Back in the late 90s, Warner Brothers Animation did something no Scooby-Doo series had ever done before, and I don’t mean the purported marketing campaign that stated “This time, the monsters are real!” because Scooby and the gang had tackled real ghosts and monsters dating as far back as the 1970s. It began when the Scooby Gang met up with the likes of The Addams Family and Jeannie in The New Scooby-Doo Movies, and then in the 80s we got The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, where our heroes tackled a plethora of actual demonic creatures, so the idea of real ghosties and beasties was certainly not a fresh concept, but in 1998 the direct-to-video movie Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island gave us a Scooby-Doo show with a much darker tone, an adventure that was genuinely scary. Death and horror await those who visit this isle.

With Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island we discover that our gang of mystery solvers had decided to go their separate ways, decades of pulling monster masks off crooked real-estate agents having gotten old — this movie of course blissfully ignoring aforementioned shows like The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo where the ghosts were real — and now we find Scooby-Doo (Scott Innes) and Shaggy (Billy West) working as customs inspectors, which they are quickly fired from due to their eating of all the contraband food, while good ole Velma (B.J. Ward) is running her own mystery bookshop, Daphne (Mary Kay Bergman) has her own successful television series “Coast to Coast with Daphne Blake,” and Fred (Frank Welker) is her producer and one-man crew. Now, as good as Daphne’s career is going, (her show being picked up for a second season), she does miss the old gang, so when the next road trip involves visiting haunted houses in the Old South, Fred secretly contacts the gang, and before you can say “Scooby-Dooby-Doo,” Mystery Incorporated is back in action.

Note: After decades of these guys roaming up and down the byways and highways of America, this is possibly the only time they’re on an actual paying gig.

Next is a quick montage of the group visiting various haunted plantations and riverboats where once again all the supernatural threats are revealed to be just human swindlers, with Daphne getting more depressed with each debunked ghost because her show promised the real thing, but hope is on the horizon when Fred is approached by a young woman named Lena Dupree (Tara Strong) and is offered a visit to Moonscar Island, her employer’s home, which is allegedly haunted by the ghost of the pirate Morgan Moonscar and has a dark history of people going missing. It’s at this point that the movie starts to roll out the suspects; we have Jacques (Jim Cummings) the avuncular ferry boat captain, then Scooby and Shaggy have several run-ins with a grumpy catfish enthusiast called Snakebite Scruggs (Mark Hamill), Velma has her suspicious eye trained on Beau Neville (Cam Clarke), the manor’s hunky groundskeeper (this is because he never seems to be around whenever supernatural shenanigans are happening), and finally there is Simone Lenoir (Adrienne Barbeau), the owner of Moonscar Manor and a serious cat lady.

Note: In this movie, Scooby-Doo seems to have an uncontrollable hatred of cats, destroying anything in his path in the attempt to sink his teeth into some fur, which is odd considering that Scooby-Doo has never shown anything but affection towards his fellow animals, cats included, so his mad-on against felines is very out of character here.

The quality of the central mystery to Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is one of the key reasons for this movie’s success, and the longer 74-minute run-time certainly helped with that as it gave the story some breathing room to properly outlay a good mystery — in between all the comedic shtick and ghostly troubles, that is. When a ghostly presence carves the warning “Get Out” on the kitchen wall, Velma later discovers that under the plaster is planking from Morgan Moonscar’s pirate ship; then, when the ghostly apparition of a Civil War soldier appears in a bedroom mirror, which sends Shaggy and Scooby running for help, it is Velma again who finds the inscription on the back of the mirror revealing that it once belonged to a Confederate colonel. Simone does her best to explain why such artifacts abound in her home, but with the spooky specters never actually seeming to threaten our heroes, and calling out “Beware” and “Get Out” rather than trying to eat their brains, suspicions start to mount, and when the dead actually rise out of the bayou, things get even tenser.

Note: With Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island and the following three direct-to-video movies, we get a much darker tone than is found in the original animated series, and the character designs of the zombies themselves could frighten younger viewers.

Then, in what is a rather interesting twist, we learn that zombies aren’t the real villains here at all but instead it is Simone and Lena, who are practitioners of voodoo magic, and that they are, in fact, ancient and evil cursed were-cat creatures whose condition requires them to drain the life-forces of whatever hapless victims they manage to lure to the island so as to preserve their immortality. During Simone’s evil villain monologue, we learn that hundreds of years ago, she and Lena were part of a group of settlers who were devoted to a cat god — who knew Louisiana settlers included pagan worshippers — but then, one night, Morgan Moonscar and his pirate crew chased the settlers into the bayou, where the poor pagans were killed by alligators. A vengeful Lena and Simone, who had survived the piratical attack, called upon their cat god to curse Morgan and his crew. Unfortunately, this curse also turned Lena and Simone into cat creatures and gave them the whole “vampire immortality” requirements.

At least these “Cat People” weren’t required to sleep with their relatives to regain human form.

It’s the horror aspect of Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island that may surprise some viewers; not only are the numerous zombies rather grotesque looking — certainly for a kid’s cartoon — but this is the first Scooby-Doo mystery that has a death toll. In the flashback, we see the poor settlers being hemmed in by killer alligators, which has got to be one of the worst ways to die, and then when the cat creatures’ curse expires, we see Lena and Simone dissolving into bones and dust. There is no “And we would have gotten away with it too, if not for you meddling kids!” Nope, in this movie, the villains literally bite the dust. The one caveat I shall mention is that at one point Daphne exclaims, “And those zombies are just the poor souls you drained! They were just trying to warn us so that we wouldn’t suffer the same fate they did!” Did she forget that some of those zombies were the pirates who murdered a bunch of settlers? Even though the zombies weren’t the chief villains to this story, not all of them were exactly squeaky clean either.

I guess history is written by the dead?

What is never made clear is why this zombie army never attacked Lena and Simone before now. These were-cats had been killing people for over a hundred years — we see gangster zombies in 1920s garb as well as Bermuda shorts-wearing zombies — and we are told that the dead arise every night, so what was keeping this army of the dead in check? Does the pagan zombie magic that raises them every night not allow them to attack the cursed cat creatures directly? Or are Lena and Simone simply so powerful that a zombie army is more of a nuisance than anything else? Regardless of the unclear mythology of Moonscar Island and its pagan history, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is a solid entry in the Scooby-Doo canon, with my only real criticisms being that some of the jokes are kind of lame — the running joke of Scooby-Doo repeatedly being confused when someone calls him a dog being the most egregious example of this — and it’s also a bit sad that the only original voice actor to return for this outing was Frank Welker as Fred Jones, and the replacements they found for the rest of the cast of characters ranged from the passable to the outright bad.

“They chose poorly.”

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) 7.5/10 Movie Rank - 7.5/10 7.5/10 Summary This first direct-to-video entry in Scooby-Doo history was a nice jumpstart to where Scooby and the Gang would venture in the future, things will get even darker at times, and though the animation on hand is pretty much your standard Saturday morning level of quality it’s still fairly decent.