Review

Nostalgia Is No Match for the Cold Corporate Synergy of Scoob!

The new Scooby Doo movie is really a lame attempt to create a whole cinematic universe.
SCOOB Review
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Et tu, Scooby Doo? Just when I thought our beloved (or at least beliked) mystery-solving Great Dane (and his dorky human friends) had returned to unmask local crooks and hoaxsters once again—the simple, relatively analog thing he has been doing on and off for 50 years—Scooby had to go and bring superheroes into it. Meaning that the new animated film Scoob! (available for digital rental on May 15) is not a new iteration of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon format: it’s an appropriation of it for other, more ambitious ends.

Warner Bros. hopes to use Scoob!, a weather balloon floated in viral times, to test the viability of a Hanna-Barbera cinematic universe. With Scoob!, Warners has begun tethering together all those junky old mystery-caper cartoons—which enjoyed their heyday in the aesthetically ravaged 1970s—to create a new and formidable franchise, replete with mineable I.P. and appealing to . . . well, therein lies the problem.

Where to Watch Scoob!

The parents of today’s kids, meaning people around my age or (gulp) a little younger, probably have some fond memories of Scooby Doo reruns. Maybe they even went to see one-time matinee idols Freddie Prinze, Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar in the 2002 live-action film version. But what do their children know of Scoob and the gang? I’m sure some little ones are eager to see Scoob! because it’s been successfully advertised to them. But for the many who are likely indifferent at best, Scoob! has come up with an inelegant enticement: this film is going to look and sound and move like nearly everything else that’s big and loud these days.

Which brings me back to the superheroes. There was once a Hanna-Barbera cartoon called Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, about a multi-use robotic dog (think the clumsy Swiss Army knife mechanics of Inspector Gadget but, well, a dog) who was the non-marital helpmeet of a caped crusader called Blue Falcon. Which is close enough to DC and Marvel’s whole thing, with the bodysuits and the fighting and whatnot. So Falcon and Dynomutt have been dragged into the Scooby narrative for the first time since some decades-old crossover episodes, quickly whisking Scoob! off into a Incredibles/Despicable Me pastiche that has all the airiness of the Mystery Machine after a day-long stakeout.

Scoob! places Scooby (Frank Welker), Shaggy (Will Forte), Daphne (Amanda Seyfried), Velma (Gina Rodriguez), and Fred (Zac Efron, gamer than most) in someone else’s movie, stripping its iconography for parts and trusting that some remnant whiff of nostalgic fondness for the old ways will keep audiences engaged in whatever this new thing is. It’s entirely possible that young people with no particular allegiances to Scooby Doo will be just fine with Scoob!, with all its whizzing and clanging and big boss fights. But the movie is bad at the business of building a real legacy; it’s a hasty, throwaway cartoons-assemble job reminiscent of Warners’, well, throwaway superheroes-assemble disappointment, Justice League.

It’s not only Blue Falcon and poor Dynomutt doing the muddling. (They are voiced on autopilot, by the way, by Mark Wahlberg and Ken Jeong, respectively.) Dick Dastardly has also been dragooned to the cause, plucked from Wacky Races and other subsequent series. (Particularly, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. What a time the late 1960s was!) Dastardly is voiced by Jason Isaacs doing his best Jeremy Irons as Scar, and he offers at least a bit of natural flair to offset the rest of the movie’s strenuous approximation of wit and energy.

Still, Dastardly, with his army of cutesy robots—who will, when the great war for Heaven begins, undoubtedly square off against the Minions, and lose—is just not a Scooby Doo villain. His hunt involves ancient texts and a legend about Alexander the Great, not a broken down carnival he’s trying to get rezoned or something. The proportions are off. Though maybe that’s just me flailing away uselessly as some sort of purist, when in truth I’ve only a small amount of affectionate loyalty to the original formula.

Ultimately, I’m not sure who, if anyone, will really care that Scooby Doo’s DNA has been so thoroughly altered. I doubt many people will be online moaning that their childhood “has been ruined” because Scoob and pals are battling supernatural forces from Greek antiquity in this movie, instead of the cheap fakery of enterprising conmen. Maybe they won’t even care that Scooby talks way too much, and way too coherently. We’re all caught up in the sweep of change, in the constant reimagining of and tinkering with old things, and some battles just aren’t worth it. I suspect people will save their energy to defend true classics, and let this vague injustice—crafted from kitsch, rather than sacred text—pass by them in the coursing slipstream of content.

That said, Scoob! is a dumb movie, full of creaky topical references and jokes that are above kids’ heads but below adults’. It’s also pretty boring, because it makes no real effort to give the plot any sort of cinematic build. We’re introduced to young Shaggy as he meets young Scooby, then they encounter the rest of the soon-to-be gang, and then we’re rocketed ahead into (I guess) the present, when the the superhero stuff kicks in and all the traditional Scooby lore we’ve just been (re)taught is immediately tossed out the window. Perhaps your children won’t (and shouldn’t, really) care about the debasing of a lesser icon from yesteryear. But they might at least care about narrative structure!

Well, I’ve gone and exhausted myself raging at the dying of the light, so I’ve nothing more to say about Scoob! See it if you want, or if you must (at least one friend has told me that his child has made it a household requirement). Rant about its apostasy, its violation of the old ways. Or, maybe, revel in its reinvention. Your reaction, or non-reaction, is up to you. Me, I could have done without the superhero stuff—just once, please. But also, if I’m honest? I wouldn’t mind seeing whatever comes after this initial salvo of Hanna-Barbera synergistic maximalism. Because if Captain Caveman (Tracy Morgan, fun) is good enough for Scoob!, then how far behind could, say, the Funky Phantom really be? I’d be into that flamboyant sequel appearance, and am willing to wait for it—if the CW doesn’t go ahead and make Hot Jonny Quest first, anyway.


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