Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988) Review

Tagline: “The New Scooby-Doo Movie You'll Howl For!”

Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf (1988) Review

 

The Scooby-Doo franchise has featured pretty much every type of monster imaginable since it first started as a Saturday morning cartoon in 1969, but in the 1980s, Hanna-Barbera started producing televised feature-length films, and one of the earliest examples had the biggest cast of classic monsters ever seen in animated form. I saw Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf as a re-run on Teletoon when I was a kid, and as a Scooby fan who was somewhere between casual and consistent, it stuck with me as one of the best animated movies featuring the character, but how does it hold up today?

Unlike later TV movies of the Great Dane’s namesake, this one stars just Scooby and Shaggy as the main characters, without any of the other Mystery Inc. gang members. It starts with Shaggy as a pro race car driver, winning a race with a range of tricks in his decked-out dragster. Count Dracula just so happens to be hosting an upcoming “Monster Road Rally” for some of the most famous horror personalities, including the Frankenstein Monster and his bride, the Mummy, and even a swamp monster. The Wolf Man has retired, though, but it also just so happens that the next man prophesized to become a werewolf is none other than Shaggy—crazy coincide, right? Dracula forces Shaggy to compete and makes him a deal: if he can win the race, he can become human again, but if he loses, he has to remain a werewolf forever. Winning won’t be easy, though, because Dracula has totally rigged the race to be against him, and the other competitors have some monstrous surprises of their own!

Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf doesn’t do a whole lot with the concept of Shaggy as a werewolf, and is more focused on the racing aspect of the story, but that isn’t a bad thing. The first half hour is a bit slow and focuses way too much on two very annoying characters: the Hunch Bunch. Brunch and Crunch are Drac’s hunchbacked henchmen; one of them has a pompous British accent and a monocle and is the “smarter” one of the pair, and the other has his tongue constantly hanging out and can’t speak properly. Luckily, their roles are diminished as the movie goes on. Shaggy is at the drive-in hanging out with his girlfriend Googie, as well as Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, when Shaggy undergoes his transformation, and all of them are transported to Transylvania in the bat-copter (maybe Drac leased it from Batman?). Googie only ever appeared in this one movie, and there’s not much to say about her. Scrappy had plenty of representation in movies and shows in the 80's, but this would actually be his last role until the live-action Scooby-Doo movie in 2002, though he plays a pretty small part here.

Googie and Scrappy are basically a mobile pit crew for Shaggy and Scooby once the race starts, and the race is what I remembered best about this movie, because it makes up more than half the runtime. I’d completely forgotten about Brunch and Crunch, as well as the whole Shaggy-becoming-a-werewolf setup in that first half hour. Once it gets to the race, though, Reluctant Werewolf gets much more consistently funny and entertaining. There are Transylvanian peasants standing by watching the race and listening to the commentators, frequently providing apathetic “yays” or “boos” which never gets old. Dracula commentates along with his wife, Vanna Pira, who has a major crush on Shaggy for some reason and makes quite a few annoying jokes, such as when she says she’s going to provide “colour commentary” and then just starts listing all the colours she can see.

If you have a problem with puns made about monsters, I don’t think you’ll be able to handle this movie at its best. I mean, even a character named Shaggy becoming a werewolf, the hairiest of all monsters (next to Cousin Itt) is in itself a joke. What I appreciate is the rapidity and variety of jokes throughout the race. I couldn’t possibly list them all; a few of the visual gags I find particularly amusing include the mummy’s car using bandages like rope to ensnare a competitor’s car, Frankenstein’s Monster’s car using a lightning cannon shaped like a giant bolt, and swamp thing’s car shooting disgusting bog muck at the witch sisters. Many of the monsters’ names/identities are also joke versions. For example, I like that instead of a generic animated skeleton he’s called Mr. Bone Jangles and talks like he’s a cool old rack of bones. Every monster gets at least one moment to shine. 

Though he’s not a participant in the race, Dracula gets the most screentime of any monster and is often unintentionally sabotaged by the Hunch Bunch. He pronounces Shaggy's name “Shaw-Gi” and is probably one of the funniest versions of Dracula I can think of despite still being an antagonist. It often cuts away to the Count’s attempts at thwarting Shaggy and Scooby, and I found these bits inconsistently funny. Some are in the spirit of good-old-fashioned cartoon hijinks, but others are kind of lame. These bits do prevent the race from feeling repetitive or monotonous, though, and while there are many overhead shots of the cars, the sequences throughout the race are never boring or tiresome. One thing that bugged me was how every monster had a unique vehicle design that complimented their most obvious attributes except for the Wolf Man. Shaggy’s car is just a decked-out VW bug, but nothing about it makes me think werewolf. A quick note on Shaggy’s outfit: he’s wearing his red t-shirt instead of the traditional green one, and from what I remember, every time Shaggy wore his red shirt, it was a good movie.

Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf is still fun to watch all these years later and stands out as a much more original werewolf movie than you might expect, even if not specifically because Shaggy himself is a werewolf. It’s like watching a cartoon version of Mario Kart with classic monsters instead of Nintendo characters (now that would be a game I'd love to play), mixed with some of the usual Scooby-Doo antics in a premise that’s different from the standard mystery solving. It’s one of the best old school Scooby-Doo movies, though perhaps not as great overall as some others that came later. Between reviewing Scooby-Doo! and the Loch Ness Monster a couple years ago, rewatching Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island last Halloween for the first time since I was a kid, and now revisiting this one, I’m thinking I may need to rewatch some more Scooby-Doo movies from my childhood, to see which others still remain entertaining all these years later.