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Cartoon
The New Scooby-Doo Movies

Animal
Furley

Outfit: Mayberry law enforcement gear / one bullet in his pocket / zombie flesh

Tagline: "Nip it in the bud!"

Plot summary: After years of sending children into mansions with sociopaths, Hanna-Barbera decided that Mystery Inc. needed to broaden their horizon.  The idea was simple.  Nobody is interested in seeing Freddy, Shaggy, and the rest of the Scooby Gang wander aimlessly into a haunted house to solve mysteries that nobody else seems to really need solved...that is, unless they're accompanied by a FABULOUS GUEST STAR!

Pretty soon anyone who was anyone in the early seventies was climbing into the Mystery Machine.  Guests on the "New Scooby-Doo Movies" included The Harlem Globetrotters, Batman, and fictional heroes like Sonny and Cher.  The formula didn't stray far from "guy-buys/finds-abandoned-place, guy-haunts-abandoned-place" and the monsters were still mostly that guy in a mask, but I think we'll all agree that every issue seems more pressing when you've got Jonathan Winters leering over your shoulder.

Don Knotts, most famous for his role as deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show," appeared in two of the Scooby-Doo movies.  In the first, cleverly titled "Guess Who's Knott Coming to Dinner," the Scoobies ask for directions to Moody Manor (where Evanescence used to live) so they can investigate a murder.  Don Knotts overhears this, and since he (as Don Knotts, not as a character) is a SKILLED PRIVATE DETECTIVE assumes that one of the gang is responsible for said murder.  The second movie is even more divergent, as the gang visits a town called "Juneberry" where Don Knotts has gone insane and believes he is a sheriff's deputy.  He demands that they spend the night in his county jail, and the misunderstanding and grave mental disease leads the group into chance encounters with a skeleton, some ghosts, the Grim Reaper, and a dinosaur.  DON KNOTTS MAKES THEM RUN INTO A DINOSAUR.  That "Does Knott Make Any Sense."  If I ran into a dinosaur I would shit my pants and "Bust a Knott."

But then again if I were in the Scooby-Gang I wouldn't keep saying we ride around in the "Mystery Machine," because it's clearly a fucking van. (more)

User Comments: Where on Earth do you start dissecting Don Knotts' fashion sense?   For the first two-hundred years of his life all we ever saw him in was a cop uniform.  That's what he's pictured in above.  When he started making movies (like "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" or "The Ghost and Mrs. Chicken") all he wore was Pee-wee Herman suits and labcoats always with his hair slicked back, because that's what people did in the fifties and early sixties.  They slicked their hair back, built vehicles, and used those vehicles to jump over, off of, or into things.   In the seventies Knotts adopted Hypno-Hustler gear like bell-bottomed pants and butterfly collars, proving that sometimes comedy is as simple as taking a shivering old man and dressing him like the Bee Gees.

So what else can I say?  Don Knotts is one of those people who doesn't try to be iconic, but has to clean out the little chunks of icon that form in the corner of his eyes when he wakes up in the morning.  He's awesome.   He's so old that he be born when Moses be born, but until a thousand days after the day he dies we'll remember him, and that's all you can really ask for when you're alive and trying to live.

Maybe Hanna-Barbera drew Don Knotts into their cartoon because they liked Don Knotts.  I think we could all take a lesson from Enid Coleslaw.

User Rating: 10/10 (100,00,000 votes)