Scoob!

You can see from my video review my passion for Scooby-Doo the character. Since I’m going to follow this up with posts about the old cartoons and about my personal history as a fan of the “mangy mutt”, for right now I’ll focus my thoughts on what’s in the current movie itself.

Between Dick Dastardly and Muttley being the villains, Blue Falcon and Dynomutt helping the heroes, and Captain Caveman being another fairly significant character, this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to a feature length version of Laff-A-Lympics. I might be the only person on the planet who cares about that – certainly the only person under 45 years of age – but that alone warrants a recommendation. Also, it was awesome seeing the opening theme of the very first Scooby-Doo cartoon, recreated frame-for-frame in 3D animation, early in this movie.

At this point you might be wondering, “But Mr. AAC, what if we’ve never seen Scooby-Doo before?” Scoob! is still a great time.

We start off seeing the origins of Scooby and Shaggy’s friendship before the film moves to the present day (of course the “present day” has been shifting for 50 years since the characters were created LOL) where we see the gang meeting Simon Cowell.

Yes, that’s extremely random and I don’t get it either. However, the point is that rather than simply telling Scooby and Shaggy what horrible singers they are*, he also tells them they are deadweight to the team. Even though Fred, Daphne, and Velma defend their friends, Scooby and Shaggy dejectedly quit.

However, things get more complicated when they stumble across Falcon, Dynomutt, and their new associate Dee Dee, and it becomes clear Dastardly wants to kidnap Scooby because the latter is the last living descendant of Alexander the Great’s dog.

That’s about as trippy as it sounds, but Scooby-Doo was often called a drug-influenced cartoon in its early days (more on that in my History post on this). What matters is that, strange is at is, the plot is simple enough for all ages to understand and fun enough for all ages to enjoy. A colorful assortment of good guys battle a few colorful bad guys, with the well-told morals of the specific story being “You’re special in some way and don’t ever doubt that” and “Even when you find out how remember that nothing is more important than your friends”.

Special shout-out to the great cast: Will Forte, Zac Efron, Gina Rodriguez, Amanda Seyfried, Mark Wahlberg, Jason Isaacs, etc. not to mention legendary voice actor Frank Welker as Scooby himself! He has been part of the franchise since the beginning in 1969 (admittedly only as Scooby much more recently), so having him as Scooby feels almost as wonderful as it was having Jim Cummings for 2018’s Disney’s Christopher Robin.

That’s all I got on this movie but not even close to all I got on the character. Read on.

Bottom line: Wonderful!

Up Next: A bunch of reminiscing.

*Speaking of which I made clear in my last post my feelings about family trips as a kid. One of the worst things was having to listen to my sister’s singing.

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