Scooby Doo

Scooby Doo is a bona fide cultural institution. Despite never having watched the cartoon or any of the related materials ever in my life, just through cultural osmosis I know each member of the Mystery Machine gang by name and the cartoon’s many tropes: Scooby and Shaggy’s cowardice, Velma’s bookishness, the fact that it is basically always some old man in a mask instead of an actual ghost, and so on. As The Flintstones and The Jetsons fade from our collective memory, Scooby Doo remains the only Hanna Barbera cartoon that endures. And while this isn’t the first Hanna Barbera cartoon to be given a live action adaptation (that honor goes to The Flintstones), Scooby Doo actually succeeds at bringing its subject matter to the silver screen in a way that both feels true to its source material while also tweaking its formula where necessary to both fit the expectations of a modern audience and the demands of a feature length film.

If there is one thing that Scooby Doo absolutely nails, its tone. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t try to take the cartoon’s darker elements and push them into overdrive because movies always need to be “more”. It also doesn’t go too far in the other direction. It doesn’t take the zaniness of the cartoon and translate that into non-stop gags and scatalogical humor out of some misguided belief that it’s just a movie for kids, and kid’s like this stuff, so who gives a damn. The movie was written by James Gunn, writer/director of Guardians of the Galaxy, and he proves here, again, that he knows how to nail that challenging middle ground. It can be dark and funny, believably have characters accept an outlandish plot with total seriousness without expecting the audience to do the same, and create an adaptation that feels both fresh and true to the original material.

This tone lends itself to a teenage market, similar to Gunn’s Guardians, but unfortunately here that leads to an aesthetic that is quite dated. Made in the early 2000s, the shortcut to teenage relevancy was to model yourself after MTV and Scooby Doo is no exception. The fashion, dialogue, set design, and more are all so intensely early 2000s that it is kind of amazing. The non-major characters lean into various teenage tropes of the era, like gnarly skater kids and uptight preps, with the dress, hair styles, and mannerisms those cliches connote. It might not be as obvious to people who were not as immersed in pop culture from that era, but as someone who knows that period well it is as clear as day.

However, where the background characters seem like they are straight from central casting for an MTV beach party show or music video, the major characters are sublime. Each member of the Mystery Machine team is about as perfectly cast as possible, so much so that I now have a hard time imagining anyone else inhabiting any of those roles in any capacity. Rowan Atkinson also turns in a pitch perfect performance, albeit a markedly small one, as the mysterious island amusement park’s eccentric owner. The only notable miss with the speaking roles was Isla Fisher as Mary, who wasn’t bad by any means, but rather criminal underwritten and under utilized.

All this praise is not to imply that Scooby Doo is some perfect, albeit dated, piece of high art. It is still a Scooby Doo adaptation. It is goofy and cheesy, and at times a bit silly, but is surprisingly fun regardless. It is also a bit weird at times. It takes the Scooby Doo norm of all the supernatural being easily explained and turns it on its head, with genuine supernatural things taking place. Not ghosts or ghouls, but more otherworldly artifacts and soul/body separation. And while this may tread in territory Scooby Doo purists won’t like, it bothered me less than I thought it would.

It also tries its hand at some interesting twists and turns, but I found basically all of them to be very predictable. Even the biggest of the reveals, in the climax of the film, was one I saw coming from a mile away. The writing just doesn’t trust its audience enough and so the pieces that are supposed to be foreshadowing instead telegraph the coming subversions to a point that they didn’t surprise me at all. Maybe this is a function of trying to make a movie for kids/teens, or maybe it is a function of me having watched too many movies , or maybe even both, but I felt that the show’s attempts to throw me for a loop universally failed. However, to be clear, this did not put much of a damper on my enjoyment. I still had a good time, despite the movie playing out in a predictable manner.

One last thing to note is heavy use of early 2000s CGI. Essentially all of the creatures in the piece, from monsters the gang encounters to Scooby himself, are computer generated. They don’t look great. Little effort was done to mask or hide the inadequacies of the technology of the time, as was done in Jurassic Park with rain, fog, and other camera tricks, and the result is something that adds an additional element that dates the picture. As a result, if you are a stickler for realistic effects this movie is not going to come close to reaching your standards. I thought this might bother me, but it ultimately didn’t. In fact, I think leaning into the more unrealistic side of things, given that the original material is a cartoon, helps avoid a situation where a photo-realistic dog is animated to try and match the mannerisms of the hand animated Scooby Doo. Yes, the effects are low polygon and rough around the edges. The lighting and shadows are not nearly as refined as you would find in a modern movie. But the fact that things feel animated is OK, when done tactfully, in a movie that is itself based on an animated TV series.

Would Recommend: If you are a millennial feeling nostalgic about a time when the villain was something simple like old man Smithers in a mask.

Would Not Recommend: If zany silliness and meta humor are not what you are looking for in a comedy.