SCOOB! (2020)
Tagline: Mystery Loves Company…
(Adventure, Animation, Comedy) [PG]
We'll go in the Haunted House this one time. But we're not going to make a habit of this, right, Scoob?
This movie is sadly a prime example of trying to force-feed old loyal fans something unproven for the sake of trying to get new fans. Meanwhile, you’ve achieved neither goal. The cruelest part of this effort is that we actually got a decent script, a cool story and it all fell flat. Why?
SCOOB! Is the story of when Mystery Inc, decided to sell out and sign a deal with Simon Cowell (yeah the dude from “American Idol”, to start working on bigger cases. What the preview wants you to believe is that it’s the story of when Shaggy met Scooby, but that is maybe 10 minutes of this entire movie. The issue is that Simon Cowell doesn’t want Shaggy or Scooby to be part of Mystery Inc. It doesn’t take long before the movie's main villain Dick Dastardly gets involved and he’s looking for 3 giant skulls that will open the portal to another dimension. Yep, that’s what’s going on here.
The good –
1. Overall the animation is spectacular in this thing. Some of the design work is amazing. I mean Dick Dastardly’s ship looks like global warming if it has a physical form. It's freakin nuts. He’s got a minion of robots that are really cool on top of that.
2. Nostalgia – We get some visits from old favorites in this. I won’t say who all shows up, but let’s just say two of them are on the poster. There is also a pretty cool montage scene that pays tribute to the Scooby-Doo we all love.
3. Storyline – I love the old formulaic stuff in the Scooby-Doo series. This is part of why I loved SCOOBY-DOO: MYSTERY INCORPORATED so much. However, this one decides to take it up a notch and the way they decide to do that in the script is pretty solid.
4. The script has several funny and heartfelt well written moments in the dialog.
The bad –
Here is where this movie goes off the rails for me.
1. The only returning cast member from either the show or the other movies is Frank Welker who does the voice of Scooby. For some reason, Shaggy’s voice is replaced by Will Forte? What in the fresh red cabbage is going on? Pretty sure they could have just gotten Matthew Lillard whose competently voiced Shaggy for 18 freakin years now. Fred Jones for some damn reason wasn’t voiced by Welker who was clearly on set, but instead by Zac freakin Efron? Bloody hell! Gina Rodriguez replaced the usual voice of Velma, but Velma’s been done by lots of people over the years, so that’s forgivable. Still not exactly sure why Kate Micucci or someone that’s been Velma before couldn’t have done it. We also oddly got Amanda Seyfried as a horrible Daphne rather than Grey Griffin whose been voicing Daphne for 20 years. What the crap?
2. While Tracey Mogan does fine as the voice of Captain Caveman, Captain Caveman looks nothing like Captain Caveman. It looks like it would have been better if they just said it was Captain Caveman’s stunt double, or son, or something.
3. The design work of all the characters we care about. In my estimation, the best look Mystery Inc has ever had was in SCOOBY-DOO: MYSTERY INCORPORATED, but most other Scooby Movies have them looking totally fine. This isn’t one of them, they look terrible in this thing. They could have just made an entirely different movie and it might have been more fun, that is how badly they missed the target on trying to do an actual Scooby-Doo movie.
For me, the 3 bad things, overrode the 3 good things. While I found SCOOB! more enjoyable than expected, it comes across as a bootleg of the real thing. I feel bad that Welker even got the call on this one if the rest of his usual castmates didn’t. Everyone involved in this movie needs to take a deep hard look into their social media platforms and apologize to fans for this freakin movie now.
SCOOB! gets a 3 out of 7. There were some cool concepts…it just wasn’t a Scooby-Doo movie if none of the characters looked or sounded like Scooby-Doo characters. Not the way to launch a cinematic universe. That sucks for me to say because I love Scooby-Doo and pretty much everything Hanna-Barbera.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF WARNER BROS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
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