Thursday 5 May 2011

01: What a Night for a Knight.

This image always makes me laugh. It's how unhappy everyone looks, seriously, there's not a happy face amongst them, (except perhaps Velma who looks like she's having a nervous orgasm). Look at Fred there, his lips are pouting, he's about to cry. Haha, classic stuff.


Anyway, on to the episode.

The episode opens with a shot of a long lonely road, lit only by the glow of a full moon. A pickup truck appears coming up the road, carrying a wooden crate. A medieval knight with freaky green pupils climbs out of it and looks in at the driver. We then cut away to Shaggy and Scooby, left to assume the driver met his end impaled on a medieval lance.

Shaggy and Scooby are walking back from a movie, apparently. I don't know why their journey home involved this creepy road in the middle of a forest. Perhaps they went to some kind of hillbilly cinema, where a man in a barrel loads up the film with tobacco stained fingers. 

They are then terrified by a frog, which Scooby then chases, resulting in Shaggy's beard getting skin for a few seconds. 

Gross.

Somehow this results in the discovery of the pick up truck from earlier. Shaggy's and Scooby are understandably unsettled to find a medieval knight in the drivers seat.

This is my truck. This is what I do.
The Gang is called in and it is discovered, through reading a sign, that the knight belonged to someone called Hyde White, who lives in London, England. That's all England is, anyway, just a big sprawling London, and Scotland is just men in kilts and peat.

Daphne finds a note which, according to her is instructions for the knights delivery. It's not, it's... not even close. Some of it is in like Thai or something, and the rest is just gibberish. I don't even know, like, it's on the screen for a while, people would have noticed. How did they think they could get away with that?

"Is the only because where are DELIVER TO COUNTY MUSEUM"

Anyway, the Gang finds their way to the museum the knight was being sent to. Where they meet a little man who looks sort of like that guy in The Critic, I think it was called. But fatter. Seen here trying to eat a floating thistle seed.

Look up thistle seeds, they... they look like that.
He tells the Gang about a legend that the Knight would come to life when the moon was full. Like a werewolf, I guess. Seems kind of lazy, but, you know whatever. We find out that the Knight was being delivered to the museum, something that, lets me honest, they should have know, but which still apparently shocks Scooby and makes Shaggy lose everything below the waist.

What I don't see- ABUH!
After some brief exposition and plot contrivance, the Gang finds themselves back at the Museum, preparing to break in. Fred comments that the door is: "Tight as a drum!" and I can't help but find it a little sexy. He then instructs Shaggy to climb through a tiny door miles above them, something Shaggy absolutely doesn't want to do; Fred just smiles that creepy smile of his and tells Shaggy that he has to. Fred is so scary sometimes.

Picture says enough really.
Shaggy does what he's goddam told, and climbs a ladder balanced on a car-jack up to the window, he then falls in and breaks some priceless artefacts for comic relief. Seriously, these guys should just run now, they must be so poor, this will put them in debt for life.

Shaggy lets the gang in and they split up, Velma and Shaggy go one way, Fred and Daphne another. I'm fairly sure they're fucking as well, because Velma's skirt gets really short for a couple of frames.

It's not just me right?
The knight finally shows up and begins following Scooby and Velma, (Shaggy got lost but I didn't mention it. Because, honestly, who cares). Like most Scooby Doo villains, it doesn't seem to pose much of a threat. It just sort of walks behind them with its hands outstretched, it's almost playful.

Wheeeee! Nice Doggy!
Scooby freaks and runs into Velma, knocking her over and causing her to lose her glasses. She then mistakes the knights animalistic howlings for Shaggy. I'm scared to suggest this, but do you think the writers thought being blind also meant being deaf? Like, as in, they were hand in hand? That's a scary thought.

Sometimes it's hard to grasp how stupid Shaggy is. After the gang meets up again, Shaggy sees a painting missing on the wall, prompting him to say: "A paintings missing, maybe that's a clue?" Hey Shaggy look, a statue is covered for storage, maybe it's a clue! A bowl of cereal is being washed, maybe it's a clue! 

Anyway, when he finds the gang and brings them back to it, it's no longer empty. Fred snorts: "some clue." sarcastically, and Daphne spots what she thinks is blood, causing Fred to pick some up and create this image.

He knows it's blood because of how it feels. So creepy.
Fred can apparently tell weather something is blood or not just by mushing it between his fingers, and declares it, in fact, paint. There's also apparently a trail of it down the hallway. It leads them to a secret room full of illegally reproduced paintings. The knight then appears and causes hijinks which culminate in Shaggy and Scooby stealing a plane from an exhibit and just running the knight down. Also Shaggy apparently has ventriloquism skills which I think never turn up again, so there's that.

The villain is unmasked as the creepy museum dude from before, Scooby looks totally creepy and wrong when he's pulling off the helmet. 

Ew.
The museum dude is sent to prison or something, and everyone feels pretty proud of themselves. Until they remember Hyde White, the man from London, England. Apparently he was being hidden in an exhibit tied up the whole time. Which was two or three days, which, when you think about it, is pretty messed up. That's pretty much torture. 

And that's the end of the first episode of 'Scooby Doo Where Are You?'. What a Night for a Knight sets the tone for the rest of the series: inexplicable, slightly disconcerting, and eye-numbingly rediculous. 

But on the plus side, Fred looks like he's crying.


Goodnight everybody.






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