Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics: The Complete Series — Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Review
Pressed on 3, BD-50 discs!
There is something genuinely special about watching a show from your childhood get the treatment it deserves. For those of us who grew up planting ourselves in front of the television on Saturday mornings in the late 1970s, Scooby’s All-Star Laff-A-Lympics was appointment viewing in the truest sense. It was chaotic, warm, and stuffed to the gills with nearly every Hanna-Barbera character you could name. Warner Archive Collection has now brought the entire run to Blu-ray in a three-disc set, and for fans of classic animation and Saturday morning television, this is the release we have been waiting for.
What Is Laff-A-Lympics?
If you have never seen the show — or if the decades have softened the memory a bit — here is the setup. Laff-A-Lympics premiered on ABC on September 10, 1977, as part of a massive Saturday morning block that also included The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour. The show functions as an animated sports competition, with three competing teams racing, climbing, rowing, and stumbling their way through ridiculous athletic events staged all over the globe.
The three teams are the Scooby Doobies, led by Scooby-Doo himself and filled out with characters like Dynomutt, Scooby-Dum, and Yabba-Doo; the Yogi Yahooeys
, captained by Yogi Bear and featuring a roster that includes Huckleberry Hound, Wally Gator, Snagglepuss, and Auggie Doggie; and the Really Rottens, a team of comedic villains who spend most of their screen time cheating, scheming, and still managing to lose. Each episode covers two separate events staged in two different locations, giving the show a globe-trotting variety feel that kept things fresh week to week.
The premise is deceptively simple, but what made it work was the sheer volume of personality crammed into every episode. This was a showcase for the entire Hanna-Barbera catalog, and there is real joy in watching Huckleberry Hound competing in the Three-Legged Kilt Race in Scotland or seeing Wally Gator navigate the Fill Up the Oasis Race in the Sahara. The events range from the inspired — Skateboard Polo, the Big Ben Tower Climb — to the wonderfully absurd, and the show never takes itself even slightly seriously. That lightness is exactly what made it a Saturday morning institution.
The first season ran from September through December 1977, with a second season following in the fall of 1978 before the show concluded. Twenty-four episodes total, and Warner Archive has included all of them here.
*Affiliate Commissions earned.
The Blu-ray Presentation
The headline here is the HD remaster. All 24 episodes have been remastered in High Definition, and all three discs in this set are pressed on BD-50 — the larger dual-layer Blu-ray format that gives the encode more room to breathe. For a late-1970s Hanna-Barbera production, that matters more than it might sound.
Animation from this era was produced on film, which means there is genuine resolution to recover in a proper scan and remaster. The limited animation style of the show — flat backgrounds, economical character movement — is not going to challenge a modern rendering pipeline, but what a good HD presentation does is restore the original color palette with fidelity and clean up the kind of accumulated print damage, graininess, and faded saturation that plagued older home video releases of this material. On Blu-ray, the colors read the way they were meant to: the vibrant Hanna-Barbera oranges, yellows, and blues that defined the visual identity of the studio’s TV output look punchy and clean rather than washed out.
BD-50 discs also mean that Warner Archive did not have to compress aggressively to fit the episodes. Eight episodes per disc with the larger format leaves room for a solid encode, and that shows in how stable the image looks during scenes with a lot of flat color and hard edges — exactly the kind of content that reveals compression artifacts on a lesser transfer.
For a set covering animation that is nearly fifty years old, this is about as good as it is going to get without a full digital restoration from the ground up, and it is considerably better than anything previously available for the series.
Episode Guide
Disc 1 — Season 1, Episodes 1–8 (September 10 – October 29, 1977)
The Swiss Alps / Tokyo, Japan — September 10, 1977
Acapulco / England — September 17, 1977
Florida / China — September 24, 1977
Sahara / Scotland — October 1, 1977
France / Australia — October 8, 1977
Athens / Ozarks — October 15, 1977
Italy / Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — October 22, 1977
Egypt / Sherwood Forest — October 29, 1977
Disc 2 — Season 1, Episodes 9–16 (November 5 – December 24, 1977)
Spain / Himalayas — November 5, 1977
India / Israel — November 12, 1977
Africa / San Francisco — November 19, 1977
Grand Canyon / Ireland — November 26, 1977
Hawaii / Norway — December 3, 1977
North Pole / Tahiti — December 10, 1977
Arizona / Holland — December 17, 1977
Quebec / Baghdad — December 24, 1977
Disc 3 — Season 2, Episodes 1–8 (September 9 – October 28, 1978) + Special Feature
Russia / The Caribbean — September 9, 1978
New York / Turkey — September 16, 1978
South America / Transylvania — September 23, 1978
French Riviera / New Zealand — September 30, 1978
New Orleans / Atlantis — October 7, 1978
Morocco / Washington, D.C. — October 14, 1978
Canada / Poland — October 21, 1978
Siam / The Moon — October 28, 1978
Special Feature: Spooky Games (2012)
The Bonus: Spooky Games (2012)
Tucked onto Disc 3 alongside the second season episodes is Spooky Games, a 2012 animated special that revisited the Laff-A-Lympics format with updated animation. It is a fun inclusion for collectors, both as a piece of Hanna-Barbera franchise history and as a point of comparison between the original series and how the property was handled over three decades later. The core spirit of the competition — the teams, the events, the comedic chaos — is intact in the special, and having it on this disc makes Disc 3 feel like a complete package rather than just the second-season episodes plus an afterthought. For anyone building out their Hanna-Barbera library, it is exactly the kind of extra that turns a good release into a genuinely comprehensive one.
Verdict
Warner Archive Collection has built a reputation for giving cult and library titles the physical media treatment they deserve, and this release continues that track record. The BD-50 pressing across all three discs, the HD remaster of all 24 episodes, and the inclusion of the Spooky Games special add up to a set that there is no reason to pass on if you have any affection for this era of animation.
For longtime collectors, this is the definitive version of the series. For anyone who remembers racing downstairs on Saturday morning to catch this show, it is a proper restoration of something that genuinely mattered to a generation of kids. And for anyone who simply loves classic Hanna-Barbera and wants to spend time with Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Wally Gator, Dynomutt, and the entire extended family of characters competing in increasingly ridiculous events across the globe — this is the set to own.