I never realized how much I loved Scooby Doo until recently. As someone who loves horror, true crime, and Halloween I often try to trace my love of these back to some definitive source. My mom and grandma were big true crime readers, I was allowed to have Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark scar me at a young age, I watched The Twilight Zone and Night Of The Living Dead and spent most of my childhood trying to relive those experiences. But I’m almost certain that my interests in all these things can be narrowed back to he classic cartoon Scooby Doo Where Are You!.
That show took monsters, ghosts, haunted houses, mysteries, and crime and wrapped it up in a package that was lighthearted colorful fun. Scooby Doo in various incarnations as a staple in my house, and I would come back to it on and off over the years. The franchise is like comfort food for me; the visuals and sounds are a soft blanket that mellows me out.
So when I saw the first trailer for this movie Scoob! became one of my most anticipated movies of the year, especially because I could take my young son to it. And then Covid came and shuttered the world and Scoob! came straight to homes. I was home from work on the day it came out and shilled our the $23.99 it cost to purchase it from Amazon and watched it with my kids.
I won’t mince around it and just say I didn’t care for it. The first ten minutes are really good and shows just how good this movie could’ve been had it followed a traditional Scooby Doo formula. This movie opts instead to focus on launching a Hanna-Barbara shared cinematic universe, so there’s no mystery and little-to-no Fred or Daphne or Velma, and instead we get a cadre of (sorry to their fans) forgotten HB characters like Dick Dastardly, Muttley, Dynomutt, Blue Falcon, and Captain Caveman, all of whom distract from our core group. I can’t be the only person who comes to a Scooby Doo movie for Scooby Doo and the gang, not the cast of Wacky Races. Honestly it’s shocking that Yogi and Boo Boo didn’t show up, I don’t think there’s a real reason they couldn’t have.
The animation is crisp and appealing and the voice acting is strong even if the studio made a big point of not offering the role of Shaggy to the resident actor who’s been behind the character for ten years or more, Matthew Lillard. Will Forte takes over the role but doesn’t really do much of anything that Lillard couldn’t have. Another snubbing is that of Frank Welker, the man who’s voiced Fred Jones since 1969. Fred is now voiced by Zac Efton, but Welker was still allowed to voice Scooby Doo so I guess he wasn’t stiffed as hard as Lillard was. Oh well.
The story is mostly incoherent and appears to have been concocted by a computer, wildly flailing from destination to character to random thing. Given the overall aimless tone this isn’t really all that shocking.
At least the Scooby Doo franchise still has a consistent output of tv shows and straight-to-video movies that don’t need to build a connected universe or feature big stars. The serialized tv show Mystery Incorporated is really good and should appeal to fans of Twin Peaks, the writings of HP Lovecraft, and even the music of Adam Ant. There’s also thirty something S-T-V movies that are either great or terrible with little in between that you can go through. This movie isn’t worth it, which is a total bummer.
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