Scooby-Doo has survived Scrappy, Flim-Flam, a Velma series that the internet received like a cursed videotape, and more than half a century of Shaggy being permanently on the brink of starvation. Now he’s going anime. Yokoso Scooby-Doo! (“Welcome, Scooby-Doo!”) is the franchise’s first original anime series, and the first look at the show has been doing fresh laps of X this week, some months after Tubi first announced it in May.
Warner Bros. Animation produces, with Japan’s OLM, the studio behind the Pokémon anime, providing the animation. Itsuro Kawasaki directs; his credits include Baban Baban Ban Vampire, Cardfight!! Vanguard (2018) and The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil. The voices will be reassuringly familiar. Matthew Lillard, Shaggy since the 2002 live-action film, returns, as does Frank Welker, who has voiced Fred since 1969 and Scooby himself since 2002. Welker is, at this point, less a voice actor than a load-bearing wall of the Hanna-Barbera estate.
The premise is about as Scooby as it gets. Shaggy and Scooby visit Japan on what is billed as the ultimate foodie adventure and, while eating their way across the country, unwittingly unleash hundreds of mythical monsters. To round them up, they join forces with Scooby’s uncle Daisuke-Doo (a cheerfully grinning Shiba Inu, judging by the key art), a magical girl called Yume and a gadget whiz called Takumi. Fred, Daphne and Velma appear to have stayed at home, presumably to deal with fifty-odd years of insurance claims from collapsing mansions.
Veterans will spot the family resemblance to The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, the 1985 series in which Shaggy and Scooby let thirteen ghosts out of a chest and had to recapture them, with Vincent Price as a warlock and Scrappy along for their sins. Four decades on, the escapee count has gone up to hundreds, which is either ambition or inflation. Japan is a smart choice of setting, too, because few folklore traditions are as overstocked as the yokai. There are haunted umbrellas, river imps with a weakness for cucumbers and good manners, and women whose necks stretch at night. That’s a season of monster-of-the-week before anybody has even reached Kyoto.
The key art has some nice touches. The Mystery Machine has been reworked into something closer to a pick-up truck and wears the yellow number plate of a Japanese kei car, the sort of detail that suggests somebody on the production has actually been to Japan rather than just watched Lost in Translation twice. The big question, naturally, is whether the monsters are real or turn out to be a disgruntled property developer in a rubber mask. Scooby-Doo has flip-flopped on this for decades, and a show built around genuine folklore creatures would seem to have made its choice.
There’s no release date yet. The series will stream on Tubi in North America and air on Cartoon Network internationally, which ought to include the UK, though no British broadcast details have been confirmed. Whatever happens, it’s safe to predict that within five minutes of landing, Shaggy will have found a convenience store and cleared out its entire stock of onigiri. Some mysteries don’t need solving.
Join the conversation (0)