YMMV / Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was Morgan Moonscar genuinely remorseful about his atrocities and trying to help Simone's potential victims, or did he just want revenge on her for killing him? The way he advances menacingly towards Shaggy and Scooby while holding a sword suggests he may have intended to defeat the werecats by killing their food source before they could be drained.
  • How much did Lena really care for Fred? Throughout the film, she occasionally shows some subtle favoritism towards him and slights Daphne more than once (though whether this be out of jealousy or if it's just unintentional is vague at best). Not to mention upon her betrayal, she apologizes to him with what seems to be a bit of sincerity and even admits "I really do like you". However, she still very much intends on draining him with hardly any remorse (and in what way she "liked" him is also ambiguous), so was every action just to gain his trust and lead he and his friend to their deaths, or was there some part of her that genuinely fell for him? It's very hard to say, but it wouldn't be entirely out of the question; out of all the villains in the movie, Lena does seem to have the most humanity left.
• Angst? What Angst?: The gang and Beau walk away surprisingly okay from their nightmarish hell of an adventure that involved them almost dying numerous times and learning that life-eating pagan supernatural monsters are real.
• Ass Pull: While that twist is well-explained and developed after it's revealed, there was little to no foreshadowing about the existence of a cat god prior to The Reveal. Although, it should be noted that this started life as an episode of SWAT Kats, explaining things.
• Awesome Art: The animation is some of the most fluid and best-looking you'll ever see in a Scooby-Doo movie, thanks in part due to being animated by Mook DLE, a Japanese animation studio.
• Awesome Music:
  • Third Eye Blind's Alternative-Rock version of the Scooby-Doo theme at the beginning.
  • Skycycle's "It's Terror Time Again." Great Horror-Punk that's also quite catchy, it's often considered to be the best song of the franchise.
  • Skycycle's Pop Punk "The Ghost Is Here."
  • Not to mention the protege of Bruce Broughton and Laurence Rosenthal Steven Bramson's orchestral music score, that manages to be witty and suspenseful at the same time.
• Complete Monster: Jacques stands out as a stark contrast with his two co-conspirators. While his partners had no idea that praying to their cat god for help in their pursuit of vengeance would lead to their transformation into monsters, Jacques was a normal man who willingly became a monster to become immortal. For years, he's been using his ferry to escort people to Moonscar Island, only for him and his partners to drain the life from them. Afterwards, their victims are left to wander the island as zombies, aware but unable to move on to the afterlife.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Lena and Simone, despite the atrocious nature of their Ax-Crazy actions and horrific fates given to their victims after draining them, are given this treatment by some fans due to their tragic Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds backstories as well as their beautiful character designs, especially Lena, as she was the least evil of the three villains. You will want to give Lena a big hug after hearing her and Simone's Start of Darkness. Simone to a lesser extent, only because she'd likely claw your eyes out if you tried. Plus, their frightening deaths are something of an Alas, Poor Villain moment for them as as tragic as their motives, they get to receive Cruel and Unusual Deaths, although also deserving given what they did to their victims. However, all this can't whitewash the fact that they killed innocent people who had nothing to do with their plight in order to continue living forever.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Beau, for being a pretty badass gardener (actually a private detective) voiced by Cam Clarke.
  • The mysterious cat god has attained a following from fans who noticed the passing reference to it during the flashback sequences. Even twenty years later, fans are speculating about its true nature, intentions, and whether or not one day it will return. After Return to Zombie Island, the presence of another real cat creature also exacerbated discussion about the cat god, with some wondering if this is the actual cat god who will remain an ongoing antagonist.
• Evil Is Cool: Simone Lenoir and Lena Dupree, despite being one-shot villains, are quite popular for being the first enemies in the franchise to be treated as a serious threat, being both appealing in human form and outright scary in monster form, having a tragic backstory, and for suffering a Family-Unfriendly Death that would give child fans of the franchise nightmares.
• First Installment Wins: Oodles of direct-to-video Scooby-Doo films followed the success of this one, but few if any of them earned as much acclaim. Its own sequel "Return To Zombie Island" in particular was strongly disliked and, more often than not, utterly ignored.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The central plot twist of this movie (that the zombies are actually trying to repent for their crimes when they were alive by helping the protagonists, after being cursed by the female antagonist(s) who were initially innocent victims but ultimately became no better than those they hated) is almost identical to the plot of ParaNorman, 14 years later.
  • The fated night of the werecats' annual sacrifice of their victims takes place every harvest moon. In 2019, two decades after this film’s release (and the same year as the follow-up’s release), the harvest moon took place on Friday the 13th, and the same day as the 50th birthday of the franchise.
  • Fred believes that the source of the hauntings is just someone in a costume looking for Morgan Moonscar's treasure. In Scooby-Doo: Return to Zombie Island, that is exactly what the villains are doing.
  • Lena Dupree is supposed to sound more like a Ragin' Cajun due to living in Louisiana, but ends up sounding more like a Southern Belle instead. Tara Strong would later go on to voice Miss Minutes in Loki, who has a similarly exaggerated southern accent, and also turns out to secretly be a villainous character, much like Lena is.
  • One joke involves a terrified Shaggy picking up Fred's camera, only for the video to come out shaky due to his shivering. Funny then. Even funnier now that the craze for Found Footage Films has popularized the use of Jitter Cam in horror, making the joke that much more meta.
• Jerkass Woobie: Lena and Simone, due to their tragic origins of how they end up they way they are.
• Les Yay: Simone and Lena carry this vibe when you stop and realize how old they are and how much of their lives they've spent together. Also doubles as Opposites Attract considering their different personalities. Lena may be Ambiguously Bi considering the way she flirts with Fred and mentions she "really did like him" before trying to kill him. Also, Lena wasn't around when Velma started floating, and someone had to have moved her voodoo doll. And Velma's skirt happens to be lifted up.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Nobody really believed that the old Mystery Gang would remain broken up for any lasting amount of time, making their apparent breakup before reuniting at the start come off as a tad random.
• Misattributed Song: "It's Terror Time Again" by Skycycle doesn't have a full-length version, not even for the end credits. A full-length mostly-synthesized version is on the soundtrack album for Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost, attributed to Gary Falcone and Joe Pizzuco.
• Moe: Well, ain't Lena just the cutest little Southern chick you ever did see? It may or may not be an act; we don't see enough of her pre-curse to judge what her personality was like back then, but she definitely uses it to fool people.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Whilst the two main villains' backstory concerning their descent into evil is undeniably tragic, they're over the line once it's revealed that, after they took their revenge on Moonscar and his crew, they started making more restlessly undead victims out of innocent people just to maintain their immortality, amassing a body count which is surely in at least the hundreds by the present day.
  • The above villains' collaborator Jacques is also over the line once it's revealed that he joined them, accepted the werecat curse, and has been setting their annual victims up for their deaths and eternal undeath ever since, all of his own free will. Unlike Lena and Simone, who initially only brought the curse on themselves out of righteous vengeance and genuinely didn't know what they were getting themselves into until it was too late; Jacques has no tragic backstory, and by Simone's account, he signed up with Team Werecat simply because he craved immortality and feared death.
• Narm:
  • A pan in on Velma during her accusation of Beau is overly dramatic.
  • There are several times that characters have random, out-of-place movements. It looks like they were trying to avoid making the characters just stand around, but during the cat creature exposition scene, the random movements make the villains look goofy at times, like they don't know what to do with their hands.
• Older Than They Think:
  • There is a misconception that this movie is the first time in the Scooby Doo franchise that the monsters are real instead of just being a hoax. This mostly stems from the commercial that only said "this time the monsters are real", which of course was true but doesn't actually mean it's the first time. It was actually just the first time that the original five are there with real monsters as the main antagonists ^note  The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show was the first time real supernatural things happened, but only featured Scooby and Shaggy (with Scrappy) and was generally played for comedy; The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo was the first time the series used real monsters as antagonists, but only with Daphne, Shaggy, and Scooby (plus Scrappy and Flim-Flam); and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was the first to feature the original gang with a real ghost in a Halloween Episode, but the gang were Spin-Off Babies and the ghost was not the antagonist.
  • Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers combined genuine supernatural forces with the time-tested mystery format a good decade before this movie (albeit in a more light-hearted manner).
  • The later DVD release back crawl played with words to a silly level that lets them use the tagline but make it technically true with "for the first time in their lives, these ghouls might actually be real" (since the original direct-to-video continuity seems to ignore everything but Scooby Doo, Where Are You?).
• Once Original, Now Common: Younger viewers watching the movie decades after the 90s might wonder what the big deal about this movie was since there have been numerous Scooby-Doo animated movies since this one was released, many that have built significantly upon the foundation laid by this film, not to mention the numerous Scooby-Doo television shows. It's hard to remember now that when this movie came out, the Scooby-Doo franchise was essentially dead in the water, good only for reruns and schedule filler. The shot in the arm this movie gave the franchise simply cannot be understated.
• Tough Act to Follow: While future installments attempted to continue riding the "Monsters are Real" wave, none of them have quite been able to capture the admiration of this film. Witch's Ghost likely came the closest, and that was more due to the Hex Girls inadvertently tapping into the Hot Goth fandom than anything. The direct sequel produced several decades later was met with such middling reception, especially due to the zombies in it ending up actually just being people in costumes, that it's basically been relegated to Fanon Discontinuity.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While the Confederate soldier zombies were technically the victims of the film's true antagonists, with their leader even thanking Shaggy and Scooby before moving on, some viewers, knowing the historical context of the real American Civil War and what the Confederates fought for, might, like with the murderous pirates, not feel as badly about their fate as the writers may have intended.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Shaggy and Scooby would not have gotten away with their airport antics (especially Scooby constantly sniffing and barking at people's baggage) in a post-9/11 world. The camera is also very late 90s, and the gang losing their footage to quicksand means that they have nothing to show on Daphne's show; these days, everything would be digital and backed up on computers and hard drives easily after each filming day as opposed to having to get the tapes processed back then. Also, Simone and Lena's scheme to trap people on the island would be harder to pull off when most people would have mobile phones these days and could call for help (unless the island has bad reception).
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Considering that there are actual mentions of people dying, the gang themselves almost die several times, the gruesome design of the zombies, the monsters suffer Cruel And Unusual Deaths, and the overall darker atmosphere, yes, some may find it difficult to consider this a film for kids.
• Win Back the Crowd: The Scooby Doo franchise had been at its lowest production pace with only one production after the Turner Buyout. This movie managed to kick-start not only the Scooby franchise into the new era but in a way kept the HB lighthouse shining through its also lowest production pace.

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