SCOOBY DOO AND THE RELUCTANT WEREWOLF (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Hanna-Barbera's 1968 WACKY RACES was a concatenation of almost every type of joke-category the company ever used-- hillbilly humor, Stone Age humor, horror-humor. So it's fairly inevitable, and maybe even appropriate, that when H-B began mining jokey horror in the SCOOBY DOO franchise, they figured out a way to inject car-race humor into one of the Scoob-shows.

WEREWOLF was one of three SCOOBY DOO TV-movies which dispensed with the mystery-solving angle of the original series, as well as dumping Fred, Daphne and Velma. Scooby, Shaggy and Scooby's obnoxious cousin Scrappy are the stars of all three, though WEREWOLF adds a little feminine interest by giving Shaggy a rare girlfriend, one Googie, never seen before or since.

Every year Count Dracula holds a "Monster Road Rally" in which several monsters compete. Though some of these are generic fiends like a mummy, a skeleton and a pair of witches, the group includes a version of Frankenstein and his bride, a Jekyll-Hyde type oddly named "Jackyll and Snide," and a swamp-monster who doesn't look like DC's Swamp Thing but uses the exact same name. The only monster not represented is the werewolf, and the only werewolf available decides not to compete any more. For some reason Dracula just can't stand not to have a werewolf in the race, so his vampire bride "Vanna Pira" (who talks about the race-prizes the way Vanna White announces Wheel-of-Fortune prizes) finds a new subject for werewolf-dom in America, none other than Shaggy Rogers. 

WEREWOLF breaks down into two equally dull plot-movements. First Drac sends his goony (and unfunny) henchmen to the U.S. to make sure Shaggy turns into a werewolf, and then to get him, Scooby, Scrappy and Googie to Transylvania. Then, once the vamp-lord has cudgeled Shaggy into participating in the race (in exchange for the promise to lift the werewolf curse), Drac turns into Dick Dastardly, desperately trying to make sure that no matter who else wins, Shaggy loses. This development makes Drac the fall guy to assorted slapstick gags, all very dull except to tykes who've never seen them before. (This film is very much directed at little kids; in 1988 we're a long way before the SCOOBY franchise began to mine meta-humor.) The other monsters and their race-cars are pretty stupid, with two exceptions. One fiend is a King Kong riff whose initials are "G.K." and I won't spoil the joke by revealing what the letters stand for. The other is Vanna Pira, who adds to Drac's miseries by uttering various "dumb-girl" remarks, in keeping with 1980s jokes about Vanna White's perceived lack of intelligence. 

Most SCOOBY movies are repetitive in one way or another, but WEREWOLF is one of the worst. The script doesn't even make a token effort to establish the rules for making a mortal into a werewolf, and it's so Shaggy-centric that Scooby and Scrappy barely have anything to do. Googie gets a little more action at the opening, when she thinks Shaggy is simply being childish when he begins wolfing out, but during the race-segments she and Scrappy just serve as pit-crew to Shaggy and Scooby's race-car. It's a shame because the script's basic situation had a little more potential. For instance, Vanna Pira repeatedly claims that she thinks Were-Shaggy is cute. What if she'd promised to betray Drac to help Shaggy overcome his curse, but only if he became her lover and rejected Googie? That would have added a little spice to all the vanilla shenanigans, at least. As it stands, WEREWOLF's only distinction is that it was the last story in the Scooby-franchise to use Scrappy Doo as a regular character.

As one often sees in monster-mashes, the only monsters that make WEREWOLF a crossover are Dracula and Frankenstein, However, I could argue that "Mister Snide" is still basically Mister Hyde, and that this is one of the times that a name-change doesn't change his essential identity with the original model. This stands in marked contrast to "Swamp Thing," who has the same name as the DC Comics monster but displays no other points of commonality.