What's New Scooby Doo?

I went into this past summer pretty much with the idea that it was going to be the Summer of Junk as far as enriching media for my son. So I started him on a steady diet of Scooby-Doo TOS which he was immediately resistant to because it was kind of spooky. And, like an idiot, I encouraged further viewing as much as possible! He caught on and is now joyfully and irretrievably obsessed with all things SD. My old man, God love him, is a gifted story-teller in the Scooby-Doo genre and so car trips are pretty entertaining -- he does a mean Norville "Shaggy" Roberts which, if you listen closely, kind of sounds like a castrated Bill Clinton. I think this Christmas we're getting DJ the complete first two seasons of the original series but, you know, in retrospect SD:TOS is not as enjoyable to watch in my dotage as it was the first time around. The animation is pretty hideous; for one thing, Daphne often looks like she was born with an unfortunate eye deformity.
Anyway, we started watching the latest Scooby-Doo series on DVD, What's New Scooby-Doo? and I have to say, out of all the configurations of SD it is probably my favorite. The writing is snappy, the theme song is appropriately poppy for the new millenium, and the animation is a far, far cry. Also, they reinstated the song-during-chase-sequence which began in the second season of TOS and then was sporadic through the rest of the different SD shows. Less Than Jake even has a song ("Ghosts of Me and You") that was featured on an episode (don't ask me which one). Simple Plan does the theme song for the show. Go to smallages for a cool blogspot blog entry about the Scooby Doo music from WNSD.

Jeffrey Scott--Genius or Scourge?

It seems anticlimatic to start one's blog about Saturday morning cartoons by talking about a writer in the medium, Jeffrey Scott. One day at the library a colleague asked me if I had ever seen Captain N: Game Master.
I pled ignorant, but as we were watching the video he had pulled up on YouTube, I noticed in the credits that it was written by Jeffrey Scott and said, "hmm, that name sounds familiar," and went back to my desk to Google it. Turns out, Jeffrey Scott is the genius behind not only Captain N but also a whole slew of cartoons that littered our prepubescent landscape, and beyond. The most notable current is Dragon Tales, that Latin-American flavored cartoon shown on PBS kids which, depending on who you talk to is most beloved or most reviled (my son loves it, my husband and the fathers of other children we know seem to hate it with a white-hot passion -- I think it's the Ord character).
Anyway, you can read a whole slew of his writing credits and, if you want to be just like Jeffrey Scott, he can teach you, too, to be a writer for animated cartoons!