S0SE01 - Fright at the Museum

"Fright at the Museum" is a standalone special of the W-Series of We Can Fix Pawbert, released as the second half of the series' first two-parter alongside "Scare Tactics", whose closing image leads straight into it. The pack does not appear. It follows Mystery Inc., hired by a renovation contractor whose third crew in fourteen days has just walked off the job because of something twelve feet tall that moves through the Savanna Central Natural History Museum after dark.

Synopsis

Night guard Welker, a hippo eleven years into the job, follows a wail through the closed Savanna Central Natural History Museum and finds a twelve-foot figure in a bone-white cloak lurching toward him down a corridor. He runs. The next morning Mystery Inc. pull up at the front steps, where renovation contractor Mr. Barbera explains that three crews have quit in two weeks and the museum board's deadline has not moved. Fred divides the building. Velma finds mouse-sized pawprints in the construction dust of the temporary exhibit wing, leading to a ventilation grille whose screws have been turned with tools too small to be standard issue. Fred and Daphne recover a battery built for a mammal the size of a coin, and scratch marks at baseboard level. Shaggy and Scooby raid the shuttered basement cafeteria and are driven out of it by the Phantom, which then runs the whole group through a corridor of three-scale doorways. Fred rigs a cargo net to the mounted mammoth skeleton, but the Phantom steps clean over the tripwire; Scooby bolts, collides with the counterweight bench, and drops the net anyway. Under it are twenty-six mice in a puppet rig, led by a chef whose five-star restaurant occupies the basement utility corridors the renovation would seal. The ZPD collects them. Shaggy and Scooby go back downstairs and eat the kitchen's reserves.

Plot

The museum shuts at six. Three hours later there is nobody inside it but Welker, a hippo who has worked the night shift for eleven years and whose worst previous call was a raccoon kit asleep in a mammoth ribcage, walking his rounds past scaffolding and drop-clothed exhibits through air that still carries construction dust. A wail rises through the walls. He follows it, because following things is the job, into the temporary exhibit wing, where the rewiring has taken the ceiling lights out and the crew's abandoned work lamps leave pools of yellow forty feet apart with dark between them. Something is standing in the last of those pools: twelve feet of hooded, bone-colored cloak, a pale mask whose proportions are slightly wrong for a face, and two cold white points burning where eyes would go. It lurches toward him. Welker drops his flashlight and does not stop running until he reaches the road.

The Mystery Machine arrives the next morning and parks at its customary angle. Fred, an elk in a white sweater and orange scarf, leads the group out; Daphne, a gazelle, is already reading the building's architecture; Velma, an otter, climbs out with her notebook open; Shaggy, a hyena, is halfway through something wrapped in wax paper; and Scooby, a timber wolf in a blue collar, comes last and slowest. Mr. Barbera, the beaver contracted for the renovation, meets them on the steps with a hard hat and a battered clipboard and the arithmetic of his problem: three crews gone in fourteen days, the drywall team on Tuesday, the electricians on Thursday, a plumber who abandoned tools worth more than his car. Everyone who has seen the thing has quit and filed an insurance claim, and the museum board's deadline has not moved. Fred takes the case and splits the team — the upper galleries for himself and Daphne, the temporary exhibit wing for Velma, the basement for Shaggy and Scooby. Shaggy objects that the basement is always theirs, itemizing past cases down to a lighthouse in Reptile Ravine that somehow had one. Scooby refuses outright until Fred produces a bag of cricket treats relabeled by paw as Scooby Snacks, at which point his nose overrules him.

Velma works the temporary exhibit wing alone, on her knees within a minute of entering it, penlight six inches off the baseboard. The construction dust holds impressions, and the impressions are pawprints — dozens of them, four-toed, no wider than a pen tip, overlapping and all heading the same way. The prints end at a vent grille partway down the wall, whose screws are bright and unoxidized where they should be dull and carry tool marks too fine for any standard screwdriver. She photographs the prints, measures a stride of half an inch, backs the screws out, and takes the grille with her as evidence.

Two floors up, in the Ancient Mammal Hall, a woolly mammoth stands wired to a steel armature under the skylight and a saber-tooth skull sits in glass beside it. Near the gallery entrance hangs the museum's rebuilt Founding of Zootopia panel, rewritten since the Lynxley case to name Agnes De'Snake as the inventor of the weather wall system, with her portrait beside her original blueprints and, in smaller type below, the century-late correction. Fred and Daphne walk past it with their attention on the floor. Daphne spots a glint under a dust sheet and picks up a battery no bigger than a lentil, the sort that goes into hearing aids and into equipment built for mammals who could sit on a coin. Fred finds parallel scratch marks along the baseboard, evenly spaced, where something heavy has been dragged the same route more than once. He notes that whatever left them was nowhere near twelve feet tall, pockets the battery, and starts assembling a theory.

The staff cafeteria in the basement has been shut since the renovation began and is still fully stocked, which is all the invitation Shaggy needs. He and Scooby build sandwiches three feet tall out of the walk-in pantry — ant-flour bread, cricket chips, mealworm spread, grasshopper strips, a jar of expired beetle-shell crunch — and eat them in a single synchronized swallow. Then Scooby's ears turn toward the corridor. The wail comes up through the floor grates, close enough this time to rattle the trays on their rack, and the Phantom rounds the corner beyond the cafeteria door, filling the hallway wall to wall. The two of them run, take the stairs three at a time, and collide with Fred and Daphne coming down the main staircase, which leaves an elk underneath a hyena, a timber wolf, and everything the two of them were carrying. Velma arrives from the exhibit wing with a look that says she has found something and will raise it once the shouting stops.

The Phantom climbs the stairwell behind them and comes through into the first-floor exhibition hall, where all five of them are standing. The main exhibition corridor runs a hundred feet and was built on the city's founding premise that infrastructure serves every citizen or none, so its walls carry doorways at three scales: micro-mammal openings at floor level, ordinary doors, and twelve-foot mega-mammal frames sized for elephants and giraffes. What follows uses all of them and respects none of the geometry. Fred takes an ordinary door on the left and reappears sixty feet ahead out of a mega-mammal frame on the right, still sprinting, declining to stop and think about it. Daphne goes in through a twelve-foot frame at the end of the hall and comes back out on her knees through a mouse door well behind where she started. Shaggy and Scooby go through one door together and exit a mouse-sized one with the Phantom behind them. Velma trips, and her glasses skid six feet away across the marble. The Phantom reaches them first, picks them up and holds them out to her. She takes them, puts them on, thanks it, registers what is standing over her, and runs. The chase burns itself out in the rotunda, with five mammals winded, Velma cleaning a cracked lens on her sweater, and Fred's scarf unaccountably perfect.

They regroup in the Ancient Mammal Hall, where the lamps are brightest. Velma sits under the mammoth with her notebook and her evidence, writing fast, and keeps her conclusion to herself. Fred announces his: Barbera called them in, Barbera holds keys to every door, and Barbera gets paid by the board whether or not his crews stay on the job. Daphne points out that the contractor is down three crews and a plumber and paid them to fix it, which Fred takes as further proof. Nobody argues. The gang has been through enough of these to know his plans fail as designed and work anyway. The one he builds now takes twenty minutes: forty feet of construction rope, three pulleys slung over the mammoth's tusks, a bench dragged in to act as a counterweight, a cargo net hung between the skeleton's front legs, and a fishing-line tripwire across the gallery doorway at knee height. Daphne ties the knots and resents being good at it. Velma checks the counterweight math and shifts the bench six inches without mentioning it. Shaggy asks repeatedly whether anyone else can smell cooking coming up from the basement ventilation, and nobody listens. Scooby is assigned bait, refuses three times, and settles for three treats plus the run of the pantry Shaggy raided.

He stands alone under the mammoth in the dark until the wail comes up the stairwell and the Phantom appears in the gallery doorway. It crosses the threshold — and its stride clears the tripwire by three feet, because knee height on a standard mammal is nowhere near knee height on this one. Fred's plan fails exactly as built. Scooby's nerve breaks, he bolts sideways, and he hits the counterweight bench at a dead sprint. That is enough: the bench shifts, the rope pulls tight, the pulleys spin, and the cargo net drops onto the Phantom, which topples into the mammoth's display case. Under the netting the shape writhes in a dozen small, separate places, and something squeaks. Fred pulls the cloak away, and mice pour out of it — twenty-five of them, headsets still hanging from their ears, harness straps trailing, each in a numbered vest. What is left in the wreckage is an engineering job: a jointed aluminum armature on stilts, LED optics on adjustable stalks drawing on a bank of the same micro-scale cells Daphne found, a cloak sewn inside with pockets and grip-loops so the crew could stay braced as the rig moved, and six miniature amplifiers wired in series, still humming with what turns out to be twenty-six mice arguing, run through enough reverb to pass for a haunting. Velma has had the answer since the exhibit wing: mouse-sized prints all heading one way, a battery built for a mammal a fraction of their size, drag marks at baseboard level, and a walk that staggered and changed direction constantly because twenty-six operators could not agree which way to go.

The twenty-sixth is under the collapsed cloak — a mouse four inches tall in an immaculate chef's hat, who explains, dangling from Fred's hooves, that the crew were running a five-star restaurant in the basement utility corridors and the renovation was about to seal it. The lease committee will not return their calls, the permits office has lost their paperwork twice, the micro-mammal commercial exemption form is physically larger than their building, and no lawyer's retainer is payable out of a year's takings that fit inside a coin purse. Asked about the lurching, he concedes the point and blames a crew member named Joe, who always wants to go left; mouse number seven crosses his forepaws in silence. The ringleader delivers the traditional complaint about meddling kids and adds an insult aimed at Scooby, which Shaggy immediately undoes by pointing out that Scooby is the reason the net came down at all. Two ZPD officers, a rabbit and a fox, arrive with an evidence bag sized for suspects who would fit in a coffee cup and a stack of very small citations.

Afterward the gallery is quiet, the mammoth still on its feet above the ruins of its own display case. Down in the basement, Shaggy and Scooby find the restaurant: string lights along the ceiling pipes, tables the size of coins, a bar with bottle-cap stools, a chalkboard of cocktails, and a kitchen with prep stations, a shoebox walk-in and a six-burner stove built out of salvaged electronics. They work through the bulk reserves, emptying dozens of containers portioned for mammals weighing less than an ounce. The beetle-shell crunch turns out to be as good as advertised. Fred, Daphne and Velma find them there on the floor amid the remains of a week's prep, and Shaggy offers no defense beyond the quality of the food. Scooby, dusted with crumbs and no longer frightened of the building, wags his tail.

Key Moments

• Welker follows the wail into the rewiring wing and comes face to face with the Phantom, then abandons his post
• Mr. Barbera puts the loss at three crews in two weeks and hires Mystery Inc. off a recommendation
• Fred splits the team and assigns Shaggy and Scooby the basement, over Shaggy's itemized objection
• Scooby is bought with a single Scooby Snack, and later with three and the contents of the cafeteria pantry
• Velma finds mouse-sized pawprints in the construction dust and a vent grille with freshly turned screws
• Daphne recovers a battery built for a mammal small enough to sit on a coin
• Fred finds drag marks at baseboard level and concludes the Phantom is not what left them
• Shaggy and Scooby build and eat three-foot sandwiches in the shuttered basement cafeteria
• The Phantom drives them out of the basement and into a collision with Fred and Daphne on the stairs
• The corridor chase runs the gang and the Phantom through doorways at three different mammal scales
• The Phantom picks up Velma's fallen glasses and holds them out to her, and she thanks it before she runs
• Fred accuses Mr. Barbera on the grounds that the contractor bills the board either way
• Fred's tripwire is set at knee height and the Phantom simply steps over it
• Scooby panics, hits the counterweight bench, and triggers the net by accident
• The unmasking produces twenty-six mice, a stilted aluminum rig, and a six-speaker sound system
• Velma lays out the solution she reached in the exhibit wing, including why the Phantom walked badly
• The ringleader reveals the basement restaurant and the permit process he blames for the haunting
• Shaggy tells Scooby he caught the Phantom, and the insult stops landing
• Two ZPD officers remove the crew in a single evidence bag
• Shaggy and Scooby return to the basement and eat the restaurant's reserves

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Savanna Central Natural History Museum — The entire episode. Closed for a renovation that has stalled, with scaffolding, drop cloths, dust and disconnected lighting through the affected wings
• Temporary exhibit wing — Display cases under plastic, lit by scaffold-mounted work lamps. Velma finds the pawprints, the stride length and the vent grille here
• Ancient Mammal Hall — Second floor. A mounted woolly mammoth and a saber-tooth skull, plus the rebuilt Founding of Zootopia panel crediting the weather wall system to Agnes De'Snake. The trap is built and sprung here
• Main exhibition corridor — A hundred feet of gallery lined with doorways at three scales — micro-mammal at baseboard level, standard, and twelve-foot mega-mammal — which the chase uses in every impossible combination
• Basement staff cafeteria — Shut since the renovation began, still stocked, and the site of the sandwiches
• Basement utility corridors — The mice's restaurant: string lights, coin-sized tables, a bottle-cap bar and a kitchen built from salvaged parts

Items

• The Mystery Machine — Mystery Inc.'s orange, green and blue van, flowers faded, parked at its usual approximate angle (first appearance)
• Scooby Snacks — Bulk cricket treats decanted into a homemade cellophane sleeve lettered by paw. Fred's entire negotiating position (first appearance)
• The Phantom rig — A jointed aluminum armature on stilts, LED eye optics on adjustable stalks, a bone-white cloak sewn inside with pockets and grip-loops, and six miniature amplifiers wired in series for the wail
• Micro-mammal power cell — The lentil-sized battery Daphne recovers in the Ancient Mammal Hall, and the first evidence of the operators' scale
• The vent grille — Removed by Velma and kept as evidence; its screws are bright and bear tool marks too fine for standard equipment
• Velma's glasses — Lost in the corridor chase, returned by the Phantom, and cracked in one lens for the rest of the episode
• Numbered vests — Worn by the rig crew, numbered 1 through 25. Number seven belongs to Joe
• Fred's trap — Forty feet of construction rope, three pulleys over the mammoth's tusks, a bench counterweight, a cargo net and a fishing-line tripwire at knee height

Featured Song

"Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?" (From 'Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?'), Larry Marks

The 1969 theme is a summons, somebody calling Scooby in because there is work that needs him. It plays under a title card that strikes out this series' own name, then strikes out a Scrappy-Doo joke, and settles on the borrowed one.

End Credit Song

"What's New Scooby-Doo" (From 'What's New Scooby-Doo'), Simple Plan

Simple Plan recorded the theme for the 2002 revival. The episode opens on the 1969 song and closes on this one, so it sits between the franchise's two eras.

Notes

• The title block strikes out the series' own name, then a second line naming Scrappy-Doo, before settling on the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969) title card. The episode is a full pastiche of that series.
• Welker, the museum's night guard, is named for Frank Welker, who has voiced Fred Jones since the 1969 series and Scooby-Doo himself since 2002.
• Mr. Barbera, the renovation contractor, is named for Joseph Barbera, co-founder of Hanna-Barbera Productions, the studio that produced Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969). The series itself was created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, with character design by Iwao Takamoto.
• Every member of the gang gets their franchise catchphrase: Velma's "Jinkies," Daphne's "Jeepers," Shaggy's "Zoinks," Scooby's "Ruh-roh" and "Scooby-Dooby-Doo," and Fred's order to split up.
• The unmasked culprit's closing complaint adapts the franchise's signature line, with "your stupid wolf" standing in for the usual reference to a dog. Zootopia has no dogs, so Scooby is a timber wolf.
• The corridor sequence rebuilds the franchise's door-chase gag — characters entering one doorway and leaving by another that cannot connect to it — around Zootopia's three scales of architecture.
• The episode carries two themes: it opens on the original 1969 series theme performed by Larry Marks and closes on Simple Plan's theme from What's New, Scooby-Doo? (2002-2006).