The New Scooby-Doo Movies

The New Scooby-Doo Movies (sometimes called The New Scooby-Doo Comedy Movies) is the second incarnation of the long-running Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. It premiered on September 9, 1972 and ran for two seasons on CBS as the only hour-long Scooby-Doo series. Twenty-four episodes were ultimately produced (sixteen in 1972) and eight more in 1973.

Overview
Each of the episodes of this series featured a special guest star, who would help the gang solve the mystery of the week. Some of these guest stars were living celebrities who provided their own voices (Don Knotts, Jonathan Winters, Sandy Duncan, Tim Conway, and Sonny and Cher, among others); some were dead celebrities whose voicing was done by imitators (The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy), and the rest were present or future Hanna-Barbera characters: the characters from Harlem Globetrotters (1970), Josie and the Pussycats (also 1970), Jeannie (1973), and Speed Buggy (also 1973) all appeared on the show during or after their own shows' original runs; The Addams Family and Batman and Robin both appeared on the show a year before they were incorporated into Hanna-Barbera shows of their own -- The Addams Family and SuperFriends (both 1973).

After the cancellation of The New Scooby-Doo Movies in August 1974, repeats of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! aired on CBS for the next two years. No new Scooby-Doo cartoons would be produced until the show defected to ABC in September 1976 on the highly-publicized The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour. When the various Scooby-Doo series entered syndication in 1980, each New Movies episode was halved and run as two half-hour parts. Beginning in September 1990, on the USA Network, the New Movies returned to their original broadcast format; they were rerun on Sunday mornings until August 1992. In 1994, Turner restored the episodes of The New Scooby-Doo Movies from the original negatives for broadcasts on TNT, Cartoon Network, and Boomerang.

Cast

 * Don Messick as Scooby-Doo
 * Casey Kasem as Shaggy Rogers
 * Frank Welker as Fred Jones
 * Heather North as Daphne Blake
 * Nicole Jaffe as Velma Dinkley

DVD releases
Upon attempting to release a Complete Series set of The New Scooby-Doo Movies on DVD in 2005, Warner Home Video was unable to negotiate agreements with several of the episodes' guest stars to have those episodes included in the DVD set. As a result, the DVD was released under the title The Best of the New Scooby-Doo Movies, and features only 15 episodes culled from both seasons.

Furthermore, the images of The Addams Family, Batman & Robin, The Globetrotters, The Three Stooges, and Laurel & Hardy were voluntarily removed from The New Scooby-Doo Movies' opening titles, as their rights were controlled by their copyright owners. In Batman and Robin's case, this is despite the fact that they and their comics publisher, DC Comics, are part of the same Warner Bros. family as are Scooby-Doo and the rest of the Hanna-Barbera library.

Episode guide
Main article: The New Scooby-Doo Movies episode guide