28 Years Ago, a Near-Perfect Zombie Thriller Resurrected a Beloved Franchise From the Dead
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For the past few years, Scooby-Doo media has been met with either cool indifference (e.g., Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?) or outright hostility (Velma). So fans of the lovable hound and Mystery Incorporated are likely hedging their bets that Netflix’s upcoming 2027 adaptation, Scooby-Doo: Origins, will bring something new and exciting to the franchise.
This isn’t the first time Scooby-Doo has entered a period of stagnation. Back in 1998, the franchise was approaching its 30-year anniversary and audiences had begun to grow tired of the Great Dane and his mystery-solving pals. A Pup Named Scooby-Doo had gone off the air in 1991 with nothing to replace it but reruns, and by the late ’90s, the state of Scoob seemed dire. Instead, that low point became a new opportunity.
With Scooby-Doo in such dire straits, director Jim Stenstrum and writers Glenn Leopold and Davis Doi had plenty of creative freedom to create the franchise’s next adventure: Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. This 1998 animated film arguably saved Scooby-Doo from being put down for good, while turning the zombie genre completely on its head.
Forget everything you know about zombies
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is set a few short years after Mystery Inc. splits up to pursue new careers. However, when Daphne — now the star of a reality TV series — says she wants to hunt real ghosts instead of people in masks. Fred — Daphne’s one-man crew (join a union already, Freddy) — contacts Shaggy, Scooby, and Velma, and the gang embarks on a road trip to New Orleans.
They are soon invited to a plantation on Moonscar Island by Lena Dupree, who lives at the plantation alongside its owner, Simone Lenoir. According to Lena and Simone, a pirate named Morgan Moonscar haunts the place. Eventually, they discover the island is rife with zombies — and not the kind you can cosplay as.
The movie’s premise feels a lot like James Gunn and Raja Gosnell’s 2002 live-action adaptation, though not quite as crass. Both films follow Mystery Inc. reuniting after years apart, and each has a supernatural element. But where these movies diverge (beyond the obvious live-action vs. animation differences) is that Stenstrum, Leopold, and Doi arguably took a bigger creative swing with their monsters.
In most zombie stories, the zombies are ultimately a destructive force that terrorizes the characters. Whether the ‘real evil’ is capitalism or society or some terrible scientist, the zombies are never portrayed in a positive or sympathetic light.
Yet in Zombie Island, the zombies only stalk and scare Mystery Inc. in order to make the gang understand the real danger they face — not from the zombies, but from their hosts. Simone and Lena are actually were-cats who sacrificed previous tourists and used their life force to preserve their immortality. While it may seem like a small change, including ‘good’ zombies in arguably one of Scooby-Doo’s darkest spin-off films was an interesting choice. It not only gave the zombies a positive connotation but also granted them autonomy in a way we hadn’t seen in the zombie genre.
A reimagining of Scooby-Doo’s formula
Scooby-Doo has followed a familiar formula since the beginning: a mystery to solve, and culprits who usually wear masks, waiting for someone from Mystery Inc. to yank them off. There were, of course, exceptions, but for the most part, Scooby-Doo stuck to a tried-and-true plan.
Stenstrum and Doi, however, wanted to shake things up with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. In an oral history of the movie published by SlashFilm, Lance Falk, a writer and animation artist on various Scooby-Doo projects and a model coordinator on Zombie Island, discusses the movie’s production.
One key point Falk touches on was an early production meeting where Stenstrum was the first to suggest the team do something different with the Scooby 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.
However, Leopold, who Falk describes as the “defender” of Scooby-Doo, balked at the idea. After all, the gang solving mysteries and unmasking the villains who caused them so much trouble was what made Scooby-Doo so iconic in the first place. Removing that risked alienating the audience the team desperately wanted to appeal to.
It was Doi who pointed out that Zombie Island’s feature-length format and structure would make it hard to follow the same old plan.
Falk describes Doi saying 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.”
Ultimately, Falk chose to pair the unmasking idea with real monsters. This would make everyone working on Zombie Island happy and give them room to stretch their imaginations in a creatively satisfying way, while still speaking 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.
Turns out, he was right. Zombie Island received overwhelmingly positive critical reception. Even years later, the movie remains beloved, with Variety calling it the best Scooby-Doo movie ever made in a 2022 ranking.
Almost three decades after its debut, Zombie Island remains one of the most innovative and ambitious Scooby-Doo films of all time. As recent iterations of the characters have shown, shaking things up entirely doesn’t always work, but when you have a clear, concise, and clever idea for keeping Scooby-Doo fresh while respecting the original vision, fans will flock to it and stick with those stories for a long, long time.
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island is available to rent from online platforms like Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play, and Fandango.
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