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Wednesday is Missing is the third episode of the first season of The New Scooby-Doo Movies.

Premise[]

When Gomez and Morticia want to go away on a second honeymoon, the group get tricked into being house sitters in the Addams Family house. But when Wednesday goes missing, there is another mystery for the gang to solve.

Synopsis[]

While driving through a fog, the gang see a giant pair of eyes heading towards them, causing the Mystery Machine to skid off the road and crash into a swamp. The "eyes" heading towards the gang were just headlights from an elderly couple's car speeding away from the nearby house. The couple explain about the strange things happening in the house and warns the gang to keep away from it before driving away. After Fred fails to get the Mystery Machine out of the swamp, the gang meet Lurch who leads them to the house which turns to be the Addams Family mansion.

The gang were introduced to Gomez Addams and his wife, Morticia, their children Wednesday and Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Thing, Cousin Itt and Grandmama. Gomez explains that their previous housekeepers ran away and he makes the gang their new housekeepers while he and Morticia go for their second honeymoon at the Okefenokee Swamp.

During dinner, a sound of a giant bird roaring and flapping wings causes the lights to go out. When the lights came back on, everyone finds Wednesday gone and a note telling the Addams Family to leave and signed by the vulture. The gang split up to look for Wednesday, but only found a self playing organ, a walking suit of armor, a flying carpet, and a hall of doors with a closet of skeletons, Wednesday's Pet Corner (with a fire breathing dragon) and Pugsley's Experimental Laboratory (with a baboon with a brain of a lion, a mouse with a brain of a horse, and Mr. Bentley the Mailman in the body of a parrot). When Fred and Daphne tried to leave the lab, a trap door opens beneath them which sends them down a slide into the Addams Family's parlor.

Later, the gang ponder about finding Wednesday while Shaggy plays a game a chess. Suddenly, the black horse chess piece comes alive and made a move, and the chessboard and table levitates into Gomez's bedroom. As the gang look around the room, Shaggy finds a bed of spikes that Scooby pushes away before Shaggy jumps on it. When Scooby begs for a Scooby Snack as a reward, Shaggy throws him one which gets eaten by a living moose head which made Shaggy and Scooby faint.

After searching around the house, the gang found no sign of Wednesday. But when Shaggy sits down in a nearby armchair, he sits on Wednesday's voodoo doll that was sitting on the chair. The gang decide to track down Wednesday by getting Scooby to sniff the doll to pick up her scent. But when Scooby sniffs the doll, he sniffs some of its hair on his muzzle giving him a mustache that made him sneeze which causes the doll to deflate in Velma's hand. But then, the gang find an envelope sticking out of the doll's stuffing. Inside it was another note from the vulture again telling the Addams Family to leave. After Velma gets Scooby to sniff the doll again, Scooby finally picks up the scent meaning that he's Wednesday's trail and leads the gang through the house. Approaching a room, the gang at first thought Scooby found Wednesday, but it turns out Scooby had led them to the kitchen and the smell was just food from a pot that Scooby drank. After Scooby finished consuming the contents, Grandmama comes into the kitchen with her pet iguana asking what's going on. When Velma apologizes to her about Scooby drinking all her soup, Grandmama informs her Scooby drank the iguana's bath water, causing Scooby's face to turn green. Running out of the kitchen, Scooby falls down a shaft and he lands on a round elevator that brings him back up to the gang. Wondering where the elevator will lead them, the gang board it and it takes them up to the tower.

Climbing out of the elevator, they found themselves in a secret terrace in the tower and find a room with a big padlock on its door. Velma picks the padlock with a hairpin that unlocks it, and the door opens by itself. Stepping into the room, the gang found Wednesday sitting on a chair and playing with her pet spider, Homer. She explains to the gang when the lights were out, her chair levitated her into the room by itself. When the gang ask her if she'd seen anyone else up here, Wednesday tells them about the huge vulture outside the tower, flapping its wings, meaning there really is a vulture. Looking outside on the tower's balcony, the gang saw the vulture flying in the sky. Suddenly, it dives towards them and launches a giant egg at them. As the gang ran for cover in the tower, the egg lands on the balcony and it hatches. Inside the egg was another note telling the Addams Family to leave and it's their final warning. Shaggy and Scooby ran to the elevator and it takes them to the Addams Family main hall. When Shaggy opened the door, the pair get scared by an alligator and ran off. The alligator was just an alligator suitcase carried by Gomez and Morticia who just arrived home from their trip at the Okefenokee Swamp. They follow Shaggy and Scooby into another room where they get trapped inside the rib cage of Brontosaur. As Gomez and Morticia observe Brontosaur having someone in his stomach for a million years, Shaggy and Scooby faint.

Later, the gang tell Gomez and Morticia about the vulture telling them to leave their mansion and Velma says they must stop him before he pulls anymore tricks. But Shaggy and Scooby, fed up about the vulture, leave Fred, Daphne and Velma to take care of the mystery. While Fred and the girls search the cellar, Shaggy and Scooby lay down on a flying carpet controlled by the vulture who takes them on a ride. In the cellar, Fred, Daphne and Velma find a dark storeroom. When Fred lit a candle, Velma remembers Uncle Fester invents fireworks in his laboratory and the candle Fred lit was a Roman Candle which sends sparks onto the other fireworks. As Fred and the girls ran out of the room, the fireworks went off in a chain reaction all around the Addams house. A rocket hits Shaggy and Scooby's flying carpet and it lands safely in the swamp. Another rocket hits the vulture on its tail feathers. It spins out of control and crashes on the ground. The gang see that the vulture was really a helicopter, and recognized the people controlling it, the elderly couple they met on the road before.

The elderly couple admit they're not really housekeepers and only pretended to be in order to plant highly magnetized steel squares inside the Addams Family house and attached them to various objects which they controlled from the helicopter, explaining Wednesday's levitating chair, the suit of armor and the flying carpet. They wanted to scare the Addams Family out of the area because of the mummies and dinosaurs inside the Addams house were having a bad effect on the neighborhood children. When the male housekeeper ask the gang to call the authorities and get everything over with, Velma says she has a much better solution.

In the morning, the gang and elderly couple watch the neighborhood children having fun with Brontosaur, the pet octopus and Thing, which changed the minds of the elderly couple's about the Addams Family who make splendid neighbors. Later in the Addams house, Morticia ask the gang if they wanted to stay on as housekeepers, Shaggy refuses and the Addams Family wished them farewell. Later, Lurch help the gang lift the Mystery Machine out of the mud and the gang went on their way. As they drove down the road, Fred tells Shaggy to check the map and tell them where they are now, but Shaggy says he can't tell and it's too dark to look at the directions. Then Shaggy lights one of Uncle Fester's candles that was stored in a box inside the back of the Mystery Machine with other boxes of firework and it explodes sending colored sparks and flashes flying out of the Mystery Machine in all directions.

Characters[]

Main characters:

Villains:

Other characters:

  • Ling-Poo (only appearance)
  • Cleopatra the plant (only appearance)(no lines)
  • Mr. Bentley (only appearance)
  • Homer (only appearance)(no lines)
  • Brontosaur (only appearance)(no lines)
  • Neighbourhood kids (only appearance)(no lines)
  • Suit of Armor
  • Wednesday's pet dragon
  • Addams Family pet Octopus
  • Living Moose Head
  • Okefenokee Swamp Octopus

Locations[]

Objects[]

Vehicles[]

Suspects[]

  • None

Culprits[]

Culprit Motive/reason
The housekeeping couple as the Vulture They thought that the Addams family were frightening to the neighborhood children.

Cast[]

Don Messick Scooby-Doo
Casey Kasem Shaggy Rogers
Ling-Poo
Frank Welker Fred Jones
Housekeeping man
Vulture
Cleopatra
Heather North Daphne Blake
Nicole Jaffe Velma Dinkley
John Astin Gomez Addams
Janet Waldo Grandmama
Housekeeping woman
Ted Cassidy Lurch
Carolyn Jones Morticia Addams
Jodie Foster Pugsley Addams
Jackie Coogan Uncle Fester
Cindy Henderson Wednesday Addams
John Stephenson Cousin Itt

Full credits[]

The following credits are how they are seen on-screen (or as close as possible).

Opening credits[]


Closing credits[]


Notes/trivia[]

  • This episode marked the first animated appearance of the Addams Family. It could be considered a backdoor pilot, or at least indirectly, for Hanna-Barbera's The Addams Family animated series that premiered on NBC on September 8, 1973.
  • The original live-action sitcom aired on ABC from September 18, 1964 to September 9, 1966 for 64 episodes.
  • Four of the sitcom's cast members, John Astin (Gomez), Carolyn Jones (Morticia), Jackie Coogan (Uncle Fester) and Ted Cassidy (Lurch), provided the voices for their characters. (Only Coogan and Cassidy returned to reprise their roles on the ensuing animated series; as Astin and Jones were unavailable, they were replaced by Len Weinrib and Janet Waldo, respectively.)
  • Wednesday and Pugsley's original actors, Lisa Loring and Ken Weatherwax respectively, were already teenagers by the time the episode aired, and thus were too old to reprise their roles. They were replaced by Cindy Henderson and a young Jodie Foster.

Miscellaneous[]

Cultural references[]

  • Fred states that he's seen the Addams Family on T.V. lots of times; this is probably a reference to the live-action sitcom.

Animation mistakes and/or technical glitches[]

  • In the beginning, when the Mystery Machine is driving through the fog, from the inside where Shaggy and Scooby sit, there is three open windows along the side of the van, although it wasn't there before or after. Actually, the Mystery Machine has no side windows, just two in the front.

Inconsistencies/continuity errors and/or goofs/oddities[]

  • Why would Gomez and Morticia need house sitters when they have Lurch?
  • Gomez says to Freddie and the girls that he is going away for three days (making it a three-day weekend), yet they still end up going for just the day.
  • At dinner, when the Vulture makes its appearance, the candles go out and then Thing fires up the candles. But in the next shot, the candles are out again.
  • The disguised helicopter moves more like a jet plane.
  • At the end, magnets are the explanation for the magic carpet, the levitating chair, and the suit of armor. But Daphne refers to the suit of armor as "the mummy" (the housekeeping woman also says about one being in the house). There was no mummy in the episode, and the suit of armor was encountered by Velma, Shaggy and Scooby, though they could've told Fred and Daphne later on.
  • At the beginning of the episode, Fred complains that it's too crowded for Scooby to sit in the front seat with him, Daphne, and Velma. However, he has no problem with Scooby being there at the end of the episode.
    • This also conflicts with all the instances where Shaggy also sits in the front seat.

In other languages[]

Language Name Meaning
Dutch Scooby ontmoet de familie Adams Scooby Meets the Addams Family
Hungarian Scooby-Doo és az Addams Family Scooby-Doo and the Addams Family

Home media[]

Scooby-Doo Meets The Addams Family

Australian VHS Cover

  • AUS Scooby Doo Meets the Addams Family VHS released by Worldvision Home Video.
  • Flag of the Netherlands Scooby ontmoet de familie Adams VHS released by Video For Pleasure.
  • UK Hanna-Barbera Presents Scooby~Doo VHS released by Lollipop in 1989.
  • This is the only episode of the series Warner Home Video have not been able to get the copyright holders' (i.e. Charles Addams' estate) agreement to release onto DVD and Blu-ray. This is in spite of the fact that Warner Archive Collection was able to release the entire original cartoon series.

Quotes[]

Daphne: Then you're not really housekeepers.
Male housekeeper: No. We only pretend to be in order to plant these highly magnetized steel squares inside the Addams' house.
Female housekeeper: We attach them to various objects which we then control from the helicopter.
Fred: That explains Wednesday's levitating chair.
Daphne: And the mummy.
Velma: And the flying carpet.
Male housekeeper: Yes. We wanted to frighten the Addams Family out of the area.
Daphne: But why?
Female housekeeper: All those eerie things in that house. Mummies, dinosaurs — they had a bad effect on the neighborhood children.
Velma: The neighborhood kids? Is that what all this is about?
Male housekeeper: Why don't you call the authorities and get this over with?
Velma: Just a minute, folks. I've got a much better solution.


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The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair The New Scooby-Doo Movies
Season 1
The Frickert Fracas
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