Scooby Scooby Doo, lookin' for you.
Scooby Scooby Doo, where are you?
All the stars are here, waiting for you.
Couldn't have a show without you.
Scooby Scooby Doo, where are you?
All the stars are here, waiting for you.
Couldn't have a show without you.
—Theme song excerpt
The second series to feature Scooby-Doo, The New Scooby-Doo Movies ran on CBS from 1972 to 1974. Scooby and friends interacted with celebrities and other Hanna-Barbera characters of the time. This series featured nearly all of the Scooby-Doo tropes and was unique in that all episodes were an hour long. In Syndication, the episodes were usually split into two half hour episodes across two days.
Guests included:
- The Addams Family
- Batman and Robin
- The Harlem Globetrotters
- Jeannie and Babu
- Josie and the Pussycats
- Laurel and Hardy
- Speed Buggy
- The Three Stooges
- Don Adams
- Tim Conway
- Phyllis Diller
- Sandy Duncan
- Mama Cass Elliot
- Davy Jones
- Don Knotts
- Jerry Reed
- Sonny & Cher
- Dick Van Dyke
- Jonathan Winters
Tropes in The New Scooby-Doo Movies:
- Bait-and-Switch Credits: Minor example, but Dribbles appears in the opening credits, but he didn't appear in any of the episodes with The Harlem Globetrotters.
- "Best Of" Anthology: Warner Bros. didn't have the rights to republish all episodes on DVD, because they featured guest stars. So they released a "Best-of" DVD set instead, limiting the selection further … until April 2019, when Warner released eight of the missing episodes (they still couldn't get the Addams Family).
- Book Dumb: Shaggy comes across as relatively uneducated in this series. In "The Frickert Fracas", he and Scooby go to a corn field; he doesn't realize it's corn until Scooby decides to collect an ear and peel it back to eat the cob. Shaggy gets confused and asks why the corn is wrapped in "this green stuff". A disbelieving Scooby tries to explain that it's corn in its natural state, but Shaggy doesn't believe him.
- Bootstrapped Theme: The theme song would be resurrected without lyrics in 1979 for Scooby Goes Hollywood and Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo and become the theme song for the whole franchise for most of the next decade.
- Bowdlerise: Part of first season's title sequence has Scooby facing off against a Wild West gunman who repeatedly fires his gun into the air, deafening Scooby. For the second season, this was changed to the gunman firing his gun off-screen, and Scooby running away.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: While it is the usual here, it is actually averted and played hilariously straight in both Don Knotts episodes.
- In the first, Don's character is supposed to be the cavalry to help Captain Moody; but by the time he got there, Moody had vanished (although his arrival apparently kept the culprits from murdering the captain).
- And in the second, Don plays a police officer for the whole episode, so the cavalry never really leaves.
- Character Catchphrase: Velma's "Jinkies!" is finally introduced, though Shaggy is actually the first to utter it in "The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair", the second episode. Velma wouldn't say it until "The Frickert Fracas", the fourth episode.
- Cold Touch Surprise: In "The Mystery of Haunted Island", Shaggy and Scooby weaponize this, dumping ice down the shirts and shorts of the Harlem Globetrotters to shock them awake after the owner and coach of the Scorpions successfully kept the Globetrotters from getting a good night's sleep before the game.
- Continuity Nod: in the Opening Credits, the name of the previous series (Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!) is title dropped. When Shaggy asks, "Where are you?" Scooby replies, "Over here!"
- Crossover: A bunch of Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters have put in appearances.
- Weird Crossover: Most of whom are quite out of place being in a Scooby-Doo episode, and some of whom aren't actual Hanna-Barbera characters.
- Failed Attempt at Scaring: Grandma Frickert is not scared of the scarecrow that seems to be haunting her farm, just annoyed that it ran off with her farm hand's Sunday best.
- Fictional Fan, Real Celebrity: Many of the weekly guest stars were Ink Suit Actors whom Mystery Inc. would express admiration for. These included The Three Stooges, Dick Van Dyke, and Sonny & Cher.
- Fooled by the Sound: Jonathan Winters, known for his impressions and sound effects, guest-starred in "The Frickert Fracas". At one point, he tries to trick the Monster of the Week by convincing him a police helicopter is chasing him. It fails because, there's obviously no helicopter in the sky. At a previous point, he uses Ventriloquism to trick a particularly stubborn farm hand.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: This show had some of the franchise's first tentative steps at it, since at least some of the guest-spots were trial balloons for new shows. For instance, the second Batman episode ("The Caped Crusader Caper") is pretty much a straightforward superhero adventure, with The Joker and The Penguin donning monster suits almost purely for appearances' sake.
- Inept Mage: Babu is so inept that even Shaggy realizes that there’s a reason why Babu had been an apprentice genie for 1500 years!
- Ink-Suit Actor: Just about all celebrities who appeared on this show voiced their animated counterparts.
- Karloff Kopy:
- "The Haunted Horseman of Hagglethorn Hall" features a butler named Creech whose voice and appearance invoke Boris Karloff.
- In "A Good Medium is Rare", Phyllis Diller's butler Lucas resembles Karloff in his later years and speaks in the same vocal tones.
- Lovable Coward: Jonathan Winters and Alexander Cabot, who fit right in with Shaggy and Scooby during their respective appearances.
- Nonindicative Name: These episodes really don't seem long enough to count as "movies", though in all fairness, the modern notion that movies must be around "90 minutes" is a little unfair given the amount of movies that have existed that are under and over that length. This show being early 1970s, there were plenty of drive-in movies in the 1950s and 1960s with around an hour's run time.
After all, any form of video media longer than 45 minutes is classified as a "movie". - Obviously Evil: Quite a few of the villains, either due to creepy appearances and actions, the fact that they are the only characters in the entire episode besides the gang and the special guest star, or both (such as in "The Loch Ness Mess").
- Police Are Useless: Often played straight given the show's format, although there's a couple exceptions. For instance, the endings of "The Secret of Shark Island", "The Ghost of Bigfoot", "The Ghostly Creep from the Deep" and "The Haunted Showboat" have an Undercover Cop Reveal and show that the authorities were aware of the villains' schemes and ably investigating them independently of the gang.
- Powder Gag: In "Ghastly Ghost Town": Shaggy falls to a storage cellar, hitting containers of a white powder and getting himself covered in it. The villains think he's a real ghost and run away in fear as he calmly tells them, "What's wrong? Have you never seen a flour child?"
- Recycled Animation: Like its predecessor, the show would frequently reuse animation, including many of the same stock poses, walk and run cycles from said show.
- Uncanny Family Resemblance: While visiting Shaggy's uncle, Shaggy shows Scooby portraits of his family, and every single member looks exactly like him — right down to the goatee (even the girls)!
- Unconventional Food Order: At one point in "Ghastly Ghost Town", Shaggy says he wants a chocolate pizza. This was in an era before the advent of dessert pizzas, so this might not sound strange to a modern audience, but the implication at the time was a standard pizza with chocolate added.
