Scooby-Doo and the gang have encountered many supposed supernatural threats over the years — though most of them were revealed to be hoaxes perpetrated by criminals — but fake or otherwise, they tended towards being ghosts or monsters with science fiction elements and threats being quite rare. Even back in the day, with the likes of the Spooky Space Kook from the original series Scooby-Doo, Where are You!, it was a ghost of an astronaut — albeit a fake one and certainly not an alien — so with Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders, it was kind of nice to see the franchise taking a close encounter in a sci-fi direction.

The movie opens with a trio of bored government employees of S.A.L.F (Search for Alien Life Form) receiving a powerful signal from outer space, with Laura (Audrey Wasilewski) and Max (Kevin Michael Richardson) being excited over this event, but when the signal abruptly vanishes, they are laughed at by their co-worker Steve (Mark Hamill), yet the scene ends with a mysterious “blip” approaching on their radar screen. Was that powerful signal from deep space? Could that blip be an invading alien spacecraft? Unfortunately, the events of this cold open are never clearly addressed, so we have to draw our own conclusions. Luckily for us, the movie quickly joins Shaggy and Scooby-Doo (Scott Innes doing double duty as the cowardly duo) as they drive the Mystery Machine down the dark desert highways of New Mexico, that is, until they are caught in a freak sandstorm that sends their van careening down a “Forbidden Access” road. Fred (Frank Welker), Daphne (Mary Kay Bergman) and Velma (B.J. Ward), who had been sleeping in the back, are jerked awake when the van is sent on its mad detour, but manic driving isn’t the real problem here as the group is suddenly buzzed by a UFO.

“Do you think they are looking for directions to Roswell?”

The Mystery Machine is crippled by a busted radiator hose, so Fred, Daphne and Velma head to the nearby town to find help, while Shaggy and Scooby — not wanting to venture through a dark and snake-filled desert — volunteer to stay behind and guard the van, that is until they see a mythical jackalope and decide to chase after it into the desert. Now, why would these two confirmed cowards chase after a mythical creature, venturing into the danger-filled desert that just moments ago they feared? Well, the jackalope stole their last Scooby Snax, so that checks out, but unfortunately, this chase leads to a cave and an encounter with a pair of nasty aliens. And by nasty I mean they look like the Broccoloids from The Powerpuff Girls cartoon.

“Beat your greens!”

Scooby-Doo and Shaggy flee in terror — which leads into the show’s first musical chase number, with Jennifer Love Hewitt doing a nice cover of the original “Scooby-Doo, Where are You!” theme song — until they reach that nearby town and run into Fred and the girls at the town’s sole diner. Good ol’ Fred is skeptical when told of this “alien encounter,” but Shaggy and Scooby’s story is backed up by a local kook named Lester (Jeff Glen Bennett), who claims to have been abducted and interrogated by aliens. Even the diner’s chef Sergio (Neil Ross) and waitress Dottie (Jennifer Hale) admit to seeing strange lights in the sky, as well as pointing out that many farm animals have gone missing. So it seems like Mystery Incorporated has a new mystery on their hands — even if Fred thinks it’s more a case of heat lightning and farmers forgetting to lock up their livestock — and things get even more interesting when later that night Shag and Scooby themselves are abducted.

Did someone say “Anal Probe?”

Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders is the third of the first four Scooby-Doo direct-to-video films to be animated overseas by Japanese animation studio Mook Animation, and while it doesn’t have the spooky atmosphere of Zombie Island, the character design for the aliens was rather cool — if also a little terrifying — unfortunately, cool designs aside, there wasn’t much else on offer here to make this movie stand out from the previous incarnation of the series. This installment fell back on the standard “Bad guys in masks” trope that has been a hallmark of the series since the very beginning, ditching the “zombies and witches are real” theme from the previous two entries — that an actual alien does make an appearance not lessening the laziness of a once again criminal hoax being thwarted by some meddling kids — and the mystery that is solved, by Velma of course, is even less believable than the reveal of actual aliens.

The writers clearly don’t know how a helicopter’s downdraft works.

And who exactly is behind this alien invasion? Could it be the trio of bored geeks, who Velma saw had dried mud on their shoes — deserts being rather dry, this is pretty unusual — and then there was Max loading up tons of oil into his van that he claimed was for the satellite dishes (though Velma informed the gang that the type of oil he had was not the kind used for the hydraulics found in satellite dishes), or could it be Buck, the town’s gruff auto mechanic? No, of course it’s not Buck, it’s the bored geeks who we learn had stumbled onto a cave while searching for a new location for another S.A.L.F dish, a cave that led to an abandoned gold mine, one that turned out to still have lots of gold lying around. Since the cave was on government land, they decided to keep the secret for themselves, using alien disguises and two fake government agents to keep people away. And they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those … well, you get the idea.

Stray Observations:

• What was the point of abducting people? It doesn’t add much to the hoax and just increases the odds of being exposed.

• The whole alien hoax is libel to bring more attention — with tourists and such — so wouldn’t a fake toxic spill work better?

• The trio of S.A.L.F employees hire muscle to pose as Military Police to keep people away from the cave, but where are the actual authorities during all these abductions and livestock theft?

• If you are secretly exploiting government land, why invite a group of teenage mystery solvers to tour your office?

• And most importantly, where do villains go to get such amazing costumes?

Does Acme have a criminal costume division?

Now, about that actual alien, the one I mentioned earlier? Well, Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders does have something that previous versions of Scooby-Doo rarely include, and that would be a love interest for not only Shaggy but Scooby-Doo as well. After their unnecessary alien abduction, Shaggy and Scooby are awakened in the middle of the desert by a “hippie” looking photographer named Crystal (Candi Milo) and her golden retriever, Amber. It’s love at first sight for our heroes — Crystal having seemed to have stepped right out of the 60s, making her a perfect girl for Shaggy — and even her dog looks to be as intelligent or even more so than Scooby-Doo himself. But, easily the best part of this entire episode is Shaggy’s hallucinogenic dream sequence where he imagines a whole relationship with Crystal, even ending with them having a child together, while Scooby has pups with Amber. The sequence is quite brilliant, and Scott Innes’ pulls off the love ballad quite well, being touching as well as funny, and the 60s throwback animation style was beautifully rendered.

A love that crosses time and space.

The screenwriters try and throw Crystal into the pool of suspects — her retro attire and 60s slang being very counterpoint to the weird futuristic devices she has in her possession — but the identity of those responsible for the alien shenanigans is clearly the guys from S.A.L.F, so I doubt any viewer was even remotely fooled into thinking Crystal was involved. Also, it would have been a dick move to make Shaggy’s true love turn out to be a villain — we already had that happen with Velma in the Witch’s Ghost — so Crystal’s innocence was never really in question, but of course there is something more going on with her than simple nature photography.

Crystal and Amber are aliens, because of course they are.

I had no real issues with actual aliens popping up in this movie — the two previous movies would have lent anyone to believe this would be the case — but the problem with it here is that not only is this big revelation late in the game (Crystal and her dog reveal themselves to save Shaggy and Scooby from the fake MPs during the big finale), but it’s also quite irrelevant. The plot of Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders is that a trio of asshats creates an alien hoax to pillage a government-owned gold mine; Crystal turning out to be an alien has pretty much no bearing on the central plot. We learn that Crystal and Amber are from a planet 20 light-years away — which is why they are disguised as hippies, because the only information they had about Earth was from watching 1960s television broadcasts — which means her arrival during an alien hoax was one huge coincidence, or in proper Hollywood terms, “Lazy Writing.”

M. Night Shyamalan eat your heart out.

There is some good stuff to be found in Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders, but sadly even with a meager 72-minute run-time, the movie still seems a tad padded, and though the subplot of Shaggy and Scooby falling in love provided some of the show’s best moments — visually speaking, that is — it didn’t add much to the proceedings, so it’s as guilty of being as much padding as stuff like the introduction of Buck, the grumpy auto mechanic who apparently liked to press flowers. Fun, but goes nowhere.

Unfortunately, as a follow-up to the excellent Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island and Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost, this installment was less than remarkable, with obvious padding of the run-time and the use of the standard tropes of the series makes Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders a less than ground-breaking adventure. There isn’t really much to hate about this movie, but also not much to crow about — again the Shaggy love dream sequence was great but not all that pertinent to the plot — so, in conclusion, Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders is another cliché-riddled mystery that will entertain kids, but will have less of an impact on older viewers.

Also, what was the point of the jackalope in this movie?

Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders (2000) 6/10 Movie Rank - 6/10 6/10 Summary In this third direct-to-video movie – also the last one to use traditional hand-painted animation – the writers fall back on the old tropes that the Scooby-Doo franchise has been using for generations, foregoing the more interesting developments of the last two entries. The animation is still solid, as is the voice acting, but it certainly doesn’t warrant repeat viewings.