- Title: The New Scooby-Doo Movies – Wednesday is Missing
- wiki: link
Wayback Wednesday takes us back to another mystery involving some meddling kids and their talking dog. Often referred to as the “lost” episode of the series because Warner was never able to get the rights to release it on DVD, Blu-ray, or streaming, “Wednesday is Missing” is an odd episode that attempts to be both a Scooby-Doo mystery and a backdoor pilot of sorts for the eventual The Addams Family cartoon. It serves the latter better than the former and in many ways is probably best forgotten as its certainly one of the weakest classic Scooby-Doo episodes ever made.
The episode kicks off with the Mystery Machine being crashed in the middle of nowhere. Well, not nowhere exactly. They meet an elderly couple fleeing the swamp and then are given a ride to the Addams Family home by Lurch (Ted Cassidy). There they meet Gomez (John Astin) and Morticia (Carolyn Jones) who talk the gang into staying the night to look after the children, replacing the housekeepers (who were the fleeing couple the gang met on the road), while the pair set off for their second honeymoon. Why Lurch or Fester couldn’t perform the task is never discussed.
The episode’s title comes from Wednesday (Cindy Henderson) disappearing during a blackout with a note left from the Vulture who claims to have kidnapped the girl. The gang would later encounter a giant vulture in sky above the house. The setup is basically a thin excuse to allow the Scooby-Doo characters to snoop around the bizarre house and meet all kinds of odd people and creatures from a flying carpet to a dragon. The mystery isn’t even solved, as Mystery, Inc. bungle themselves into a reveal by accidentally setting off fireworks that reveal the identity of the Vulture to be nothing more than a helicopter run by the two former housekeepers.
Part of a problem that could arise from this particular Scooby-Doo series was that the celebrity guest-stars often overshadowed the episodes with writers sometimes becoming too invested in writing gags for the celebrities rather than simply write them into a Scooby-Doo story leading to some rather inconsistent writing. From a Scooby-Doo perspective, there’s almost nothing of note here. There are no memorable moments from our characters and the mystery, which sort of begins and ends without much effort on their part either way, limps to its inevitable conclusion. Not only is it a hard episode to track down, but, if you can manage it, it’s mostly a waste of your time (unless you are solely interested in The Addams Family).
