Mystery, Inc. go their separate ways after becoming bored of mystery-solving due to their monstrous culprits always being people in costumes. Daphne Blake, along with Fred Jones, becomes the star of a successful reality television series, determined to hunt down a real ghost rather than a fake one. Sometime later, Fred contacts Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers and his dog Scooby-Doo to reunite for Daphne's birthday. The gang then embark on a road trip scouting haunted locations across the U.S. for Daphne's show, only to encounter more fake monsters.
After arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana, the gang are invited by a woman named Lena Dupree to visit her workplace at Moonscar Island, an island allegedly haunted by the ghost of its pirate namesake, Morgan Moonscar. Though they are skeptical, the gang agrees. On the island, they meet ferryman Jacques, Lena's employer Simone Lenoir, who lives in a large mansion on a pepper plantation, Simone's gardener Beau, and resident fisherman, Snakebite Scruggs. Shaggy and Scooby then encounter Moonscar's ghost, who later becomes a zombie, while the gang receives several ghostly warnings to leave. Despite this, they stay overnight, still skeptical.
That night, Shaggy and Scooby are chased by a horde of zombies. Velma suspects Beau, while Fred and Daphne capture a zombie. Fred believes it is a human culprit until he pulls its head off, revealing that the zombies are real. As the horde chases them, the gang gets separated and Daphne accidentally causes Fred to drop his video camera in quicksand, losing all film evidence for their show. In a cave, Shaggy and Scooby discover wax voodoo dolls resembling Fred, Velma, and Daphne and play with them, unknowingly controlling their friends until the pair disturb a nest of bats.
The rest of the gang and Beau then discover a secret passageway in the house, where Lena claims the zombies dragged Simone away. The passageway leads to a secret chamber for voodoo rituals, where Velma confronts Lena about her lie, having seen Simone's footprints instead of drag marks. After trapping the gang with the voodoo dolls, Simone and Lena reveal themselves and Jacques as werecats. Simone explains that 200 years ago, she and Lena were part of a group of settlers on the island who worshiped a cat god. When Moonscar and his crew invaded the island, they chased the settlers into the bayou, where they were eaten alive by alligators, but Simone and Lena escaped. They prayed to their god to curse Moonscar and were transformed into immortal werecats. They killed the pirates, but later realized that invoking their god's power had also cursed them. Every harvest moon since, the two have lured and exploited victims to drain their lives and preserve their immortality, hiring Jacques along the way to facilitate their plot in exchange for making him immortal, with the zombies and ghosts being their previous victims who awaken every harvest moon to try and scare people away, in the hopes of preventing them from suffering the same fate.
While being chased by Jacques, Shaggy and Scooby disrupt the werecats' draining ceremony, allowing the gang to free themselves. The werecats then surround the gang, but realize too late that the harvest moon has passed, causing them to disintegrate to dust and finally put the zombies' souls to rest. Beau then reveals himself as an undercover police officer who was sent to investigate disappearances on the island. Daphne asks Beau to guest star on her show, before everyone leaves the next morning.
The Scooby-Doo franchise, which by the time of this film's release was nearing its 30-year mark, had entered into a period of diminishing returns in the early 1990s. After the conclusion of the sixth iteration of the series, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, the character became absent from Saturday-morning lineups. In 1991, Turner Broadcasting System purchased Hanna-Barbera, the animation studio behind Scooby, largely to fill programming at a new, 24/7 cable channel centered on animated properties: Cartoon Network.
Reception
The film has received widespread rave reviews after its initial release. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 89% based on nine reviews, with an average taking of 8/10. Donald Liebenson of the Chicago Tribune described the film as "ambitious" and calls it "a nostalgic hoot [that] resurrects all the touchstones of the original cartoons." Entertainment Weekly's Joe Neumaier praised the film as "Fast, fun, and filled with knowing winks, the mystery honors the show’s beloved structure, but writ large." A 1998 New York Times article by Peter M.
