DVD Review: Scoob!

Scoob!
[DVD j Scoob]

I grew up on the very earliest series featuring these characters, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969-70, 1978), though I drifted away from the characters long before they got “spun off” into various subsequent series and sequels. I did kind of enjoy the two live-action feature films adapted from the cartoon, mainly for the presence of Sarah Michelle Geller (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Daphne. When I saw that producers were going to try to release an all-new animated film that retroactively tinkered with the origins of the characters, I was initially annoyed, but when the film finally came out on DVD, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.

 

Scoob! succeeds on many levels, but fails on others. The main characters — Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma and Daphne are all well-captured, with new voice actors playing each of them. Fred Welker (the original voice of Fred Jones, now takes on the iconic “ruh-roh!” voice of Scooby, from the late Don Messick, who played that character for decades. And Will Forte replaces the late Casey Kasem as Shaggy, sometimes well and sometimes not so well. A charming section at the beginning of the movie explains how Shaggy and Scooby first met as kids, before the action fast-forwards to the Mystery Inc. gang as young adults (the age they’ve been perpetually stuck at for decades now). There are lots of “in jokes” that people (like me) who grew up on the cartoons will get, but that might go over the heads of young viewers. One of the areas this film “fails” for me is that the series was definitely a child of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but has been updated to the modern age. Therefore, some of the humor falls a little flat. There are a lot of “Easter eggs” (hidden tributes) in the animation — I loved seeing “Hong Kong Phooey” on the side of a videogame in one scene.

 

The producers/writers of this film connect the Scooby-Doo characters with a bunch of other lesser-known but still recognizable animated characters from other series produced by the Hanna-Barbera studio — including The Blue Falcon and Dyno-Mutt, villain Dick Dastardly, and Captain Caveman. In fact, Scoob! is intended as the first film in a new crossover film universe featuring all these old animated properties in their own individual films — much like the Marvel Cinematic Universe films tied all the various Marvel superhero films into a connected “film reality”.

 

Scoob! is far from perfect, and strays from the central character relationships far too often in its attempts to connect Scooby-Doo to other animated characters. But, in the end it was still a fun, entertaining project. And I’m curious to see what the studio does in the future. I miss the old classic character voices, but the replacements were acceptable. A short sequence early in the film that attempts to recreate the opening theme music credits of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! was highly nostalgic.

[ Internet Movie Database entry for this film ] | [ official Scoob web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

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