Scooby-Doo And The Legend Of The Vampire

Yeah I'd say this is the middle ground for this week.

I didn't hate Legend Of The Vampire, it's a decent little movie but it's certainly the most average of the bunch. So we meet up with the gang as they have just taken a cruise ship to Australia as they lolligag about enjoying the sights before they sporadically decide to attend a music festival at the totally not real location of Vampire Rock, where attending musicians (like discount Jimi Hendrix) have been kidnapped or scared off by a group of vampires that look like Kiss if they had a more psychedelic color palette to work off. They meet up with The Hex Girls again (Huzzah!) and quickly set about solving the mystery. What's really interesting about this movie is it's this very bizarre mix of old and new, the animation style follows the current show at that time What's New Scooby-Doo but the character designs are the 1969 classics, even the sound design is almost ripped straight from the 1969/70 episodes music and all, and it perplexes me cause this has really been the first to do that. Most if not all the other direct to video entries of this series do something original with it's production, maybe 2003 was just a sort of off year where this project got quickly pushed onto the director and producers and they had to quickly cobble it together. But it's not a shoddily made movie, the animation is quite nice, I genuinely dig the original music pieces, it's so goddang great to hear Casey Kasem again as Shaggy, the movie set a precedent with returning original characters with The Hex Girls which is a trend still felt today, I do like the movie but I don't love it. Will however say the gang does not make for very convincing musicians, not only is their look more ridiculous and just plain bad than any 80s hair band ever, but at least Velma has a kind of nice singing voice. All in all, I would only recommemd this to a hardcore fan or if it just sounds interesting enough to you, not bad but not great. 2.5 stars, 6.5/10, and we finally get to the main event with the first 3D animated Scooby-Doo film ever so join me tomorrow for Scoob!