I’m “biast” (con): …but it didn’t need a reboot
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
I wasn’t gonna watch the new Scooby-Doo movie. I was a fan of the original late 60s–early 70s TV show, but I was a kid then and it’s not a cartoon with adult appeal beyond the most perfunctory of nostalgia-fueled curiosity. Plus Scoob! simply looked dire.
But I watched it. I paid 20 damn bucks for a streaming rental. (Press screeners were limited to very select critics.) Why? Why did I do that? What an idiot I am.
I plead professionalism. This is what I’m telling myself, anyway. Scoob! is only the second shoulda-been-a-multiplex-wide-release movie that has been sent direct to home viewing because of the closure of cinemas during the coronavirus pandemic. (The first was last month’s Trolls: World Tour.) The future of cinema exhibition — the entire experience of Going To The Movies — is literally at stake: If this business strategy works, will it kill movie theaters for good? This is the terrified buzz of the industry at the moment. I’m not sure that most casual moviegoers are even aware of the issue — or if they are aware, whether they care. Most people who aren’t critics or ardent cinephiles only see a couple of movies on the big screen each year anyway. Most people who watch movies are already watching them at home.
But it is my professional duty to examine this controversial matter and have an opinion about it. And here it is: What’s shocking about Scoob! isn’t that we didn’t get to see it on a big screen. What’s shocking is that anyone thought this was worthy of such a presentation in the first place.
This is a disgracefully terrible movie, even grading on the “it’s for kids!” scale (which I never do anyway, because kids don’t deserve junk any more than grownups do, but if I did, this still wouldn’t pass muster). The animation looks cheap, like it was knocked off for a 90s cable show even though it’s also clearly modern CGI. It’s both a reboot and an origin story for the gang of paranormal investigators and their talking dog, set in today’s world, so it’s lacking that groovy Summer of Love vibe but fails to find a mood that feels 2020ish. (No, Harry Potter references do not count. Nor does Velma Googling to advance the plot; that’s a bad thing about contemporary movies. And dear god, is there a “joke” about Tinder in a children’s movie? *facepalm*)
Scoob! was intended to be a summer tentpole because Warner Bros. had one of the worst ideas in the history of movies: it wanted to launch a Hanna-Barbera shared-universe franchise, and this was meant to kick it off. So this isn’t only just (barely) a Scooby-Doo movie. It’s also a Blue Falcon movie; he’s a sort of vaguely Iron Man–esque superhero in a flying suit, and if anyone remembers Blue Falcon at all, it’s because of his talking-robot-dog sidekick, Dynomutt. The bad guy is Dick Dastardly, an unfunny cliché of a mustache-twirling villain, who also has a talking-dog sidekick called Muttly. Yes, there will be a sequence in which Dastardly has to screamingly insist on his preferred shortened version of his forename: “I’m a Dick! I’m a Dick!” (I am embarrassed for voice actor Jason Isaacs [Star Trek Continues, The Death of Stalin] here. I remind you again that this is a movie for children.)
No, Dastardly is not actually Old Man Withers from the amusement park wearing a mask who would have gotten away with his greedy plan to sell to developers if not for those pesky kids. (That was a great thing about the original cartoon: it promoted reason and scientific skepticism, if only accidentally! There were never any actual ghosts or monsters, at least as far as I recall, never anything truly supernatural. There were just rich bastards trying to get richer. Though subsequent incarnations of Scooby-Doo did feature elements that were genuinely paranormal.) Dastardly is just a standard villain the likes of which you might find in a same-old superhero movie. And Blue Falcon is a generic superhero. It’s like Scoob! doesn’t even want to be a Scooby-Doo movie at all. It’s just a random, scattershot collection of pulp junk, cheesy sci-fi, and — yes — paranormal crap, assembled by six screenwriters who apparently don’t actually understand or even like any of the genres they’ve mashed together.
In the midst of this spectacularly dumb and pandering mess, we also get some fucked-up gender dynamics: The “heroes” — Shaggy (the voice of Will Forte: Extra Ordinary, Booksmart), Scooby-Doo (the voice of Frank Welker: Aladdin, Smurfs: The Lost Village), and Blue Falcon (the voice of Mark Wahlberg: Mile 22, All the Money in the World) — are all useless doofuses, and proud of it. The women — Velma (the voice of Gina Rodriguez: Ferdinand, Deepwater Horizon); Blue Falcon’s assistant, Dee Dee Skyes (the voice of Kiersey Clemons: Flatliners, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising), and to a lesser degree Daphne (the voice of Amanda Seyfried: Anon, Gringo) — are all supremely competent and do all the work, including frequently fixing messes the doofuses — also including Fred (the voice of Zac Efron: The Disaster Artist, Baywatch) — have made. Is there a hint of satire in any of this? I suspect the screenwriters — all men — believe that having one of the women shout “toxic masculinity!” at one particularly annoying point constitutes such. But it doesn’t.
The lesson of Scoob!: Ineffectual idiot men inevitably get all the credit as heroes — get hailed as legends, to boot! — even as competent women do all the work. All the usual “it’s for kids!” garbage we’re assailed with here — the attempts to be heartwarming among all the poop jokes, for instance — are inoffensive next to this sexist poison. We need to be inoculating kids against this, not feeding it to them. Our sons need to get their shit together, and our daughters shouldn’t be expecting to have to do it for them.
If anything is going to kill movies, it’s movies like Scoob!: charmless cash-grabs mired in dated conventions that can’t be bothered with the slightest stab at originality. Find some new stories to tell, Hollywood, and tell them better.
Snort-laughed when the email notification came in and wasn’t disappointed when I read the review. Nice work. How is it possible that my expectations for this mess were zero (I *hate* the cartoon in all its versions, because I was Velma and Velma was a marginalized workhorse) and yet the movie apparently still fails to meet them?
I have never “been” Velma or any such character, but otherwise you could be my long-lost twin. Said it all for me, thanks.
I was always (and still) pretty much Velma…
I kind of want to see a movie all about Velma, by the team that made Booksmart.
Kate Micucci played Velma in a cartoon recently, so Garfunkel and Oates could write the musical numbers. Obviously there would be musical numbers.
worse than the 2002 Scooby Doo movie?
I actually saw the 2002 Scooby Doo movie a few months ago and was unpleasantly surprised by how much worse it was than I remembered. (Not that I remembered it as being an especially good movie but still..)
Rowan Atkinson, how could you? And Sarah Michelle Gellar, did you need a break from Buffy that badly? And Linda Cardellini? Geez, that was a low point in your acting career, wasn’t it?
I haven’t seen that — thank god — since it was new. So it’s difficult to say. It’d be a close contest, though, I think.
So, I’m going to toddle over to Netflix and re-watch some Mystery, Incorporated eps instead. Maybe the one where Harlan Ellison is doing a book signing at Darrow.
It’s official. I miss the late Paul Frees aka the original voice of Dick Dastardly. Though I suppose I should consider it a blessing that he’s not alive to witness this mess. No ill wind and all that jazz.
At least they didn’t bring back Scrappy-Doo, the one character from the original series that everyone loved to hate.
I never thought I’d hear MaryAnn say this. But if she can say it, I guess it must be true.
Oops! Or should I say “Drat! Double drat! Triple drat!”?
Not that it’s likely to matter to anyone but myself but apparently Paul Winchell — NOT Paul Frees — was the original voice of Dick Dastardly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Dastardly
Paul Frees did voice a lot of animated characters back in the day but Dick Dastardly was not one of them. Robert Paulsen of Pinky and the Brain fame has voiced Dick Dastardly in at least one project but not Paul Frees.
Anyway, the same sentiments that I expressed on behalf of the late Paul Frees I express on behalf of the late Paul Winchell. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Have you been watching Mark Evanier’s Cartoon Voices Panels? The most recent episode included Rob Paulsen. It was ridiculously long but ridiculously entertaining.
https://www.newsfromme.com/2020/05/16/cartoon-voices-panel/
No, I missed that. Thank you for the recommendation.
I did see Paulsen’s guest appearance on one of the Postmodern Jukebox videos. That was cool — at least by my humble standards.
Great googly-eyed goddesses NO, a Hanna Barbera Cinematic Universe?! Normally I’m all in support of HBCU’s but not like this. If Space Ghost and Johnny Quest start swiping picnic baskets with Yogi, Scrappy, and Jabberjaw, I’m gonna carve out my eyeballs with a jagged nacho chip, stuff my ears with soft pretzel, and submerge my body slowly and permanently into a tub of scalding melted cheese.
On the other hand, if it means a reboot of Pirates of Darkwater and/or Jana of the Jungle… no no, I must be strong, even then, it’s not worth the torment. Studios, when will you learn you can’t force your own private MCU into existence by throwing money at it without first ensuring quality planning, storytelling, and source material curated and masterminded by a core cadre of true fans (and even then it’s difficult), I mean you can’t just wave your ha – aaand Scoob! just became the number one movie in America.
Damn marketing departments, stop being so good at your jobs, and parents stop being so bad at yours! Literally all of recorded children’s entertainment at the swipe of a finger, several lifetime’s worth of high quality programming for younglings, to say nothing of the hundreds and hundreds of high quality gaming options both electronical and tabletopical, and yet you choose to plunk down $20 precious digital dollaridoos on Scoob!?? Madness. Pure madness.
A Space Ghost: Coast to Coast movie, on the other hand…
We watched SGCTC religiously in college, and sadly I’m just now realizing that The Eric Andre Show was essentially an attempt to make a live action version with more overtly aggressive attempts to throw guests off balance. If a team could recapture the spontaneous silliness, I’d be all for a SGCTC movie or reboot.
A lot of the enjoyment came from watching guests who didn’t know what they were getting into, but I’m afraid most modern celebrities are too media savvy to play off of SG’s random quips with non-pandering, genuinely naive confusion.
It’s the same fear I have about the inevitable Borat reboot. When everyone on Earth is performing in their own private social media reality show every waking hour, there isn’t much wiggle room for SGCTC style improvisational comedy. I’d love to be proven wrong though.
The “Imagine” video alone demonstrates that there are celebrities who have no idea how they look to the outside world. See also: Lana Del Rey.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess there will always be a steady supply of clueless famous people floating in bubbles of wealth and privilege. Maybe the SGCTC formula still has some juice left for squeezin’. It’d be cool to keep the same format, but reserve half of the show for a couple random guests off the street. I’m getting way off topic though, so I’ll stop.
I swear though, if trolls jump in the comments to defend Scoob! of all things, I don’t know about this whole America project anymore. Maybe we should all just move to Greenland and start over in 2021. I’m sure Denmark won’t mind and the Inuits would love some company – our track record with indigenous ethnic groups is practically flawless (minus the f).
i was never a fan of the original cartoon, but i have no doubt this is horrible because it has comitted one of the big giveaways to the awful ahead. it shortened the already ridiculous and not very lengthy name. The Cartoon, i believe was, Scooby Doo, Where Are You? the reboot was just Scooby Doo. This is “Scoob” which is so horrible sounding in and of itself, it can’t help but be awful. i once saw a brilliant movie, called The Tall Guy (Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson) Goldblum plays an aspiring actor in London whose is currently a stooge for a popular comedian. He finally gets his big break in a musical production of The Elephant Man, called (of course) “Elephant!” it is (of course) an unmitigated disaster. Recently, i went to see the wonderful Peter Dinklage in a musical production of Cyrano de Bergerac, called (of course) “Cyrano!”… despite the talent in it, it was an unmitiated disaster. thus, my theory that names that make sense, shortened to one word with an exclamation point (both there or implied) is a good indicator to stay far, far away.
That’s a good rule of thumb. It’s also interesting in this age of texting that slang has become shorter and shorter. My time traveling neighbor just popped in to let me know the 2053 EVR (screenless virtual reality) reboot is called Doo!! which seems like a logica- wait she’s back again, now she says the 2098 RB (apparently something called “reelbrayne” she tried to explain it to me, but it was too confusing – sounded like an LSD trip with extra steps) reboot of Doo!! is called “>d?” which she keeps pronouncing as a short glottal chirp that I’m unable to reproduce. I asked her what the next one was gonna be called, but she just mumbled something about the 2101 Squirrel Revolution, grabbed a bag of walnuts from my pantry, and vanished again. What a weirdo.
Geez, my time traveling neighbors never tell me anything interesting. Just some nonsense about an America without libraries or movie theatres, plus some Fritz Leiberish gibberish about a world where where everyone has to wear masks…
Thank God we don’t have to live in a world like that…
When someone makes too many TV series in a row, their name starts to shrink. I call it the Bob Newhart rule. We’re lucky we never got Cosby! And Dick Van Dyke is lucky that he retired when he did.
Just have to chime in to let it be on record that I hated the original, thought the stories were dull and the animation was terrible. In fact all the Hanna Barbera animation is horrible…flat, no detail, and reuses too many cells.
I agree, but nostalgia’s a hell of a drug, and pickings were slim on USA Cartoon Network at the daycare. I have a soft spot for Charlotte’s Web, Jana of the Jungle, the original Scooby Doo (mainly for its use of “logic” to triumph over superstition), and the best thing Hanna Barbera ever did (the animation was still comparatively rough, but it had decent worldbulding and showed promise in its brief run):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_5F1zYQF5M
By Hanna Barbera standards, “Pirates of Darkwater” was an animation tour-de-force. :)
(Well, at least for the first few episodes. Shows of that era usually got farmed out to multiple studios overseas, resulting in huge differences in quality between episodes)
Yeah, the Hanna Barbera animation was always cringe-level awful.
Every once in a while, I stop and listen to an Elvis Costello song I’ve heard more than a hundred times, and I realize that the lyrics are completely insane. I think: Is he really singing about angels taking his shoes?
Trying to explain the premise of a Hanna Barbera cartoon is kind of like that.