It appears the Behind the Scoobs account is becoming the account to watch for Scooby concept art, as they've just posted another piece of news from a scrapped project. Their most recent post reveals that the villain in Scooby-Doo and the Haunted High Rise would have been Johnny B. Warlock, as well as an image of the villain's design and bike. The post also reveals that the film was in production in 2021, confirming that it likely would have come out in 2023 had it been able to release.
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We have another piece of news this week shared by the Behind the Scoobs Instagram account, although this one isn't about Scoob! Holiday Haunt. Some very early concept art of the Hex Girls by Jim Stenstrum was posted on Instagram, which can be seen above. The art reveals an interesting detail - the Hex Girls originally had completely different names that were references to famous witch characters from television shows. Thorn was originally named Sabrina, after Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Dusk and Luna were originally named Samantha and Serena, as a reference to the name of the main character of Bewitched and her sister. In addition, Luna was originally going to have black hair instead of Thorn, while Thorn was planned to be a brunette. Despite originally having the same color hair, Dusk was originally going to have long blonde hair.
In addition, the Behind the Scoobs account also revealed some concept art from a "Young Hex Girls" spinoff from 2000 on Instagram. Update 1/10: The sculpt/topology model for the Krampus has been shared.
Update 1/9: Another storyboard animatic featuring the gang celebrating Christmas has been posted on Behind the Scoobs Instagram account. After the monster design for the film was posted last Monday, some additional info from the film has leaked throughout this weekend. The Behind the Scoobs Instagram account has been posting a number of storyboard animatics showing scenes from Scoob! Holiday Haunt. As of the time of this post, three animatics have been shared on that account. One features the gang meeting the chef after Shaggy and Scooby have a wild ride with a man who is presumably Fred's uncle. Another features Shaggy and Scooby running into some creepy dolls in what appears to be a cave. The third storyboard animatic involves Shaggy and Scooby being forced to clean Chef Dave's kitchen after they make a mess, and also includes Chef Dave showing the gang a very fancy chef outfit. The storyboard animatics seem to allude to the fact that Chef Dave was not necessarily just a one-off suspect, but it seems like Chef Dave had a decent-sized role in the film with multiple appearances. I'm not going to directly include the link to the Instagram reels, as it's a more of a legal grey area than a traditional unreleased Scooby filmed, considering that the film was high budget and was a tax-writeoff. It's exciting that some animatics are being released though, and it looks like it would have been a great movie! The plot of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo's "Doo Not Disturb" seems to be heavily inspired by the film Psycho, including the culprit dressing up as a dead mother, and the scene where Mother pulls back the shower curtain to reveal Scooby.
To kick off the weekly polls for the year, we're going to start with a new poll series suggested by longtime reader and commenter of this blog, Greybishop. GB and I were talking about the fact that there's nowhere we could find that a cohesive list of quirks that Daphne had in Be Cool. That morphed into GB suggesting a poll where people got to vote on their favorite of Daphne's many quirks from Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!. Because the list is so long (given she had a different quirk each episode), I decided to split it up by season. We'll be doing season 1 this week, season 2 the next, and then doing a final Winner's Circle round on January 21. Since Daphne had so many quirks, I put the episode name after the quirk in parentheses, so that it is easier to remember which episode each quirk went with. I want to give a huge thank you to Greybishop for rewatching a majority of these episodes to come up with the list! Here are the results for last week's poll:
What is your favorite Scrappy episode from the Cartoon Network VHS tapes? The Nutcracker Scoob - 24 A Halloween Hassle at Dracula's Castle - 18 Wedding Bell Boos - 14 The Ghoul, The Bat and the Ugly - 7 Glynis Johns, the voice of Miss Grimwood, passed away earlier today according to the Associated Press. Glynis had just turned 100 years old back in October, and died of natural causes in her nursing home in Los Angeles, CA. Besides Miss Grimwood, Glynis was known for being an actress with a robust filmography, with roles dating all the way back to 1938. Prior to her death, she was one of the last living actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood and classical years of British cinema. In addition, she was also a stage actress and recording artist, best known for her song "Send in the Clowns." RIP to Glynis!
There have been some rumors the past few weeks about the MultiVersus game having a brand deal with McDonald's, and now, it appears those rumors are true. On the MultiVersus Reddit, some images of Happy Meals toys in Belgium featuring Shaggy from MultiVersus were posted. The Happy Meal Toy appears will be a tin with stickers and cards featuring the playable characters in MultiVersus. While Shaggy's design remains unchanged, some people have pointed out that the other characters look a bit different than they do in the game. The toys have been reportedly been releasing in Europe recently, but no details have been announced about when these toys will be available outside of Europe. Here's the description found on one of the Happy Meals in Europe. From Superman to Bugs Bunny – all your favorite heroes come together here! Discover the cool memory cards, puzzles and stickers from the Warner Bros® Multiversus. Collect them now in the Happy Meal® and play together with your friends. Check out an image of the tins below (credit for the images goes to skylanderrobbe on the linked Reddit page). Update 1/3: A Velma tin is also being released, which can be seen below.
Prior to a couple of weeks ago, I was completely unaware of the rich and complicated history that surrounded the making of Scooby-Doo's early video games. While Scooby-Doo's Maze Chase had a relatively swift and uncomplicated release as far as we know, the next several Scooby-Doo video games in 1986-1991 faced a number of development problems. Although Scooby-Doo and the Castle Mystery survived the tumultuous development process, it was originally going to be a completely different game. Not only this, but there was originally going to be a game in between 1986's Castle Mystery and 1991's Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, but it never saw the light of day. Join me in the following article, as I share the complicated history of the early era of Scooby-Doo video games. According to Games That Weren't, Scooby-Doo and the Castle Mystery was originally going to be an 8-bit Laserdisc game set for release in 1986 released by Elite Games, and the entire gang was supposed to appear in the game. There would have text-based descriptive cutaway scenes in between the game's eight action scenes, as well as sound effects to correspond with the characters' actions. This all likely sounds very normal now, but at the time, the concept was something that hadn't ever been seen before on a 8-bit game. A lot of research was done into developing this ambitious concept for a game. Programmers consulted the current animators and artists of the Scooby-Doo series at the time, in order to ensure that the animations would be as accurate as possible. The game was originally announced in autumn 1985 in Computer and Video Games Magazine. The advertisement originally detailed a mystery advertised as "the first ever computer cartoon" featuring a shark, and the Miner 49er on the cover. An October 1985 date was originally announced. Here was the original description of the game, courtesy of RetroArcadia: Whether he's being hotly pursued at midnight over an eerie castle rooftop, or scrabbling around in the darkness of a creepy old dungeon the hapless Scooby is always at the centre of the action. In his first computer cartoon, Scooby goes hurtling through underground caverns in a run-away coal truck and finds that even a leisurely paddle with Shaggy in a rickety old rowing boat can turn out to be an unofficial attempt at the waterspeed record when he's pursued by an angry shark! Scooby-Doo: The Computer Cartoon contains over 100 sometimes creepy, often crazy scenes of startling animated action! We think it's going to start a whole new craze in computer games! What do you say, Scooby? Scooby Dooby Doo! The October 1985 obviously never ended up happening, and developers took on a more ambitious mindset with the game. No announcement of the postponement was ever made, except an indirect one when a "programmers wanted" advertisement was published in the January 1986 issue of Computer and Video Games Magazine, on the same page as a picture of the Scooby-Doo in the Castle Mystery game. In February 1986, Computer and Video Games magazine published an exclusive interview with Steve Wilcox, who worked for Elite, directly saying "Despite what you’ve read in other magazines, Elite still plans to release its cartoon computer adventure, Scooby Doo in the Castle Mystery, for the 48K Spectrum." Wilcox announced the game would be coming out finally in April, but it would be "different" than what was announced in October 1985. The issue also advertised a competition in which 50 free copies of the game would be given away with release, along with a free Scooby t-shirt and poster. We also learn the writer of the advertisement apparently loved alliteration, as the game was advertised with the tagline "a marvellous mystery with creepy and crazy scenes." In April 1986, the game never released, and there was silence from Elite Games. After eight months of waiting, a random announcement was placed in the December 1986 issue of Computer and Video Games Magazine saying "after months of development, it's finally here!" The reason for the delays eventually surfaced: the developers were facing significant issues carrying out their ambitious plan of "the first animated computer game." The animations were bare-bones and not nearly as robust as was originally planned. For those who haven't played the original game, here is how the final animations turned out: Scooby-Doo in the Castle Mystery wasn't the only abandoned game in the franchise, though! What would have been the second Scooby-Doo video game in 1989 was entirely abandoned! Microillusions Gaming had made plans to put out a game simply called Scooby-Doo for the Commodore 64. Microillusions had recently struck a deal with Hanna-Barbera to make video game adaptions of their most popular cartoons. However, that deal came to a halt when they released The Jetsons game...without getting Hanna-Barbera's approval first. Hanna-Barbera cut all ties with Microillusions and ended the contract with the company, which caused Microillusions to go bankrupt. The game would have featured Scooby trying to solve four different mysteries of an Sea Aztec God, Ski Village, Haunted Mansion, and Ghost Town. The first three levels were completed and were leaked online in 2014 by one of the game's developers, but Microillusions had just begun work on the Ghost Town level when Hanna-Barbera ended the contract, so it was never completed. Here's an image of the main menu courtesy of Games That Weren't. While the actual third video game, Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, didn't face the complications that Castle Mystery and Scooby-Doo (1989) did, it was originally not going to be a Scooby-Doo game! The original game was going to feature a rat named Stig as the main character, but he was replaced with Scrappy. You can enter a cheat code to play as the original character, Stig the Rat, according to StrategyWiki. This wasn't the only game where there was an original concept before Scooby was attached - our first Scooby-Doo video game, Scooby-Doo's Maze Chase, originally also featured different main characters that were mice! The Three Blond Mice were originally going to be the main characters, but the company didn't feel the game would sell well enough on its own, so the game was redesigned at the last minute to include Scooby.
I had no idea what a complicated history this early era of Scooby games had, but it was really interesting researching these! I had a lot of fun putting this article together. A big thank you to Juan for suggesting this article idea! A few weeks after the character design for Chef Dave was revealed following Andre Braugher's passing, another character design from Scoob! Holiday Haunt has been shared. The Behind the Scoobs Instagram page has posted the designs for the Krampus, which would have been the villain in the movie. Check out the gallery of the seven character design images below. Thanks so much to Jamesp for sharing this link!
A listing has just popped up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble announcing the release of a new picture book featuring the Hex Girls. The book, Velma and the Mystery of the River Ghost, will be released on September 3, 2024. The story will be written by Robb Pearlman, with Pedro Riquelme doing the illustrations. The picture book will have 32 pages and will be published by Running Press. While the whole gang will appear, it seems that Velma and The Hex Girls will be the main characters in the book based on the description. Here's the description:
The Mystery Inc. gang has no idea that their class trip will include a visit from the ghostly Captain Barnacle. And when Shaggy, Scooby-Doo, Daphne, and Fred all become seasick, it’s up to Velma to try to track down the passengers’ stolen backpacks and the Hex Girls’ musical gear! Could the mysterious dust on tarps and the deck floor be a clue? Join Velma and the Hex Girls as they work together to solve another spooky case in this all-new, all-hands-on-deck Mystery Inc. Picture Book mystery. |
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