Art the Clown

Zoinks! Haunting the Wow-O Toy Factory, which made quality, ecologically friendly action figures, the Luna Ghost could fly and breathe fire, and got kind of handsy with Daphne. When Mystery Inc. tried to capture the ghost, Fred and Velma's trap backfired because Scooby-Doo's tail was sticking out of the barrel he and Shaggy were hiding inside. Through sheer luck, the gang still managed to capture the ghost, unmasking it to reveal the real culprit: Old Man Smithers, the creepy janitor at the plant, who wanted revenge after Pamela Anderson refused to go out with him. He would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids and their dumb dog! The 2002 Scooby-Doo movie script was done by James Gunn, but the movie we got isn't the one he originally wrote: the big bad at the end of the story was at first going to be some threat from another dimension, but after it had been mostly shot, they realized it was dumb to have the villain be someone Mystery Inc. didn't know and who didn't know them, so it was changed. Before settling on the ending you know now, they briefly had it so it was Old Man Smithers again, which is why the last thing he says in the opening is "I'll get you for this!" - it was a set-up for his return. The Luna Ghost is has a distinctive black and white design, though if you compare the sculpt of this figure's face to the mask of the ghost Scooby and Shaggy dealt with, you'll find it's much more angular. Most of the features are there - the black eyes and mouth, a black spot on the nose - but instead of several long tails designed to suggest a jester's cap, this figure just has a tiny black top hat perched jauntily on one side of his scalp. Must be from a deleted scene. Although the movie definitely identifies "the Luna Ghost" by name, it's never made explicit where the name comes from - in his disguise, Old Man Smithers dressed like a clown, but there wasn't anything particularly moon-ish about him. However, one of Wow-O's logos has a crescent moon shape, and another appears to have a moon-faced mascot, so it seems likely that mascot is named "Luna the Clown," and thus this clown ghost was based on it. Jason Frailey has sculpted a very skinny body beneath that baggy suit, complete with a ruff around the neck, pom-poms running down the center of the chest like buttons, and big flopppy shoes where the upper part is separating from the soles. No, that's not a mistake on the toy, they're meant to look like that! Since the body is so skinny, we can only assume that this was after Velma turned off the helium balloons he wore under the suit that made him appear to fly through the air. If you look at the Luna Ghost in the film, his suit is entirely white, with black on the feet and hands, and a few thin black stipes to break up the body. NECA's figure gets the shoes right, and paints half the body (and one sleeve) white, but then does the other half in a matte black. Oh, I get it, it must be like that cool Robocop they did recently, that was painted to look like the movie poster! These probably represent him standing in shadow or something, and it merely looks like an entirely different clown in a half-and-half costume! That's some true Art right there! It's nice to see NECA getting into the "swappable faces" thing again. While the normal face has a... is that a smile? I know it's showing its teeth, but showing your teeth doesn't automatically equal "a smile." Especially when your teeth are yellowing and your gums are black. Anyway, in addition to that expression, you can also make the Luna Ghost look like it's laughing/shrieking, growling angrily, or even just giving a big, sinister frown. It's interesting to note that the black paint around the mouth changes shape more than simple makeup would allow - like, the "frowny" mouth comes down to sharp corners at the bottom that none of the others have, and the "laughing" mouth goes up higher. Almost as if something actually mystical was going on! Sadly, none of these faces have a pair of cute daisy sunglasses they can wear. The body of the suit is made from soft PVC, so it can have waist and chest joints without breaking up the sculpt. In fact, we can tell you it's molded in white PVC, with the black half simply being paint. We can verify that not only because it's a more logical choice, paintwise (black covers white easier than white covers black), but also because there's a spot where the left leg pressed up against it before the paint was dry, so now there's a tiny spot of white there. Whoops! The ruffle around the neck is a separate piece, but the ones at the wrists are glued in place; so it moves, they don't. He's got all the typical NECA articulation and it all works typically well, but if you raise the legs all the way to the front, be careful that the PVC suit doesn't get stuck behind the balljoint. We join Scooby-Doo in medias res, with the Luna Ghost having already captured Daphne, and the Gang already set up to trap him. If these accessories are anything to go by, he must have really been up to some mischief! There's a hacksaw, a power drill, a scalpel, an awl, a small knife, a large knife, two various-sized cleavers, an industrial-sized butcher knife, a hammer, a hatchet, a 3-in-1 axe/hammer/crowbar combo tool, and a homemade scourge made from scissors, scalpels, and more. Also he has a gun. Just a regular pistol. Obviously Old Man Smithers has decided all this stuff is too dangerous to use in his pretend haunting, because the toy includes a real black plastic garbage bag for him to dump all that stuff into. That's pre-tied when you take it out of the packaging, and it has a cardboard chit inside it to give it a shape and allow it to sit up even when it's empty. But look, there's a dolly! An innocent little Victorian-ish baby doll for him to lovingly parent. Why, that's probably just one of the toys Wow-O Toys makes, nothing more, nothing sinister! The set includes a pair of open hands, a pair of "trigger" hands, and a pair of "holding" hands, plus two more right hands in different poses. When reviewing M3GAN, we talked about the importance of "starter" horror for bringing in new fans, but at some point you also need to have harder things for them to graduate to. I don't know why I'd mention that right now, this is a review of the Luna Ghost from 2002's Scooby-Doo movie, not some sort of murder-hobo mime from an intense grindhouse gorefest that answers the question "what would it take to get Hot Topic to sell Martyrs merchandise?" This feels as though it should be one of those figures, like Pennywise, where NECA's going to do a bunch of variations with small changes and different faces, but considering all they've given him in this release, it's hard to guess what those would be. -- 11/23/25 What's your favorite Scooby-Doo monster? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.