There’s a moment in every night of even moderate debauchery when you know that you’ve Gone Too Far; when your body cheerfully informs you “This was a mistake,” and the slow transition from “good time” to “future cautionary tale” kicks in. Thus is it with our collective addiction to nostalgia and the cultural detritus of the past, and this clip of Jaleel White resurrecting the hated Urkel for Boomerang’s new streaming Scooby-Doo series.
The above is a clip from Scooby-Doo And Guess Who?, the cartoon streamer’s recent effort to resurrect the old “Mystery Inc. implausibly solves a caper with Phyllis Diller” line of Scooby-Doo shows. Past guests on the recently launched series have included Wanda Sykes (fair enough), President Abraham Lincoln (as voiced by Bender himself, John DiMaggio), and yes, now, the Urkel, along with an updated version of his spiteful metal simulacrum, UrkelBot.
To be fair, White is a talented and veteran voice actor, having served as the voice of Sonic The Hedgehog in multiple cartoon series back in the 1990s, as well as a number of other animated parts. (He’s also had regular roles on a whole bunch of shows, including Bobby Moynihan’s short-lived Me, Myself, And I, and as the host of Syfy’s darkness-themed game show Total Blackout. Oh, and he was in an episode of Atlanta! Truly, Jaleel White’s IMDB page is a tour of vast swathes of entertainment industry history.) But he also played the Urkel, who came, once upon a time, to be synonymous with a particular flavor of annoying sitcom neighbor, overshadowing poor, beleaguered Reginald VelJohnson and the rest of the Family Matters crew with his unwanted inventions and obsessions with dairy creations. We did not miss the Urkel, just as we did not miss Kevin McCallister, or any of the other minor pop culture deities that we thought we had left behind, only to have their decaying corpses shoved daily in our faces. To needlessly revive such a minor god is to invite the day when we have to write a headline about the second coming of Screech.
(Although the fact that White seems like a perfectly normal dude just trying to live his life—as opposed to a Dustin Diamond-esque horror show—does take some of the sad sting out of this; presumably, he just thought it would be cool to be in an episode of Scooby-Doo.)
Anyway, this was not even the weirdest thing we saw while perusing videos related to Scooby-Doo And Guess Who?; behold: The bland cat comedy stylings of Mr. Ricky Gervais: