This Scooby snack is no treat
It should be really hard to screw up an animated ScoobyDoo. But “Scoob!” is so illconceived, so poorly executed, it seems like an intentional exercise in selfsabotage.
Too bad, because 51 years after his debut as the centerpiece of the Saturday morning cartoon series “ScoobyDoo, Where Are You!” he still is one of the most beloved cartoon characters of his era.
What makes ScoobyDoo and his gang of mystery solvers — Fred, Velma, Daphne and best friend Shaggy, a.k.a. Mystery Inc. — special? Created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears for HannaBarbera Productions, its special magic was that there was no magic. These “pesky kids” were the original “MythBusters,” unmasking supernatural ghosts and monsters as hoaxes, and revealing the evil, alltoo human villains behind the curtain — Sherlock
Holmes with a SoCal vibe. Add to that the unique byplay between five disparate characters, from the bookish Velma to the laidback Shaggy, and “ScoobyDoo” became a staple on TV for more than three decades and two liveaction films.
“Scoob!,” directed by Tony Cervone — who has directed the Scooby characters before — and working off a screenplay written by seven people, throws all of that out the window.
After a somewhat OK intro that shows how Shaggy and Scooby met as children (well, kid and puppy) on Venice Beach, the movie quickly goes downhill when Mystery Inc. is being advised by Simon Cowell, the reality talent show judge, not to appear in the film again.
Then Shaggy (Bay Area native Will Forte, ably inhabiting the voice role of the late, great Casey Kasem) and Scoob (Ken Welker) go off on their own and fall in with a wannabe superhero, Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg), who with partners Dee Dee (Kiersey Clemons) and Dynomutt (Ken Jeong) discovers Shaggy is “special,” leaving Shaggy’s confidence a bit deflated.
But Shaggy really is special. Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs), a villain with plans to unleash the underworld, finds that the plan can only be realized with the help of someone who is the descendant of Alexander the Great or his dog. Somehow he discovers (through 23andMe?) that Scooby is indeed the descendant of Alexander the Great’s dog, and he kidnaps Scoob. Fred (Zac Efron), Velma (Gina Rodriguez) and Daphne (Amanda Seyfried) pursue, eventually linking up with Shaggy and the Blue Falcon gang.
So, to recap: The filmmakers took what has been for decades a vibrant working relationship between five lead characters and splits them for most of the film, destroying the chemistry. They create another three protagonists, making one of them (Blue Falcon) the de facto star of the movie, practically getting more screen time than Scooby himself. Then they have a villain with a plot to unlock an actual supernatural kingdom, completely at odds with what the original “ScoobyDoo” is about.
ScoobyDoo, where are you? The real one, I mean. The rest of this mess is just a series of nonsensical action sequences.