom these characters are virtually unknown, unless they are incurable fanboys or cult TV nerds like me). I doubt the number of people who have heard of the Herculoids or remember Frankenstein Junior and the Impossibles from the late '60's in Blighty run to three figures. Anyhow, this is all a bit of a letdown, as these characters are represented purely by a hot air balloon of Frankie and an amusing sequence when Freddy, Daphne and Velma dress up as three of the Herculoids to get into the rather sparsely attended Comic Convention where this particular adventure takes place (I wasn't really expecting the originals to be shoehorned into the format, but still...). There are numerous background gags involving other H-B characters, and it's all good fun for freeze-framing fans, although South Park did it first and better with Imaginationland.

Warners, like Paramount with Star Trek, are very good at biting the hand that feeds them, and the rest of the cameos by obscure 1960s characters are represented by ill-fitting costumes worn by overweight and shabby convention-goers. These caricatures are quite funny and on-the-nose, and provide most of the fun in this routine yarn, which revolves around Scooby and Shaggy being fans of Dynomutt and the Blue Falcon, a sort of robot Scooby clone and deliberately bland super-hero from what Jimmy Carr memorably termed "the Scrappy-Doo years", that awful dead period of the 1970s and 1980s pre-Simpsons and Cartoon Network, when virtually all animated cartoons were unwatchable.

Fanboy writers Marly Halpern-Graser and Michael Ryan, and director Michael Goguen, all with much similar fare behind them, litter the background with posters and sight gags recalling all the obscure Hanna-Barbera creations of the 1960s I love, and appear to feel the same way I and many of my generation do about the vicious and nasty versions of our childhood heroes presently being offered to today's deprived youth. Ironically, while successfully making their point, they've produced a film far more cynical than all the episodes of Family Guy and South Park combined, in which every character outside the regular cast is bitter and twisted and phoney. Star Trek fans and Comic Convention attendees have been so cruelly (and often accurately) lampooned over the last two decades that they must have the hides of rhinos to still be showing up at these things.

What's left to say? Matthew Lillard's Shaggy is as pitch perfect as ever, but I'm not so sure about the new audible Scooby Doo, who is much more coherent than he used to be. When did that happen? It's not dull, and the animation is fine (the green goo sequence is particularly well done, and a long way from when the characters simply ran from left to right), but the welcome critique of the ludicrous Batman situation, whereby the classic and most popular version of the character from the '60s is being deliberately sat on while Warners persist with endless reboots of the one who dares not even speak his name (while providing a bonanza for bootleggers as the most pirated TV series in history) will obviously go over the heads of the kids... and may even have gone over the heads of the Warners suits! Jeff Bennett provides such a perfect imitation of Adam West that I actually assumed it was him doing the voice--not unreasonable, as he's played similar roles on numerous other occasions merrily sending himself up. And Billy West of Futurama does a mean Paul Lynde impersonation!

This is another entertaining enough 'Movie' that sees the gang going to a comic convention, and a mystery of course then developing.

These 'original movie's' that Warner Brothers churn out to DVD are hit and miss affairs, but this one on the whole is good fun, with Matthew Lillard and Fred Welker on good form as Shaggy and Scooby. I didn't like what they did to the character of Velma though.

While not spectacular, this is a decent Scooby outing.