28 Years Ago, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island Revived the Franchise With a Zombie Thriller

For the past few years, Scooby-Doo media has drawn either cool indifference, as with Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?, or outright hostility, as with Velma. Fans of the lovable hound and Mystery Incorporated are probably hedging their bets on Netflix’s upcoming 2027 adaptation, Scooby-Doo: Origins, and hoping it brings something new and exciting to the franchise.

Scooby-Doo has been stuck in a rut before. In 1998, the franchise was nearing its 30-year anniversary, and audiences had grown tired of the Great Dane and his mystery-solving friends. A Pup Named Scooby-Doo had left the air in 1991 with nothing but reruns to follow it, and by the late ’90s the state of Scoob looked dire. That low point turned into an opening.

With so little riding on the franchise, director Jim Stenstrum and writers Glenn Leopold and Davis Doi had plenty of creative freedom to plan its next adventure: Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. The 1998 animated film arguably saved Scooby-Doo from being put down for good, and it turned the zombie genre on its head along the way.

Forget everything you know about zombies

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island takes place a few short years after Mystery Inc. splits up to pursue new careers. Daphne is now the star of a reality TV series, and she wants to hunt real ghosts instead of people in masks. Fred, her one-man crew (join a union already, Freddy), contacts Shaggy, Scooby and Velma. The gang sets off on a road trip to New Orleans.

Lena Dupree invites them to a plantation on Moonscar Island. She lives there with its owner, Simone Lenoir. According to Lena and Simone, the ghost of a pirate named Morgan Moonscar haunts the place. The gang soon finds the island teeming with zombies, and not the kind you can cosplay as.

The premise feels a lot like James Gunn and Raja Gosnell’s 2002 live-action adaptation, though it is less crass. Both films follow Mystery Inc. reuniting after years apart, and both have a supernatural element. Setting aside the obvious difference between live action and animation, the two diverge in their monsters. Stenstrum, Leopold and Doi arguably took the bigger creative swing.

In most zombie stories, the zombies are a destructive force that terrorizes the characters. The “real evil” might be capitalism, society or some terrible scientist, but the zombies are never shown in a positive or sympathetic light.

In Zombie Island, the zombies stalk and scare Mystery Inc. only to make the gang understand the real danger they face. The threat comes from their hosts, not the zombies. Simone and Lena are were-cats who sacrificed earlier tourists and used their life force to keep themselves immortal. The change may seem small, but putting “good” zombies in one of Scooby-Doo’s darkest spin-off films was an interesting choice. It gave the zombies a positive connotation and granted them an autonomy the zombie genre hadn’t shown before.

A reimagining of Scooby-Doo’s formula

Scooby-Doo has followed a familiar formula since the beginning. A mystery needs solving, and the culprits, who usually wear masks, wait for someone from Mystery Inc. to yank them off. There were exceptions, but for the most part the series stuck to a tried-and-true plan.

Stenstrum and Doi wanted to shake things up with Zombie Island. In an oral history of the movie published by SlashFilm, Lance Falk discusses the production. Falk was a writer and animation artist on various Scooby-Doo projects and a model coordinator on Zombie Island.

Falk recalls an early production meeting where Stenstrum was the first to suggest doing something different with the formula.

“He said, ‘Can we just get rid of the taking off the mask thing? It’s old. It’s tired. Can we? Yeah, because I want to do real monsters. They physically can be real monsters,'” Falk recalls.

Leopold, whom Falk describes as the “defender” of Scooby-Doo, balked at the idea. The gang solving mysteries and unmasking the villains who caused them so much trouble was what made Scooby-Doo iconic in the first place. Dropping it risked alienating the audience the team badly wanted to reach.

Doi pointed out that the feature-length format of Zombie Island would make the same old plan hard to follow. Falk describes what Doi said at the time:

“You can yank people’s chains for about a half an hour, but you can’t do it for an hour and a half and have it be a fake. It feels like the end where somebody wakes up, and it’s a dream. It just feels like a cheat.”

The solution paired the unmasking tradition with real monsters. Everyone working on Zombie Island got room to stretch their imaginations, and the film still spoke to the fans watching.

“If you play fair with the audience, you don’t give them false clues, but you do kind of lead them down false assumptions,” Falk says. “That way, we have our cake and eat it too. We can make the fans happy. We can make ourselves happy. We can make a better story.”

Leopold’s worry turned out to be unfounded. Zombie Island received overwhelmingly positive critical reception. Even years later the movie remains beloved, and in a 2022 ranking Variety called it the best Scooby-Doo movie ever made.

Almost three decades after its debut, Zombie Island remains one of the most innovative and ambitious Scooby-Doo films of all time. Recent versions of the characters have shown that changing everything doesn’t always work. A clear, clever idea that keeps Scooby-Doo fresh while respecting the original vision can win fans who stick with the stories for a long time.

Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is available to rent from online platforms like Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play and Fandango.

Source: Polygon