REVIEW: Scoob!

The choice to move Warner Bros' Scoob!, directed by Tony Cervone, to digital is an understandable one, but the film remains haunted by the possibility of having been the launching pad that brought Mystery Inc back into the public eye through the big screen. In an alternate timeline where theater doors weren't shuttered, could this have worked? Very possibly. Not short on laughs or ingenuity, this film places Scooby-Doo and company in a new universe that has every opportunity to initiate a new generation into the longstanding Scooby-Doo fandom.

Having deployed their mystery-solving expertise for fifty years (in the film's universe only ten years), the Mystery Inc. gang is considering expanding their business into the larger market and going big. But doing so runs the risk of losing their tight-knit posse. Does the group need to sacrifice friendship on the altar of inevitable maturation? The question hangs in the air as Scooby and Shaggy are caught in the crossfire of superhero Blue Falcon (well, Blue Falcon's son, Brian) and the notorious Dick Dastardly, who seeks Scooby-Doo for reasons unknown. Fred, Daphne, and Velma soon embark on a quest to save their friends, while Scooby and Shaggy try to understand how they fit into this larger than life world of robots and superheroes (and by extension the world of Mystery Inc), and the team must figure out just how strong their friendship is.

The movie actually shows impressive thematic symmetry in that regard. This dichotomy, the naturality of friendship versus the cold hard utility of progress, is at work in some form among most of the major players in the movie, including Dick Dastardly who now commands an army of robotic servants to take the place of his own flesh-and-blood canine sidekick whom he now seeks to retrieve from the Underworld. As a consequence, the thematic through-line of the film rings true. (There's an inescapable irony at play, though. The film does, after all, capitulate to modern computer animation instead of the hand-drawn tradition from which these characters originate.)

Voice actor extraordinaire Frank Welker (who fun-fact voiced Fred in the original 1969 run of Scooby-Doo and has voiced the big canine himself since 2002) gives life to our signature pup, while the rest of the cast is filled with prominent A-list actors including Zac Efron, Amanda Seyfried, and Ken Jeong. This is done to pretty good effect as you're never really distracted by the celebrity behind the mic. Jason Isaacs in particular relishes his role as supervillain Dick Dastardly and I'm now convinced this is how he should have played Lucius Malfoy.

One of the biggest deviations from the source material comes with a genre shift. Here the Mystery Inc. gang isn't caught up in a mystery that needs to be solved so much as a world domination quest that needs to be foiled. The movie actually gets to dip into a range of exotic locales and sub-genres. Perhaps what we see here isn't so far out of their range. After all, between their various films and shows over the decades, we've seen them take on haunted houses, pirates, dinosaurs, and everything in between. There's still an unmasking at the end, but it's done more as a meta-textual gimmick than anything else.

It's here that the film handicaps itself the most. Even in a world as cartoonish as this, even with a cast as zany as the Mystery Inc. Gang, one does wish that the writers for this team had had enough faith in the emotional gravity of the property to play a few of the more emotional moments sincerely rather than ironically. Thankfully the movie isn't without pathos, but the film elects to lean into irony a little too hard a little too often.

The movie is at its best when the personalities of the characters, and our affection for said personalities, are allowed to shine through. Does one need to be familiar with these personalities to understand this movie? It may increase your appreciation for the brand, but the film is fairly user-friendly. Just YouTubing the 1969 opening title sequence is more than sufficient. (This film may or may not include a form of that very feature for your convenience.) This is as good an entry point as any. Should we be graced with further franchising from this creative team, the Scooby Doo world may rest comfortably in the arms of pop culture for many years more.

--The Professor

Comments

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 1 The Disney of Your Childhood

So, I’m going to put out a somewhat controversial idea here today: The Walt Disney Company has had a tremendous amount of influence in the pop culture landscape, both in recent times and across film history. Further controversy: a lot of people really resent Disney for this. I’ve spent a greater part of this blog’s lifetime tracking this kind of thing. I have only a dozen or so pieces deconstructing the mechanics of these arguments and exposing how baseless these claims tend to be. This sort of thing is never that far from my mind. But my general thoughts on the stigmatization of the Disney fandom have taken a very specific turn in recent times against recent headlines. The Walt Disney Company has had some rather embarrassing box office flops in the last two or three years, and a lot of voices have been eager to link Disney’s recent financial woes to certain choices. Specifically, this idea that Disney has all the sudden “gone woke.” Now,...

"When Did Disney Get So Woke?!" pt. 2 Disney vs the 21st Century

In the first half of this series , we looked at this construction of the Disney image that the company has sold itself on for several decades now. Walt himself saw the purpose of his entertainment enterprise as depiction a happier world than that which he and the audience emerged from, and that formed the basis of his formidable fanbase. But because the larger culture only knows how to discuss these things in the context of consumerism, a lot of intricacies get obscured in the conversation about The Walt Disney Company, its interaction with larger culture, and the people who happily participate in this fandom. Basically, critics spent something like fifty years daring The Walt Disney Company to start being more proactive in how they participated in the multi-culture. And when Disney finally showed up in court to prove its case, the world just did not know what to do ... The 21st Century With the development of the inter...

The Earthling: Some Observations on "Natural Masculinity"

I’ve talked quite a bit about “toxic masculinity” across his blog, but I want to talk for a moment about a companion subject–“natural masculinity.” I’ve heard several other names and labels assigned to the idea, but the general concept is this idea that men are disposed to behave a certain way and that sOciETy forces them to subjugate this part of themselves. Maybe some of us were raised by someone, or currently live with someone, who buys into these attitudes. Maybe they’re perfectly fine most of the time, but once they meet up with Brian from sophomore year and go out into the mountains for a “weekend with the guys,” a sort of metamorphosis takes place. Jokes that were unacceptable to them become hilarious. Certain transgressions lose their penalty. Gentle Joe kinda mutates into a jerk. This is all propelled and reinforced by the idea that this is how men just are , and that entitles them to certain actions. And who are these women to infringe upon that God-given right? Gladiator (2...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

REVIEW: ONWARD

The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with. Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles. This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to gui...

Tangled: Disney Sees the Light

On November 21st, 2010, The LA Times ran its article “ Disney Animation is Closing the Book on Fairy Tales .” It pronounced that although the Walt Disney company was built on films in the style of Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid , that form of Disney magic was history, reporting, iCarly (2007) “Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent — revolving around finding the man of your dreams — have a limited shelf life. With the advent of ‘tween’ TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel’s Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon’s Miranda Cosgrove.” “You’ve got to go with the times,” MGA Chief Executive Isaac Larian said. “You can’t keep selling what the mothers and the fathers played with before. You’ve got to see life through their lens.” Th e same day this article ran, the executives at Disney disavowed the viewpoints expressed and assured the public that Disney was NOT in fact s...

The Paradox of The Graduate

If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces. But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like The Graduate . I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since. But what's int...

The Banshees of Inisherin: The Death Knell of Male Friendship

I’m going to go out on a limb today and put out the idea that our society is kind of obsessed with romance. In popular storytelling, t he topic has two whole genres to itself (romantic-comedy, romantic-drama), which gives it a huge slice of the media pie. Yet even in narratives where romance is not the focus, it still has this standing invitation to weave itself onto basically any kind of story. It’s almost more worth remarking upon when a story doesn’t feature some subplot with the main character getting the guy or the girl. Annie Hall (1977) And it’s also not just the romantic happy ending that we’re obsessed with. Some of the most cathartic stories of romance see the main couple breaking up or falling apart, and there’s something to be gained from seeing that playing out on screen as well. But what’s interesting is that it is assumed that a person has a singular “one and only” romantic partner. By contras...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog