The top dog meets Top Cat and his gang of felonious felines in this all Hanna-Barbera edition of Scooby-Doo Team-Up. Top Cat is up to his ways of playing tricks on Officer Dibble. This time, he's got one of his gang dressing up as the Ghost of Hoagy's Alley! With the Mayor making a real push to clean up the neighborhood, the policeman calls in the Mystery Inc. Gang to solve the mystery.
In a twist on the corrupt land developer trope of Scooby-Doo stories, the detectives actually go out of their way to prove that the neighborhood really is haunt, least a pair of scheming real estate agents will buy up everything for real cheap and tear it all down to build luxury condominiums. This will not only evict Top Cat and his gang, it will put Officer Dibble on having to work a really dangerous beat. So cops and cat crooks work together to stop the plans of some modernizers from putting a lot of nice folks out of house and home.
Community Gentrification. The only thing worse than monsters and ghosts.
I'm not normally as much of a fan of the Hanna-Barbera crossovers as I am the DC Comics ones. They tend to be more formulaic and predictable. However, this story was such a switcheroo to the standard Scooby-Doo mystery that I actually felt like I was reading something entirely fresh and new. It probably helps that I know next to nothing about Top Cat. Still, what I know about Scooby-Doo, and I know a lot, is changed up so much to a point that everything was totally unexpected.
The writer Sholly Fisch is the reason this story was so original. He's a masterful writer who knows how to not just write for kids but the whole family!
The only thing that I didn't like about the story was the unevenness of the art. But I don't blame Dave Alvarez for it. His renderings of the Mystery Inc. team is spot on. His drawings of the Top Cat universe of characters are great. However, the two franchises couldn't be any more different from each other. Shaggy, Fred, Velma and Daphne are drawn much more realistically than Officer Dibble and the developers. Scooby-Doo looks like a pure-bred next to Top Cat. Thus, when these two worlds of characters meet, it just doesn't gel. At least when the Flintstones meet up with the Jetsons, you felt like Fred really could have been George's long lost ancestor. The art styles of these two franchises are like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks meeting Picasso's 3 Musicians.
If you can get over how striking the artwork is, you're in for a treat. This really is one of the most original Scooby-Doo mysteries ever written and it's a ton of fun.
Worth Consuming!
Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.
