Only Urkel Matters, Bonus Episode 1: Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?
“When Urkel-Bots Go Bad!”
Original Air Date: August 15, 2019
I like when things go in order as much as the next guy, but when Jaleel White goes back to playing Urkel (in any capacity) after twenty-one long years, I’m going to stop what I’m doing and cover it. Because this is a special episode, and you might have found your way here because you’re a huge Scooby-Doo fan or something, I’m taking this moment to let you know that the following TELEVISION RECAP contains spoilers, if you can believe it. If you’d like to watch the episode for yourself, you can find “Scooby-Doo and Guess Who” on the Boomerang app, which requires a monthly subscription, although I don’t know how much it costs per month. You can also do what I did, and watch it for $1.99 on Amazon Prime. I believe YouTube also has it for the same price.
If you’re looking for my regular column, every Only Urkel Matters can be found here.
Only Urkel Matters is on Instagram! Check us out for the best Urkel content on The Gram (including sneak peeks of columns!) You should obviously like 7th Evan on Facebook. Following my personal account on Twitter seems essential as well, doesn’t it?
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
Cold Open:
If you’re somehow not familiar with Scooby-Doo in any of its various renditions, the basic premise is that a group of teen detectives and their titular talking dog drive around in a van solving mysteries. The group consists of Freddie (the leader), Daphne (the smoke-show), Velma (the nerd), Shaggy (the hippy) and Scooby-Doo, who, as I mentioned before, is a talking fucking dog. The gang is in Chicago to investigate “a crazy robot.” Velma is telling the gang that the robot “is unlike anything (she’s) ever heard of before,” when Shaggy cuts her off:
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
That’s right, it’s an Urkel-bot. Sure, we haven’t gotten to that point in the recaps yet, but I’m trusting you to put together what exactly an Urkel-bot might be on your own. Hold on to your hats, gang.
The Story:
After a title sequence, we jump right back into the action, with the Urkel-bot chasing the Mystery Machine (which is the name of the pedophile van that these sleuthing dorks drive around) and gaining rapidly. A quick-thinking Daphne grabs a barrel of snacks that the hippy and the dog have been munching on and hands it to Velma, who uses it to trip up Urkel-Bot:
After the explosion, which garners no police or media attention to the teen detectives, another Urkel-shaped shadow appears in the alleyway. Shaggy thinks that it’s another robot, but fortunately for him, it’s the real Urkin’ deal:
I’ll give this much to Scooby-Doo: that is exactly the movement that prime Jaleel White would have made if someone had pinched his arm too hard. I have a bit of a problem with Her-Urk-Ules, though. I mean, H-Urkel-es was right there. I enjoyed Urkel’s complete shut-down of Velma. Shaggy and Scooby are too fucking high to care that Urkel doesn’t know about any of their achievements, but Velma is clearly hurt that Steve congratulated both Fred and Daphne on the apprehension of particularly tough criminals, but only knew enough about Velma to know that she wears glasses and has a lazy eye. Solid stuff, especially since Velma has always been my least favorite member of the crew (even though this particular Velma is voiced by the fantastically talented Kate Micucci). Daphne shows off her dominance over Velma by finding the first clue:
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
Urkel points out that this green substance is Urkel-Bot’s hydraulic fluid, and hands Fred an electric magnifying glass so he can have a better look:
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
After almost murdering Fred, Urkel admits his mistake: he accidentally handed Fred his electrifying magnifying glass. At this point in the episode, I thought to myself, “If this is just twenty-five minutes of Urkel accidentally embarrassing the Scooby-Doo gang, I’m 100% here for it.”
The trail leads Scooby and his less important human crew to the Museum of Future Science, where it turns out that Urkel had donated the Urkel-Bot to. The museum director is a big, beefy man who wants to ban Urkel from the museum for breaking shit all the time. Urkel tells him that he can’t ban him because he has a life-time pass, like that shit can’t be revoked if you’re a nuisance. At some point, getting to show off one Urkel-bot can’t be worth the destruction of all of your shit. After Urkel accidentally destroys five motorbikes, four cars and one plane (combined value: way more than one Urkel-bot), the manager tells Steve that he’s going to get a restraining order. The Urkman is unimpressed, because he’s dealt with restraining orders before:
I like to think that Laura tried to file a restraining order on Urkel, and he beat that rap by just saying, “Please” over and over. The museum director swears that he’ll get his revenge on the Urkman, and then leaves. I’m not really sure why this man, who is clearly in charge of the museum, can’t just ban Urkel if he wants to. What sort of higher power does he answer to? The gang walks through the museum for roughly ten seconds and uncover two more people that want revenge on Urkel. Velma remarks that this is their first mystery where they already have three suspects and they don’t really know what the mystery is yet, which is a pretty good point.
They turn a corner, and run into the one person at the museum who doesn’t hate Steve Urkel: the janitor. She says that he breaks so much shit that he provides her with job security, which makes sense in theory. The problem is, she’s also super-hot, and she’s a fucking janitor. There’s just no reason for an attractive woman to be a janitor, especially in this day in age, when “Instagram influencer” is something that human beings get paid to do. For this reason alone, I was like, this lady is the villain (spoiler alert: I’m right). I also want to add that the hot janitor is voice-acted by the amazing Grey Griffin, who (aside from having a dope-ass name) also voices Daphne in this show, and Catwoman in the Arkham video game series, which I’m currently replaying. She might have the sexiest voice in America.
The gang finally makes it to the robot exhibit, where they find Urkel-bot lying in a pool of its own hydraulic fluid. Steve is luckily carrying the exact equipment he needs to fix it up, and after a moment of tinkering, it comes to life and says, “Got any cheese?” We never find out if anyone had any, though, because at that exact moment, a virtual phantom appears:
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
Its name is “The Technomancer” (dope name) and it tells them that they aren’t welcome here. The robots at the exhibit all spring to life and start chasing Scooby and the gang.
Urkel leads them all to a train, where they successfully hide from the robots. Unfortunately, Steve accidentally leans his arm on the button for the train’s horn, which alerts the robots to their presence. Urkel isn’t worried, though, because he plans to drive the train to safety. As he tells them his plan, he puts on an engineer’s cap:
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
If the only difference between cartoon Urkel and live-action Urkel is that cartoon Steve can produce any item he wants out of thin air, my support is fully behind the team at “Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?”. Urkel fails to drive the train, but instead hilariously causes it to fall off the tracks somehow, crushing the killer robots:
The Technomancer appears and threatens them again, which makes Velma certain that there is something going on inside this museum that someone is trying to keep quiet. Daphne, who is a beautiful angel lady, points out that it doesn’t make sense for someone who is trying to keep things quiet to hack Urkel-bot and send him out into the streets of Chicago to terrorize citizens. The museum director appears (RED HERRING ALERT) and his stance has now changed to rooting for Urkel to break shit so that he can gather enough evidence to ban him for life. Daphne thinks this was a suspicious turn of events and Velma can’t help but agree. It’s right around now that Velma notices some coal on the bottom of one of the destroyed robots’ foot. This gives her another raging clue, and they set off for the coal mining exhibit.
The next few minutes are spent building a backstory for this mystery, and since I don’t want this column reaching 3,000 words, I’ll let you watch it for yourself:
TL;DW? Just remember that Velma has remote control glasses, there’s a shit-ton of missing gold lying around the museum somewhere, and that janitorial cart was way too heavy for some reason.
The gang is in a submarine exhibit when the Technomancer reappears and sends several robots chasing after them. During the chase, Velma’s glasses fall off, and she uses the remote that Steve gave her to summon them. They shear neatly through the robots and then land nicely on her face. One of the beheaded robots accidentally falls into the side of the submarine, and breaks off the wheel part of one of those wheel doors that every cartoon submarine and maybe real-life submarines have. I’m not a fucking submarine expert. Velma checks the wheel, and it’s plastic. To Velma, this somehow means that the mystery is really coming together. I’m about 1500 words into this blog, and we still don’t really know anything, so I’m not sure I share her optimism.
The whole gang heads to the museum director’s office, where they request to interrogate him. He agrees, as long as Urkel waits outside, which is a more than fair compromise. The Scooby gang ask the director if he has had any parts of the submarine replaced, and he distractedly says that he hasn’t. Shaggy (who is actually voiced by Matthew Lillard, the actor who played him in the live-action movies) points out that the director is looking extremely nervous, and the director insists his anxiety is being caused by being able to see Urkel through the windows. Upon hearing his name, Steve bursts into the office, which accidentally causes the destruction of everything in there:
Velma insists that all of these clues are adding up (what?), but that they need to catch the Technomancer to be sure. Sure of what? Shaggy and Scooby (who are the dumbest members of the gang but somehow are the only ones with any common sense) are afraid that drawing out the Technomancer will also draw out more scary robots. Urkel has an idea for a secret weapon to use against the Technomancer, and he gets started working on it right away:
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
Urkel says he needs a few more minutes, but the Technomancer shows up right at that moment. The gang cowers in fear, but fortunately the Technomancer gives a whole speech about how powerful he is, giving Urkel just enough time to finish his secret weapon, Urkel-bot 2.0:
The Technomancer gets into a car and drives away, so I guess it’s an actual human person who has just been flying around willy-nilly? Luckily, as you saw in the video, Velma has slipped a tracking device on him, so they do a whole car chase thing. Urkel, Shaggy and Scooby hop onto Urkel-bot 2.0, and it’s on. The Technomancer spots the gang in his (using he as a generic pronoun, of course) rear-view mirror, so he does that weird cartoon thing where he sticks his whole head out of the window so he can stare at them peripherally:
(Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?)
That’s what the mirror is there for, my dude! He’s earned this L. Steve tries to use hydraulic fluid to slip up the Technomancer, but hits the Mystery Machine instead, leading to this exchange, which the writers were probably creaming themselves to put down on paper:
Personally, I would have went with, “Did I Scooby-Doo that?” but to each his own. The Technomancer’s car is stripped of one of its wheels by the Urkel-bot, and is easily apprehended.
For some reason, they wait to unmask the Technomancer until the police show up, and as I said earlier, it’s the hot-ass janitor. They’re all shocked, and exclaim “THE JANITOR?!” like they do with every villain’s unmasking in Scooby-Doo, and Urkel asks, “But why?” Um, maybe it’s because you never bothered to learn her name, and all call her “the janitor.” Velma doesn’t use this simple explanation, however, and instead launches into a long explanation of what happened:
As you might expect, everything is wrapped up quite nicely,and everyone prepares to say their goodbyes to Urkel. Steve decides to give murdering Fred one last try:
The episode ends with Fred’s cry of despair. That was a fun little excursion, wasn’t it, gang?
We’ll be back to the regular OUM journey next week, so join me as I break down Episode 2.14, “Ice Station Winslow.”
