Official Synopsis:
Few remember that two formidable stars of TV, movies and comic books - Scooby-Doo and Richie Rich - fought ghosts and crooks together in a one-of-a-kind series. Richie has all the money in the world, but what he loves most is one Dollar - his faithful dog who helps take a bite out of crooks. Richie puts his fortune to good use developing the coolest crime fighting inventions (with occasional sweeping up by robot mind Irona). Meanwhile, Scooby-Doo and Shaggy are joined in their investigations by pugnacious nephew Scrappy-Doo, team players in the Fearless Detective Agency, and always solving - hilariously - the spookiest caseload in cartoondom. The riotous sleuths and the rich youth make for awesome animated fun in this Deluxe 2-Disc Set featuring the First 7 Episodes of this rare TV classic!

  
Our Take:
On the DVD case for The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show, Volume One, the description states that “Few remember that two formidable stars of TV, movies and comic fought ghosts and crooks together.” What I bet even fewer people remember is that many of these episodes were written by Paul Haggis. Yes, that would be Paul “Million Dollar Baby, Crash, In The Valley Of Elah” Haggis, also known as the most dour screenwriter in the business. So is Richie Rich secretly a condemnation of big business and corporate interests? Nah… here it’s all good fun.

I love Scooby-Doo; always have, always will. But I also always enjoyed Richie Rich immensely when I was a kid, and since he’s so much more under-represented on DVD than Scooby is, I was pretty excited to get a chance to revisit some of his cartoons. Scooby and Richie don’t team up like the official synopsis makes it sound; rather, The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show was an hour-long cartoon that featured numerous segments for each of its star characters. Of course, the Scooby segments are ruined a bit by Scrappy Doo’s presence, but they’re still enjoyable. I really liked watching Richie Rich again and seeing all the crazy ways a young kid can fight crime when he’s ridiculously wealthy.

As for the DVD itself, this is being marketed as Volume One. So why are there only seven episodes included on the two-DVD set? Couldn’t Warner have just given us a Complete Series collection? There’s also only one extra feature, and it focuses only on Richie Rich. Sorry, Scooby fans!

* The Story Of Richie Rich (10 minutes) – A brief history of the character. It’s a good piece, but I would have rather seen one of the 20-30 minute features we can usually count on from Warner on their DC Comics releases.

The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show, Volume One is a lot of fun, despite the presence of Scrappy-Doo. While it’s not a perfect DVD set by any means, I’d be hard pressed to say you won’t get your money’s worth out of it if you pick it up.

Overall Picture:
Show: B+
DVD: C+

- Mike Spring

Editor