Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue! (2006)

I knew that this was gonna be bad because of how vitriolic it was considered to the Scooby-Doo fandom and and negative reviews online, but you really have to watch it to understand fans pain watching this

This has got to be the most draining show I've seen this year alone. Scott Menville voicing Shaggy felt like such a weird choice. Whenever Shaggy speaks, I just here the Teen Titans Robin and sounds more like a parody of Casey Kasem's performance than a natural fit for the character. But Scott had to pay the bills somehow after Teen Titans ended, so i'm not holding any bad blood towards him. Who i can hold bad blood towards are the show runners who didn't want to comply with Casey Kasem's one request. So yeah, if you don't know, the reason why Kasem didn't voice Shaggy for the first three direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movies is because of a Burger King ad and that went against Kasem's request of making Shaggy a vegetarian like he was himself. But he did come back for What's New Scooby-Doo and some of the later direct-to-video movies. Kasem is in this show as Shaggy's uncle probably just to have him in the show at all. I already wrote a paragraph of this review and i haven't even talked about the actually show yet.

I guess I'll start with the fact that this show completely throws mystery solving out the window in favor for whatever it's trying to be. A big complaint I had with What's New Scooby-Doo is that i felt that it barely deviated from the original formula. I get the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality, but it ultimately feels too similar to the original cartoon and it doesn't really stick out in the vast Scooby-Doo franchise. Get a Clue!, however, is the compete opposite. It's doesn't feel like it's a Scooby-Doo show, if anything, it more so inline with Inspector Gadget than Scooby-Doo of all things. Scooby-Doo really needs to find that sweet spot with their shows by still having the basic idea of a Scooby-Doo show and not deviating too far from that understanding, but it also has to try to do it's own thing and not feel like a rehash of what came before. Scooby-Doo shows like 13 Ghosts and Mystery Incorporated found that sweet spot and ended up being the best shows in the franchise in my opinion. The worst shows in my opinion are the ones that don't even attempt to find the sweet spot and feels more like a product or a necessity than a worth while inclusion in the franchise. The shows that I'm referring to are Scooby and Scrappy-Doo (1980) and, of course, Get a Clue! At least Scrappy as a character got better later in the series. At least Scrappy's trade-off for being annoying, those cowboy segments in the third season, were only 7 minutes long. AT LEAST SCRAPPY-DOO HAD ONE ANNOYING RECURRING CHARACTER FOR A WHILE!!! Agent 2 in this show might be even worse than early Scrappy and at least he wasn't delegated as the fat guy who makes burp and fart noises. The robot butler doesn't fair much better, I don't like him. He has a good gag every 50 attempts and that's the extent to how i feel about him. Also I really don't like the idea of having a recurring villain in this franchise (unless it's done right) because it was always the monster of the week format and I don't think it would be as bad if the villain wasn't so ugly to look at and that's another thing, I honestly hate the character designs in this. Scooby and Shaggy look fine, but the other 80% percent of the characters look awful and so unappealing to look at. But I can't say that about the backgrounds 'cause they actually look kinda good and has a unique art style and texture to them. There's also a gag that the villain can't step outside without getting struck by lightning. But in the cruise episode,he's perfectly fine, so what was the point of making that a gag if you're not even gonna be consistent about it. I don't know where to talk about about this, but the twist with Uncle Albert honestly sucks. There was absolutely no indication that he was a mole within the villain's group for the entirety of season 1 and it's so clear that they just made that up as the show along just to have some sort of dramatic sendoff.

That's about it i guess. It was only 26 episodes, but it felt like an eternity. It was also extremely obnoxious and so disconnected to the overall franchise. even ignoring it's attachments to Scooby-Doo, it's such an irritating, ugly nightmare to sit through.