Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! - Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf? - Toonstalgia

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! - Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Werewolf?

Premiered October 24, 1970

Season 2, Episode 7

Quickly

A werewolf interrupts the gang's camping trip.

Thoughts

Good, solid episode.

Too Much Detail Recap

The gang is camping in the woods. They hear howling then see floating red eyes in the woods. When they investigate, they find large wolf tracks. Velma notes the footprints look like they belong to a two legged animal. They follow the tracks to an old graveyard with an open grave. The tombstone notes the open grave belongs to Silas Long, a half-man half-wolf. 

The tracks continue out of the graveyard to an old mill. They split up to search. Scooby and Shaggy are stalked by the werewolf without realizing. They accidentally drop the werewolf through a trapdoor. Fred, Velma and Daphne find a secret room with a map and the werewolf. Scooby and Shaggy reunite with the gang. They are pleased they didn't find the werewolf. Their pleasure at not finding the werewolf is short-lived.

Cue Pop Music Chase Scene.

By my mom

Daphne, Fred and Velma run from Scooby and Shaggy when they mistake the wool covered pair for ghosts. Scooby and Shaggy quickly clean up and find the rest of the gang hiding in strange barrels with rubber tubing sticking out.

Outside, they find a boat receiving a rail car. Fred, Daphne and Velma investigate the car's origin and get locked in a building. Scooby and Shaggy follow the car to its destination inside the boat. Their investigation is interrupted by an attack from the werewolf. They distract the werewolf with a haircut routine that calls to mind Bugs Bunny and Rudolph in Water, Water Everyhare.

Shaggy and Scooby escape into a tunnel that takes them into the locked room of the rest of the gang. The gang's super aggressive question of Shaggy's report is so weird. Also, Shaggy says "You know how Freddy and Velma are when they have a mystery to unsolve." This puts the mystery obsession on Fred and Velma and not him or Daphne or Scooby. 

They see the werewolf pulling Bahing barrels into the boat. 

The plan is bad. Fred's crane game plan is bad. I don't even want to go into it. It's a bad and over complicated plan.

Shaggy and Scooby almost fall down a waterfall. The gang catches them in a giant net. The werewolf hangs on for dear life and calls for help.

The unmasked werewolf is a sheep rustler.

Rogue's Gallery

The Werewolf (Silas Long)

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! - A Tiki Scare is No Fair - Toonstalgia

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! - A Tiki Scare is No Fair

Season 2, Episode 6

Premiered October 17, 1970

Quickly

Criminals dress up in costumes to scare people in Hawaii this time.

Notes

I did a bit a searching in old newspapers to satisfy my curiosity. At the time Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! premiered, the newspapers listed whether the shows were in color. An early press release in a couple papers listed Fred as "Harvy Jones" and erased Velma from the character list and the image. Her hands are still in the image but her head is removed. It's the iconic shot of the gang looking at a book together. It's mind boggling. The only thing I can think of is the Hanna-Barbera removed her from the image. The image was part of a feature on Scooby-Doo. It's an interesting little pop culture nugget of an interview with Joe Barbera. In it he reflects on the fact that kids don't read anymore and that many companies were outsourcing animation to other countries because it was cheaper. I learned that a single 30 minute episode required 12,000 drawings.

At some points, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! played opposite The Hardy Boys cartoon. You only have to watch one episode of that to understand why Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! has persisted. Hardy Boys had very limited animation.

Too Much Detail Recap

The gang is in Hawaii vacationing. This feels like Hawaii as imagined from postcards. They are planning to go to lost village. They are dissuaded by Mr Simms, a newspaper man acting as a tour guide. He tells Shaggy and Scooby the village is haunted. While Shaggy and Scooby eat, drumming begins, the sky turns red and a man in a mask appears. He tells everyone to leave the land of Mano Tiki Tia.

Shaggy runs to Velma, Daphne and Fred to tell them what happened. He tells them everyone disappeared and they don't believe him. Arbitrary skepticism rears its ugly head again. They go to investigate. Scooby-Doo appears from inside of a drum. They find footprints indicating a struggle took place and someone was dragged away.

Simms was both their host and apparently investigating Mano Tiki Tia. They are scared off from the search by a man in a cloak.

They manage to flee their way into the haunted village. They are scared by the "Witch Doctor". At the village, Velma finds Mr Simms' hat in a hidden room. Scooby and Shaggy are attacked by a giant statue of Mano Tiki Tia.

Fred and Daphne find oysters and pearls. Shaggy, Scooby and Velma find a plane crash that was made to look like it crashed a long time ago with a laughing skeleton inside.

They see the guy in the cloak in the water and they dive in after him then they find themselves in a cavern that leads to a secret entrance to the village. I'm really confused about the lore here and the events. It's kind of nonsensical at this point. This is the largest fake monster they've ever faced. Overall this episode skews towards "What?" and delirious. 

The Witch Doctor is a bad look if that's supposed to represent a figure from Hawaii but mainly it's nonsense. It's all kind of nonsensical. This episode feels like it was written by someone whose only knows Hawaii from postcards. Not the content written on the back but the photos on the front.

Fred comes up with a plan to lure the "Witch Doctor" by having Scooby and Shaggy play ghost drums. It kind of works. He gets caught by his own henchman in the hands of the giant statue. Mr Simms and an unnamed henchman were stealing from pearl beds. The guy in the cloak unmasks himself. He's a local police detective. He's a good character even though he only has like 3 seconds of screen time excluding the time he spent inexplicably skulking around in the mask.

Rogue's Gallery

The Witch Doctor and Mano Tiki Tia

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Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! - Haunted House Hang-Up - Toonstalgia

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! - Haunted House Hang-Up

Premiered October 10, 1970

Season 2, Episode 5

Quickly

A headless specter tries to scare people away from an derelict mansion.

Too Much Detail Recap

The episode opens with a close up shot of an extremely detailed hand. It threw me off. It feels unlike anything that has appeared in the course of the series.

The gang is on their way to a rock festival. Fred has gotten them lost. They stop to find their bearings. Asa Shanks, a local, walks towards them. He advises them to leave for their own good. He directs them back to the highway. He tells them the road will come to a fork. The short way will take them to the headless specter, the long way won't. The girls want to go the short way, Shaggy and Scooby want them to go the long way. Fred decides to go the short way when he notices they are low on gas.

They're forced to pull over when the engine overheats. Shaggy and Scooby go to a well to get water for the engine and meet a phantom sheet. They don't believe Shaggy's story as if this doesn't happen to them constantly (I think I sprained my eyes rolling them). They go up to the mansion when they see a light is on. When they enter the mansion, they see the light is a candle. They are scared when the candle floats after them.

Shaggy and Scooby find a picture missing a head. Before they can show Fred, Velma and Daphne, the head reappears. While investigating, they find a box with a head but the head is just a dummy.

The gang splits up to follow two sets of footprints. Velma, Scooby and Shaggy follow the footprints into a dark room with strange knocking. What follows is about 20 seconds of the cheapest animation in the series up to this point with Scooby, Shaggy and Velma's eyes in an otherwise black frame. While in the dark room, they meet the headless specter. 

Cue Pop Song Chase scene.

The chase scene ends when Velma, Shaggy and Scooby fall in the well. The water saves them like they're in Minecraft. In the well, they find a door to a secret tunnel, again a bit like Minecraft (if you've ever built a straight down mineshaft).

Fred and Daphne find a journal with a nonsensical entry from 1822. They also find a trapdoor into an old fruit cellar. They reunite with Velma, Shaggy and Scooby. When Shaggy and Scooby try to eat the food in a canister, they discover the canister is filled with balloons. The balloons were used to make the ghost Scooby and Shaggy saw.

The riddle in the diary leads Scooby and Shaggy to search the greenhouse. In the greenhouse, they meet the headless man and they get into a chase on giant balloons (an RGB/Prisoner moment).

They accidentally capture the headless man. The headless specter is the great-great grandson of the owner of the mansion. He was trying to scare off people who might steal his family's treasure. They offer to help him find it. They hear the knocking and realize the knocking that has been plaguing them is a separate mystery. Fred announces he and Shaggy will go to investigate.

They discover a man in a sheet with an axe. It's less of a ghost sheet and more of a Jason Voorhees sackhead vibe. The man in the sheet is the neighbor they met on the road, Asa Shanks. They also find the treasure in a column in front of the house.

Rogue's Gallery

The Headless Specter and the Guy with the Sheet over his head.