If you grew up watching boomerang or caught those dusty DVD sets in the bargain bin, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The 1970s were a fever dream for animation. Hanna-Barbera was basically just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck. The New Scooby-Doo Movies Season 2 is the peak of that chaos. It's the season where the Mystery Inc. gang stopped just being detectives and started being tour guides for the most random celebrities in Hollywood history.
Honestly, it’s a miracle it even exists.
Think about the logic for a second. In one episode, you have a talking Great Dane. In the next, he’s hanging out with the Harlem Globetrotters or Mama Cass Elliot. It shouldn't work. By all accounts of modern television structure, this show should have been a train wreck. Yet, the second season of this specific iteration of Scooby remains a cult favorite for people who appreciate the absolute absurdity of the "guest star" era.
The Massive Shift in The New Scooby-Doo Movies Season 2
By the time the show rolled into its second season in 1973, the formula was set in stone, but the stakes felt weirder. The episodes were long. Really long. Most Scooby adventures are a tight 22 minutes. These were nearly an hour.
💡 You might also like: How to Watch The Real Housewives and Never Miss a Single Second of Drama
That extra time meant more filler. It meant more scenes of Shaggy and Scooby eating massive sandwiches while a hand-drawn version of Dick Van Dyke looked on in mild confusion. It’s fascinating to watch now because you can see the animators struggling to fill the runtime. They used long, lingering pans over backgrounds. They had repetitive chase sequences. But they also had some of the most creative character interactions the franchise has ever seen.
The guest stars weren't just cameos. They were the plot.
Who Actually Showed Up?
We have to talk about the guest list. Season 2 was shorter than the first, consisting of only eight episodes, but it swung for the fences.
You had The Harlem Globetrotters returning, which basically solidified them as honorary members of the gang. Then there’s the episode with Josie and the Pussycats. This was a massive deal for 70s kids—a crossover event before "cinematic universes" were a buzzword. Seeing two different mystery-solving bands on one screen felt like the Avengers of Saturday morning cartoons.
But then it gets niche.
Take the episode "The Haunted Showboat." It features Josie and the Pussycats, sure. But then you have The Mystery of Haunted Island featuring the Harlem Globetrotters. The sheer repetition of the Globetrotters shows just how much the audience loved that specific dynamic. They brought a physical comedy—the basketball tricks, the whistling theme song—that complemented Scooby’s own slapstick perfectly.
Then there’s the Dick Van Dyke episode. It's called "The Haunted Carnival." Seeing a legendary Emmy-winning actor transformed into a 2D drawing to run away from a "ghost" is the kind of entertainment we just don't get anymore. Modern guest spots are usually just voice cameos. Back then, the guest was the episode.
Why the Animation Looks... Like That
Let’s be real. The animation in The New Scooby-Doo Movies Season 2 isn't exactly Disney-level.
Hanna-Barbera was the king of "limited animation." They reused cells. They used the same running loops. If you look closely at the backgrounds in the season 2 finale, you'll see the same vase pass by five times. But there’s a charm to it. It’s organic. It feels like it was made by people in a room with ink and paint, rushing to meet a Saturday morning deadline.
The color palettes were vibrant, almost psychedelic. The 70s aesthetic is baked into the DNA of the show. Bell-bottoms everywhere. Ascots that serve no practical purpose. It's a time capsule of a specific era of American pop culture that was trying to be hip while remaining wholesome.
The Licensing Nightmare
Ever wonder why you can't always find every episode on streaming?
Licensing.
This is the "dark side" of the guest star era. When Hanna-Barbera made these, they signed deals with the real-life celebrities or their estates. Decades later, when it came time to put the show on DVD or Max, those legal contracts became a mess.
For a long time, the The Addams Family episode from the first season was the "holy grail" of lost Scooby media because of rights issues. While Season 2 had fewer of these legal hurdles than the first, the complexity of managing the likenesses of people like Don Knotts or the Globetrotters means the show often disappears from rotation. It's a reminder of how fragile media history can be when it's built on the images of real people.
The Legacy of the Guest Star Formula
The impact of this season can't be overstated. It changed how Scooby-Doo functioned as a brand.
Before this, the gang was somewhat grounded. They solved local mysteries in abandoned mines. After The New Scooby-Doo Movies Season 2, the franchise realized it could go anywhere and do anything. It paved the way for The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and even the modern Scooby-Doo and Guess Who? series.
The "Guess Who" show is a direct spiritual successor. It brings in people like Mark Hamill or Bill Nye, but it owes its entire existence to the trail blazed by Shaggy hanging out with Tim Conway in 1973.
The second season proved that the "Mystery Machine" was a flexible enough vehicle to hold anyone. It didn't matter if the guest was a comedian, a singer, or an athlete. Scooby-Doo was the universal language of TV.
What You Should Do Next
If you want to actually watch this stuff properly, don't just rely on random YouTube clips. The quality is usually terrible and the audio is often pitched up to avoid copyright bots.
- Check for the "Best of" Collections: Often, Warner Bros. releases specific "Best of" DVDs rather than full season sets because of those licensing issues I mentioned. Look for the "The New Scooby-Doo Movies" (The (Almost) Complete Collection) on Blu-ray. It's the most stable way to see the second season in high definition.
- Watch the Globetrotters Episodes Back-to-Back: To really understand the 70s vibe, watch the Season 1 and Season 2 Globetrotters episodes. You'll notice how the writing gets a bit more surreal in the second year.
- Analyze the Backgrounds: If you're an animation nerd, pay attention to the hand-painted backgrounds in "The Haunted Showboat." They represent some of the last gasp of that specific "painterly" style before the 80s brought in more computerized, flat aesthetics.
- Compare to "Guess Who": Watch an episode of the 2019 "Guess Who" series immediately after a Season 2 episode. It’s a fascinating study in how comedy timing in animation has evolved from long-form slapstick to fast-paced, meta-humor.
The reality is that we likely won't see a show like this again. The sheer cost of clearing celebrity likenesses for 40-minute episodes makes it a financial nightmare for modern studios. That makes these eight episodes from 1973 a weird, wonderful anomaly in television history. They are slow, they are occasionally nonsensical, and they are exactly what Saturday mornings were meant to be.