Book Review: The Vanishing Girl by Josephine Ruby

The Vanishing Girl

by Josephine Ruby (Hoopla Audiobook)

 

Ever since the original series “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” premiered in 1969, when I was a six-year-old addicted to Saturday morning cartoons, I’ve been a fan of the teenaged team of sleuths known as Mystery Inc., driving around in their day-glo van, solving mysteries around the country. Over 50+ years, these characters have gone through constant tweaking and modification, as the series has been reinvented in animated form for new audiences every few years. Live action feature films and TV-movies have added to the mix, with a 2019 computer-animated film, Scoob! being the latest addition.

 

The characters of Scooby Doo have also appeared in video games and comic books. But (as far as I can tell) never in traditional prose fiction…until now. The Vanishing Girl takes extreme liberties with the characters. This novel is a prequel to the kids’ well-known adventures, taking place when they knew each other, but before they all decided to team up and hit the road — in fact, they’re all still high school students (with the exception of Scooby, of course). This novel, and its sequel The Dark Deception, are focused primarily on brainiac Velma Dinkley and red-headed glamour girl Daphne Blake, with Shaggy Rogers and Fred Jones as relatively minor supporting characters. Despite their differing personalities, introverted and anti-social Velma and extroverted Daphne were good friends growing up, until some personal crises drove them apart and actually turned them into antagonists towards each other. Now, then snipe and yell at each other, saying nasty things and trying to get a rise. When Daphne’s replacement best friend disappears AND Velma’s mother loses her job, all over an apparent haunting at the theme park that tells Crystal Cove’s history, the former-friends, now-can-barely-stand-each-others must team up once again to find out the truth of what’s going on.

 

I have mixed feelings about this novel. As a Young Adult mystery, it’s not bad, featuring characters with complex relationships and a mystery that’s fun to see them solve. But as a novel featuring beloved characters with over fifty years of established tone and anticipated friendship, this novel really failed. Plus, the characterization and backgrounds established for both Fred and especially Shaggy don’t jibe with how those characters have been portrayed throughout their history. In part, that may be because this novel has them all as teenagers in the contemporary era, instead of the late 60s or early 70s that were created to inhabit, particularly Shaggy — who was originally patterned after the Beatnik character Maynard G. Krebs (from the TV series The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis) — setting him up as a relative well-to-do teen in the 2010s but having the same behavior quirks just doesn’t work! I think I would have preferred seeing Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Fred hew more closely to what fans would expect, rather than be so extremely divergent. None-the-less, there were moments when I saw my beloved old characters peek through the harder, edgier versions here, and that kept me going. So…there’s just enough traditional Scooby Doo elements to have me giving this one a 6 rating, with the hopes that future novels tone down the antipathy between Velma and Daphne. Fingers crossed!

[Note: Scott read this as a paperback, but the libraries currently only have it as a downloadable audiobook via our Hoopla resource.]

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try any of the many variations on the Scooby Doo characters on DVD in the libraries’ collection — either the animated series, or the live-action films.]

[ publisher’s official The Vanishing Girl web page ] | [ Note: “Josephine Ruby” is a pen-name for a female author, coined after “Joe Ruby”, who was co-creator of the Scooby Doo, Where Are You? television series and characters. ]

 

See Scott C.’s review of Scoob! in the November 2020 Staff Recommendations here on BookGuide!

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

DVD Review: Scoob!

Scoob!
[DVD j Scoob]

I grew up on the very earliest series featuring these characters, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969-70, 1978), though I drifted away from the characters long before they got “spun off” into various subsequent series and sequels. I did kind of enjoy the two live-action feature films adapted from the cartoon, mainly for the presence of Sarah Michelle Geller (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Daphne. When I saw that producers were going to try to release an all-new animated film that retroactively tinkered with the origins of the characters, I was initially annoyed, but when the film finally came out on DVD, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.

 

Scoob! succeeds on many levels, but fails on others. The main characters — Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma and Daphne are all well-captured, with new voice actors playing each of them. Fred Welker (the original voice of Fred Jones, now takes on the iconic “ruh-roh!” voice of Scooby, from the late Don Messick, who played that character for decades. And Will Forte replaces the late Casey Kasem as Shaggy, sometimes well and sometimes not so well. A charming section at the beginning of the movie explains how Shaggy and Scooby first met as kids, before the action fast-forwards to the Mystery Inc. gang as young adults (the age they’ve been perpetually stuck at for decades now). There are lots of “in jokes” that people (like me) who grew up on the cartoons will get, but that might go over the heads of young viewers. One of the areas this film “fails” for me is that the series was definitely a child of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but has been updated to the modern age. Therefore, some of the humor falls a little flat. There are a lot of “Easter eggs” (hidden tributes) in the animation — I loved seeing “Hong Kong Phooey” on the side of a videogame in one scene.

 

The producers/writers of this film connect the Scooby-Doo characters with a bunch of other lesser-known but still recognizable animated characters from other series produced by the Hanna-Barbera studio — including The Blue Falcon and Dyno-Mutt, villain Dick Dastardly, and Captain Caveman. In fact, Scoob! is intended as the first film in a new crossover film universe featuring all these old animated properties in their own individual films — much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe films tied all the various Marvel superhero films into a connected “film reality”.

 

Scoob! is far from perfect, and strays from the central character relationships far too often in its attempts to connect Scooby-Doo to other animated characters. But, in the end it was still a fun, entertaining project. And I’m curious to see what the studio does in the future. I miss the old classic character voices, but the replacements were acceptable. A short sequence early in the film that attempts to recreate the opening theme music credits of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! was highly nostalgic.

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Scoob web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you watched this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!