Throwing caution to the wind (no one will ever forget KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park!), KISS returns to amusement park related shenanigans in this new animated feature where they meet up with the Scooby-Doo gang. When the movie begins, an amusement park called KISS World has been constructed in honor of Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley and the two guys who aren't Peter Criss or Ace Frehley (the scars run deep for some of us). Thing start off okay but soon enough, the guys in the band find that the park is being haunted by someone or something called the Crimson Witch!

Thankfully, Scooby-Doo (Frank Welker), Shaggy (Matthew Lillard), Velma (Mindy Cohn), Daphne (Grey Griffin) and Fred (Welker again) show up to do what they do best: solve the mystery. They offer their help but Gene and Paul aren't interested, at least not at first. They change their tune once park employees start getting freaked out and once customers are in peril, well, they have no other choice but to work with these teenagers. If they don't, not only will the big upcoming KISS concert possibly get cancelled but the park itself could wind up getting shut down. How do they propose they do this? By finding the ‘Rock Of Hysteria' which is a magical gem so powerful it will be able to stop the Crimson Witch from bringing forth The Destroyer (voiced by… Darius Rucker of Hootie And The Blowfish?), her own evil creation strong enough to engulf the world in darkness… forever!

Let's get the KISS controversy part of this equation over with first. Those who have written the band off for horribly crass merchandising tactics, a slew of lousy albums and the handling of Ace and Peter's dismissal from the band need to go into this one knowing exactly what it is: a way for the current KISS brand and the current Scooby-Doo brand to play nice and draw in dollars from their respective audiences. So yeah, it's a marketing ploy, but not a bad one and really, if you think about the fact that a lot of parents these days grew up with the original Scooby-Doo series and with KISS it actually makes a good bit of sense (more sense than the Mystery Machine kids hanging out with WWE superstars at least!). Judged on its own merits, this is actually a whole lot of goofy, and sometimes surprisingly weird, animated fun.

Gene, Paul, Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer all do the voice work for the fantasy versions of themselves that are portray here. So we don't get Gene, Paul, Tommy and Eric we get The Demon, Starchild, Catman and Spaceman… basically rock ‘n roll superheroes complete with special powers that they can use when they need to. They seem to have fun with it and they do it with some appreciable enthusiasm. The voice actors who handle the Scooby-Doo characters these days also do pretty solid work, with The Facts Of Life's Mindy Cohn a perfect shoe-in for Velma. Oddly enough, we also get little ‘voice actor cameos' from Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes as well as from KISS documentarians Doc McGhee, Matthew Varley and Mark Stroman. The voice work is pretty strong here across the board and there are KISS reference scattered in heaping helpings throughout the movie, some more obvious than others (there are characters named Christine, Beth, etc.).

The movie is also very nicely animated. There's loads of color here and the visuals are often pretty out there, the most obvious example being the big finale where Scooby and his crew ride a giant guitar through a creepy alternate heavy metal universe while chased by a monster. If the story is a by the numbers entry in the Scooby-Doo pantheon (as enjoyable as the series has always been, it's hard to deny that the show has been formulaic from the get-go) it always looks really good. Where the story lacks originality the visuals do manage to make up for it. The character and monster design is very cool and there's always neat stuff going on in the backgrounds, particularly at the amusement park. And there wouldn't be much point in including KISS in this seventy-five minute feature if there wasn't a decent amount of music, right? There are six ‘classic' tracks here (making this a mini-greatest hits of sorts) and a new song recorded especially for the movie (that we won't spoil here).

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Scooby-Doo! And KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery arrives on Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.78.1 widescreen. All things considered , the image here is really strong. It's an insanely colorful movie at times and those colors are reproduced quite nicely indeed, often really popping off the screen and never bleeding into one another. Detail is pretty strong too, at least as strong as the animated style will allow for (this is done in the traditional Scooby-Doo style) while black levels are nice and solid. Lines are well defined here and never break down while in motion. Compression artifacts are a non-issue and aside from a tiny bit of banding in some spots, this is really solid looking.