Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School

Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School (1988) is the third in an on-going string of Scooby-Doo movies first launched in 1979 with Scooby-Doo Goes Hollywood. In Ghoul School, Shaggy lands a job as a boarding school gym teacher. Wait, what? Back up. When have we ever known Shaggy to work at a conventional job? Sure, driving around in the Mystery Machine and solving vaguely supernatural mysteries is a vocation, of sorts, but I wouldn't call it a job. And Shaggy is one of the most notorious slackers in American pop culture history. And we're expected to believe he took a job as a gym instructor? Man, this is hard to swallow even for a Scooby-Doo movie. Anyway, back to the plot.....

Shaggy takes a job as a boarding school gym teacher, and you can't have Shaggy without Scooby. And unfortunately, in this regrettable time in Scooby-Doo history, you can't have Shaggy and Scooby without Scrappy. Scooby's nephew Scrappy is widely regarded as one of the worst characters in television history, not to mention the history of animation.

For starters, Scrappy is completely unnecessary. Scrappy was first introduced with 1979's revamping of the Scooby-Doo format, "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo." Facing declining ratings and a tired format, Hannah-Barbera sought to inject some new life into the show by adding Scrappy as the brave and precocious counterpart to the lazy and cowardly Shaggy and Scooby. It was obvious that the producers had to do something to shake up the show, but adding Scrappy to the line-up was not the answer, particularly starting in 1980, when Fred, Daphne, and Velma were written out of the show entirely. The show further changed format, scaling back episodes to 7 minute shorts, abandoning the quasi-supernatural mystery aspect in favor of a purely "comedic" slant. The new short comedy format served to bring in the necessary ratings, mostly from the Saturday morning viewership of children.

But from a critical standpoint, the addition of Scrappy-Doo was an abject failure. The new format alienated older viewers, those who had been hooked by the original "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!". Scrappy's precociousness and high-pitched voice were annoying to no end, and his trademark battle cry, "Da da da da da da, puppy power!" was enough to make any self-respecting Scooby fan vomit on the spot. More insidious were the changes wrought in Scrappy's wake. Abandoning the mystery format was practically a death knell. The show became increasingly mindless, slapstick, and so boring as to be practically unwatchable.

It is under the auspices of this new format that Ghoul School operates. Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy arrive for Shaggy's new job (in a weirdly futuristic red-and-white Mystery Machine) at what he thinks is a girls boarding school but what is actually a ghouls boarding school. Hyuck hyuck hyuck, what a knee-slapper! The trio are greeted at the door by a disembodied hand and soon meet the headmistress, whose hilarious resemblance to Liza Minelli could not have been accidental. Shaggy reluctantly agrees to teach gym to the students, the daughters of classic monsters such as Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy. Shaggy must train the girls to compete in a volleyball tournament against the boys of the neighboring military school. But when the girls are kidnapped by a fringe ghoul looking to harness their monster energy, Shaggy must team up with the military students to bring them back.

There's no mystery here. No clues, no flashbacks, no red herrings. The plot is straightforward and linear, and the movie tries to rely on comedy to move the story. I say "tries" because the comedy is largely composed of terrible sight gags and a plethora of horrendous puns that verge on sins against nature. But mostly, this film just feels stretched and subdued. The director has taken the premise for a half-hour episode and stretched it into 90 minutes, and things wear a little thin as a result. For instance, the volleyball match between the ghouls and the military students is stretched into about 12 minutes of screentime, every second of which is crammed with sight gags and slapstick. And while the physical humor is ramped up to an intolerable level, the characterizations have been toned down. Shaggy and Scooby's trademark cowardice and laziness are nowhere near their usual outrageousness, and even the perennially annoying Scrappy is toned down so much that sometimes you even forget he's there. Which is a good thing, but it signals a lack of effort on the filmmakers' part, and that's just one more thing that makes this Scooby-Doo movie worthy of the trash bin.

Storyline & plot: 2/10
Cinematography & effects: 3/10
Music & mood: 5/10
Performances: 3/10

The Reverend says: 3/10