Customer Reviews

Scooby-doo On Zombie Island

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have been a Scooby fan since he first came on the air in 1969. I am delighted to find a book that allows me to share the fun of Scooby with my daughter. Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island captures the atmosphere of the original show. Good clues to the mystery stimulate young minds. The language is easy to understand without talking down to the audience.

Gail Herman once again takes the helm and provides ample entertainment and a deconstructivist view of the beloevd Hanna-Barbara cartoon characters. At the beginning, this book introduces the protagonists through a flashback, once again unmasking a perpetrator only to find that it is not a supernatural force but a human being (undoubtedly offerring the cliche exclamations: "you meddling kids!") Bringing the story to the present, we find that the group of friends has disbanded (cf. the common social fracturization of post-pubsescent social circles.) Daphne longs for her old friends (ie. nostalgia for returning to the uncomplicated latent period childhood) and calls her friends up to join her on another impeteous adventure. Velma is working in a darkened bookstore (signifying a repressed Id), and in an ironic twist, the inseperable Shaggy and Scooby are luggage inspection agents, undoubtedly helping their friends get their international agricultural imports into the country unhindered. The story reunites the entire gang, and an episode follows, better written than most of the original animated editions.

Herman remains faithful to the original's Massachusetts valley educational instituion symbolism of Shaggy (Hampshire), Scooby (UMass), Velma (Smith), Daphne (Mt. Holyoke), and Fred (Amherst). The "don't ask-don't tell" alternative lifestyles of Fred "the scarf" and Velma, as well as the unspoken herbal indulgences of Shaggy and Scooby are just as subtle as in the original. No new developments are made in the Velma > Daphne > Fred love triangle, but the underlying tension remains. The author refrains from the later-day commercialization of the infamous Scrappy character, which unbalanced the chemistry of the original fab five.

This Scholastic edition brings the reader a handsomely bound oversized paperback with coated paper, allowing full page treatments of the gorgeous animation. The presentation allows the the dark, subtle tones of the Third World-crafted animation cells to come across beautifully.

In the end, this is a delightful book, full of depthful characterization and boundless symbolism. I put the book down after reading with renewed hope for modern literature.

My four year old loves scooby doo books and movies. At the book store, I let him pick the book he wanted and I purchased it without reading first. It is scooby doo, they are all the same right? It isn't real and everything ends happy. In this book, they decided it would be fun for the zombies to be real, a true mystery the gang couldn't solve. Scooby doo and shaggy actually start becoming zombies with a horrible picture associated with it! We read to my son once and immediately returned it. He got another scooby doo to add to his collection. This book should have never been written!

My 4-year old loves Scooby Doo. One of the great things about the franchise (at least the part I've been acquainted with) is that the mystery spook is invariably unmasked at the end of the show (or book). Not this time. Real zombies, real magic. Not the message I was looking for.