My favourite part of Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated is the concept of there being other mystery gangs and the idea of there having been multiple gangs just like them in the past. In my opinion, this concept should be explored more in the Scoobyverse.
Alternatively, we could have another multiple "timelines" version where the gang that experiences real monsters are videogame characters who are sentient by their own right, but haven't yet figured it that they are in fact videogame characters.
And the best part about the Scooby Doo fandom sect that has seen mystery incorporated is them somehow forgetting that Fred, canonically, has stolen a body.
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Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase
Original release date: October 9, 2001
Date watched: March 12, 2022
Runtime: 75 minutes
Synopsis: One of the gang’s old friends made a video game about their adventures! How wonderful! Oh dear. It seems that the gang has been trapped inside the video game, and if they die in the video game, they of course die in real life. The only way to escape is to beat the game! The gang progresses through to the final level, where they find their virtual doppelgangers, the versions of them made specifically for the game. They team up to clear the final level and escape, solving the mystery in the process.
Culprit: That asshole, Bill! He was jealous that his baseball game didn’t win a prize or something, and he was stupid enough to make the phantom virus keep saying random baseball shit.
Guest star(s): Gary Sturgis (Ebon from Static Shock) as the Phantom Virus
Trivia: This is the final of the four direct-to-video films to be animated by Japanese studio Mook Animation. They will be missed dearly.
Ratings
Spookiness: The way in which this movie is spooky is maybe not the way it intended to be spooky. There’s just not a lot of unexplored territory in the whole “trapped inside a video game” trope. For a lot of kids, that’s just gonna sound like a dream. The spookiness comes from how self-aware the digital versions of the gang are. Once they reach the final level, rather than complete the game, they just start chilling in kind of an idyllic Purgatory of their own creation, delaying the inevitable by simply choosing not to do it. Some wild existential implications there. MARINA: 2.5 LAURA: 2.5
Characterization: This movie perhaps knows it has a weak cast of movie-exclusive characters and therefore spends little time with them. More interesting is the digital gang, with intentionally retro designs that harken back to the era of red-shirt Shaggy. It also gives the real gang an opportunity to play off their doubles, which makes for some decently interesting character work. That’s about the extent of it, though: “decently interesting.” MARINA: 3 LAURA: 3.5
Overall: Since we know that this is the final Scooby movie that this particular animation studio worked on, it helps us with some speculation. This movie sure did have a lot of very stylistically different setpieces that perhaps were from movies that ended up getting scrapped or reworked. As a result, it feels like far less of a cohesive whole than its three predecessors. It’s, like, fine, and everything. But “fine” is a step down from where the standards have been set the last few movies. MARINA: 3 LAURA: 2.5
Outlandishness: As I mentioned earlier, the digital versions of the gang express open and honest acknowledgment of not only the fact that they are digital facsimiles of real people who inhabit a fictional game world, but also the fact that if they never complete the game, they can exist in a kind of post-conflict bliss in the final level. Also, in a post-credits scene, it’s revealed that they made the digital Scooby real? Love it. More of this, please. MARINA: 5 LAURA: 5
Brevity: This movie avoids pacing issues by virtue of the fact that over half of it is set in a digital world where the setting can and does change abruptly. A few of the game levels get slightly extended sequences, whereas some of them are shown in a musical montage. The crux of the movie takes place with the digitized gang alongside their digital counterparts. That part felt like it was as long as it needed to be, but I do wish they had done a little more with the concept. MARINA: 3.5 LAURA: 3
Final ratings: MARINA: 3.4; LAURA: 3.3
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Voice actor: selena Gomez
Parents: shadow phantom glitch x the phantom virus
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