| abstract
| - The year is 1997. Most people would have considered that the Scooby-Doo franchise had pretty much run its course. It'd been 6 years since A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was canceled, and the only things that remained of the franchise included a made-for-TV-movie in 1994 called Scooby Doo in Arabian Nights, and reruns of exploits from decades past. Then, out of nowhere, came something totally unexpected. Children and parents everywhere stared in amazement at one thing: a trailer packed into the cassettes of several Warner Bros films... The trailer had sleek animation, dark colors, and featured a seemingly truly dark and potentially scary movie... and it featured Scooby-Doo and Shaggy running for their lives. The title? Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. The tagline? This time, the monsters are real. It was short, but it was enough to send kids everywhere into a furor. Cut to 1998. Parents and kids grab the video off of video and rental stores' shelves. They're expecting something fun, nothing more dangerous than the average Scooby mystery. To their horror-filled delight, the latter assumption turned out wrong. In honor of Daphne's birthday, Fred invites her, Scooby, Shaggy, and Velma to a long-awaited Mystery Inc. reunion. The five of them travel to New Orleans in order to find real monsters to discuss on Daphne's talk show. After effortlessly exposing several creature impostors, the gang accepts an offer to visit Moonscar Island. The island is home to a French chili pepper plantation owner named Simone Lenoir, and has become the site of several disappearances over the years. While there, our heroes grapple with zombies and voodoo, death becomes a real threat, and the adventure grows legitimately dark and scary for a kid's film. With a warmly received journey into relatively mature writing, Zombie Island marked a, or the, high-point in the Scooby-Doo franchise. The film, as mentioned before, is beautifully animated -- moreso than any incarnation before and still unmatched today -- with a literally dark and realistic feel to it. On top of that, it featured a somewhat cynical/mature look at what happened to Mystery Inc. after their adventures were done (which would be touched on again the The Movie, but with less success). Characters were more fleshed out and three-dimensional, especially the newly empowered Daphne. The irrelevant pop songs of past cartoons gave way to Alternative and Metal music. The story appealed to older viewers with honest-to-goodness death as part of the backstory, and the end result for the gang if they didn't win. And the best part of it all? No contrived story with a guy in a mask... just like the ads promised, they were real. Stinkin'. Zombies. Probably the only complaint the movie generated was, "it's too scary for young Scooby fans." The success of Zombie Island lead to the creation of three more videos covering mysteries Scooby and the gang would solve as adults. However, while they took many of the same conventions as Zombie Island, they also brought back several of the old ones. For example, in Scooby-Doo and The Witch's Ghost, Daphne returned to being The Chick, the animation wasn't as dark, and there was even an old-fashioned Scooby-Doo Hoax in addition to the Witch's Ghost. The success of the new movies caused a complete revival in the franchise, bringing What's New Scooby Doo, and a series of newer increasingly cheaper animated videos to the TV screen.
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