- Title: Scooby Doo, Where Are You! – Foul Play in Funland
- wiki: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us back to Scooby Doo, Where Are You! for another mystery involving some meddling kids and their talking dog. While digging for clams outside a close amusement park, the gang’s interest is piqued when the park suddenly comes alive without warning and an unusual creature begins stalking the attractions. “Foul Play in Funland” is the rare episode of classic Scooby Doo, Where Are You! where there wasn’t a human orchestrating shenanigans or any kind of motive to do harm. The amusement park setting offers some fun moments, a few of which would find themselves into various Scooby Doo opening montages. What Shaggy (Casey Kasem) suspects must be an alien or ghost at different times in the episode is revealed to be a malfunctioning android named Charlie.
Despite the cool design of Charlie whose speed and feats of strength are initially difficult to explain, and the fun setting of an amusement park with it’s various games, hall of mirrors, and roller coaster, “Foul Play in Funland” does have some odd plot problems. First, there’s no reason for Charlie’s creator not to tell Mystery, Inc. the truth about Charlie (other than to prolong the mystery). His sister’s reason to hurt Charlie to protect children from robots is problematic at best, and certainly mean-spirited towards both her brother and the family’s sole source of income. It’s also unclear from her sabotaging the gang’s attempt to corral Charlie whether or not she was responsible for his initial malfunction. The roller coaster sequence is also full of continuity issues with characters in the wrong location multiple times in contradiction to what events suggest are happening. Despite such head-scratching moments, there’s still an awful lot of fun happening at Funland.
