CoVideo On Demand: Scoob!

In this series originally written for The Phoenix News, we review movies that would have been in theatres in summer 2020, but released digitally instead! Today: the first movie in the Hanna-Barbera cinematic universe, Scoob!

Featuring everyone’s favourite gang of teenage mystery-solvers, Scoob! is a bizarre attempt to revive not only the Scooby-Doo franchise, but also several other Hanna-Barbera characters. Though the movie perfectly recaptures the classic art-style while updating it to slick, expensive looking CGI, it fails as a reboot in almost every other regard.

In Scoob!, Shaggy, Scooby, and the rest of Mystery Inc go on a globe-trotting quest to stop Dick Dastardly – best known as the villain of Hanna Barbera’s Wacky Races – from stealing three dinosaur skulls to open a gate to the underworld. For treasure, of course. Along the way, the gang teams up with other classic Hanna-Barbera characters, including the Blue Falcon, Captain Caveman, Dynomutt and Dee Dee Sykes. Eccentric performances, wacky visual gags, and hijinks ensue.

Apart from Frank Welker as Scooby Doo, the ensemble consists of actors who have never voiced these characters before, and do a pretty admirable job. None of the characters portrayed are particularly deep – and Scoob! only attempts to change that in the case of Shaggy and the Blue Falcon – but it’s fun to see the likes of Will Forte, Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried and others put their stamp on classic cartoon staples. Notable highlights include Jason Isaacs’ thoroughly villainous Dick Dastardly, Zac Efron’s nobly idiotic Fred Jones, and Gina Rodriguez’s criminally underwritten novel take on Velma Dinkley.

Unfortunately, Velma isn’t the only part of the movie with half-baked writing. Aside from the overall incredibly weak plot that manages to miss every element of a good Scooby Doo story, most of the jokes fall flat, and there’s not a strongly-written scene in the whole movie. Scene transitions are arbitrary, character interactions are forced, and – for most of the movie – Fred, Velma, and Daphne are even written out of the story along with anything resembling a mystery (eventually being gracefully kidnapped by Dastardly in an attempt to rectify the plot). More often than not, it’s not even clear who this movie is for: the humour is too juvenile for adults, disrespects the source material too much for Scooby Doo fans, and includes far too many references to shows that have been off the air for decades for kids to get. It’s not hard to understand Scoob!, but it is hard to understand who would want to make this movie.

Throughout the movie, characters frequently allude to the “mystery” at the centre of Scoob! being “the real deal” and not just “some guy in a rubber mask”. What the filmmakers fail to understand is that the worst Scooby Doo episodes are the ones that eschew the mask in favour of the supernatural. Scooby Doo, at its best, is a show about the harm real people can do while blaming their actions on the supernatural. It’s about “the real deal” that’s hiding behind “some guy in a rubber mask”. The villains in Scoob! never even need a mask, because they were never real to begin with.

2/10