Shaggy, Scooby and Scrappy head to the Grimwood School for Ghouls in an opening scene that starts the movie on a good note. Puns, maps stored in sandwiches, cool rain on windshield animation FX, and even fourth wall breaking. They arrive at the school and Scooby crashes over the moat. Once inside, Scooby is attacked by the school's pet dragon Matches. Very well voiced by Frank Walker, I might add.
Then the headmistress and monster students show up. Here is where you need the fast forward button on your remote. There is a bunch of stuff with poorly designed kid monsters, Shaggy and Scooby liking to eat rotten food?! And a one eyed stupid tentacle baring potato monster.
Fast forward way into the movie until you get to the scene with the Mirror Monster. That is a great scene. Shaggy makes faces into the Mirror and his reflection with an evil face grabs Shaggy and pulls him into the Mirror and takes his place, causing lots of hijinks to transpire. After a little bit, the Mirror Monster realizes it's too dangerous outside the Mirror and goes back in, returning Shaggy to the outside.
Now you need the fast forward button again. Fast forward until you see Scrappy start rapping at the end and watch the remaining few minutes of the movie. The closing moments before the ending credits are moronic but in a blzarre watchable way.
Other positives are the very fluid, expressive animation, the voice talent of Don Messick as Scooby and Scrappy and Casey Kasem as both Shaggy and his Mirror Monster representation.
Now for the bad: the drawings of all the characters except for our somewhat heroic trio and some of the monster's parents are bad. The plot of the whole movie was terrible. Most of the dialogue was terrible. Shaggy and Scooby only act like themselves on occasion. (They would not like rotten and would have been scared of the kid monsters for nearly the whole movie, not just a couple minutes.) That purple monster seemed so stupid of an inclusion to me even as a small child. The less said about that potato monster the better. This movie would had worked better if it stuck to what Scooby Doo is. Oddly though, making him a gym teacher makes the most sense of anything in the movie if you've seen Scooby Doo, Where are You? Between being a trackman and Shaggy being, in Daphne's words, "the most groovingest gymnast in school" him being hired as a gym teacher makes a lot of sense. Too bad the movie has so many flaws. The movie mostly collapses under the weight of its problems. Despite superior animation, Ghoul School pales drastically in comparison to Scooby Doo Meets the Boo Brothers and Reluctant Werewolf.
It could have been different, a better movie. I imagine the exercise sequence in particular in a different light. "Let's keep our eyes closed while we're doing jumping jacks, Scoob.... This isn't so bad, the rythm , the energy, no monsters ,yikes, I opened my eyes!
Review of Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School
