Johnny Bravo “Bravo Dooby-Doo” Review
Hey there baby! Much like this episode, you lookin’ fine!
Watching this brings me back ti those golden years of Cartoon Network. You remember those, right? Back when good shows stayed on the air and were actually promoted and the crap shows were gone quicker than a hiccup.
Ah, I truly miss those days.
When Johnny’s car breaks down in the middle of the woods, whilst he was on the way to see his dear sweet Aunt Jebidisa, the Gang drives up in the Mystery Machine and picks him up…but only after he mentions a spooky house. When they reach the house an angry voice tells them to get out because they aren’t welcome.
Naturally, Shag and Scooby want to heed that warning while everybody else settles in to solve the mystery.
I love this short!
It is one of my favorite Scooby things ever. The only problem I have is Hadley Kay as Scooby, his Scooby is just…not good…at all. The rest of the cast is great though! Heather North, B.J. Ward, Casey Kasem, and the masterful Frank Welker fill their normal roles as though they’d never left them.
This has everything you could want, it’s spooky, it’s super funny, it has great animation, the music is sublime, references to (and use of) alot of the Hanna-Barbera staples we all know and adore. There are hints at romantic ties between Fred and Daphne but nothing overt or overbearing. Velma is crushing hard on Johnny all the while he’s hitting on Daph, all funny. Easily, this is one of the best examples of the versatility of the Scooby-Doo characters and franchise.
The angry voice belongs to a Ghostly Gardener that scares the living daylights out of Shag and Scoob causing the Gang and Johnny to do the classic split up. We get a solid chase between Bravo, Shaggy, and the Gardener that has a song, Happy Haunted Sunshine House by Ward Dotson, that feels like it was ripped from one of the 70’s shows. There’s also a hallway/door gag scene that plays extremely well and brings in Velma and Scooby.
I missed these in SD:MI.
After a trip down a flight of stairs the ghost is caught in a chandelier that falls because Johnny was flung up into it. Once again, lots of old Scooby/H&B jokes and the villain is revealed.
The last scene is hilarious!
Johnny Bravo was a great series and this episode is proof of that.
If you’ve never seen an episode before or you miss those good old days of CN, pick up season 1 on DVD.
This short is a diamond in a sea of precious gems.
(1)Dislikes
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The Frephne ruined it. I think this episode is responsible for WB's decision to make the Fred/Daphne relationship an ongoing theme. Oddly enough, this episode got that idea from fan talk, not anything substantive in the canon. People said, "ha ha, why do Fred and Daphne always split up together? They must be doing it." No different from the talk that Shaggy and Scooby were eating pot brownies. So the writers of this episode ran with it. For this reason I hated it, but I admit that everything else in the episode was good.
I think the guy who voiced Scooby got the speech impediment right, but the voice was too high pitched. It should have been deeper. If it had been, I think it may have been spot on with Don Messick.
I doubt this one episode made WB decide to keep on using the Fred/Daphne relationship. I mean Zombie Island would have already been in production at the time that this episode was done. I tend to think the relationship was created to make the movie a bit more serious and adult. Though I'm sure fan talk was the main reason it was adopted into future stories.
Admittedly in the original series they split up together and when attending dances they danced together. Generally people not in a relationship tend not to do that much dancing together. It's the same for Shaggy and Velma (Though shag would more often leave Velma sitting on the sidelines at the dance when there was food to be found). So it's not totally unfounded in the canon when you think back to them dancing together in the malt shop.