Scooby-Doo In Pirates Ahoy! (DVD)

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When "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?" debuted September 13, 1969 on CBS as yet another 30-minute cartoon offering from Hanna-Barbera Productions, no one could have predicted that the show about four paranormal mystery-solving teens and their food-loving Great Dane would become a franchise.

But here is is almost 40 years later, and the scaredy-cat dog and his human friends are still hugely popular. It's hard to keep track of them all, but "Scooby-Doo Pirates Ahoy!" makes somewhere around the 44th home video release—and that's not counting the live-action films that the cartoon inspired. I don't know if that's the most amazing thing, or if it's the fact that original cast members Casey Kasem and Frank Welker are still doing the voices of Shaggy and Fred, with Mindy Cohn and Grey Delisle handling Velma and Daphne now. Welker also gives voice to Scooby these days, which isn't saying a lot, because the spotlight doesn't shine on Scooby in "Pirates Ahoy!" as it did in previous releases. This installment, the gang abandons their psychedelically detailed green mini-van and boards a cruise ship with Fred's parents (Tim Conway and Peggy Jones), who seem to get more air-time than poor Scoob.

Then again, this is a series that has been constantly evolving—from those early (most would say "failed") experiments with a pup named Scrappy-Doo or a dim-witted relative named Scooby-Dum, to four direct-to-video features around the turn of the century ("Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island," "Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost," "Scooby-Doo and the Alilen Invaders," and "Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase") that briefly abandoned the show's core concept of unmasking fake monsters by using real ones.

Maybe it's time to tinker again, because the creative minds that are driving the series seem to be taking a siesta in the back seat of the Mystery Machine. Recent direct-to-video entries have been heavily derivative, drawing on elements of popular films so much that it's hard to tell what's an influence or homage and what's just a blatant rip-off from writers too lazy to come up with something fresh.

"Pirates Ahoy! is like "Poseidon" and "Titanic" meets "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl." That in itself wouldn't be bad, if in fact the film's creators were aiming to give a similar experience to kids who are too young to get their thrills and scares from the blockbuster films. But too many of the scenes involving the ghost pirates are just pointless chases, with no real tension build-up and no real threatening situations. Even the comedy seems limp as a rubber sword this time around, and my eight year old, a Scooby connoisseur, gave it one peanut-butter covered thumb down—though in fairness, my four year old liked it. I guess that speaks volumes about the film's appeal.

You'd think with a topic as mysterious as The Bermuda Triangle that the filmmakers could come up with a challenging caper for the young sleuths. It starts out entertaining enough. In the early going, "Pirates Ahoy!" actually has a little fun at the gang's expense. You see, this is a mystery-themed cruise, but Velma, Fred, Daphne, Shaggy, and Scooby-Doo are so adept at discovering mysteries that they unravel one after the other until they've robbed the ship of its entertainment in the first day or so. When the ghost pirates sail into view and swashbuckle their way into the main plot, things go downhill. Never mind that it's just bout an exact copy of the ghost pirates from the Disney offering. The way these pirates are drawn and animated, they're just not all that interesting as characters OR monsters. Even Capt. Skunkbeard (voiced by Ron Perlman) seems like a good idea that lost something in the execution.