Scooby-Doo! Blue Falcon, le retour

My daughter and I recently enjoyed Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon (2012) on MAX. The plot follows Scooby and Shaggy's journey to a California convention featuring Blue Falcon memorabilia. A ghastly ghoul resembling Mr. Hyde emerges, threatening convention guests. Can Scooby and Shaggy channel their inner Blue Falcon to save the day?

Directed by Michael Goguen (Batman: The Brave and the Bold), the film features the voices of Frank Welker (Transformers: Dark of the Moon), Mindy Cohn (The Facts of Life), Grey Griffin (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), and Matthew Lillard (Scream).

This is a magical addition to the Scooby universe with a delightful animation style, enjoyable settings, and character depictions. The voices align perfectly with the characters, and the villain, Mr. Hyde, is particularly entertaining. The story unfolds with fun twists, turns, and a satisfying ending reveal.

In conclusion, Scooby-Doo! Mask of the Blue Falcon is a must-watch for Scooby-Doo fans. I would give it a 6/10 and strongly recommend it.

This movie is a treat for Scooby-Doo and cartoon fans alike. I found it funny and entertaining, with gorgeous animation and wonderful voice acting, most notably the Mystery Gang. Outside of Blue Falcon and Dynomutt there are countless other Hanna Barbara references, mostly in the form of fan costumes. From the more well known to the rather obscure, and some I surely missed. Look out for a blue version of Elektra from Teen Force / Space Stars!

This movie makes we wish WB would put more classic Hanna Barbara characters in their own animated adventures. I would love to see Dynomutt and BF in a classically animated movie, as well as for them to release the rest of the classic series.

Highly recommended!

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.

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.

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!