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Puppy power >> Scooby-Doo is a passable kiddie flick by MATTHEW HAYS
What wasn’t there to love about the show? Its reassuring predictability, its the ghosts-all-turn-out-to-be-a-hoax security blanket, its sweet-natured camaraderie—why, this show had everything. For my money, it was the best the Hanna-Barbera team ever concocted (yep, better than The Flintstones even). Thus the latest big-screen adaptation of a cult cartoon series was met with my severest scrutiny. Scooby himself has been CGI-ed with mixed effect; he doesn’t actually look much like the 2-D animated Scoob. But the human characters who play the animated gang of Mystery, Inc., are uncanny. Freddie Prinze, Jr., is fine as the bleach-blond ringleader Freddy, but the most impressive is Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, who seems to become the dog’s best friend. What films like these can do, if they’re truly clever, is move beyond mere children’s entertainment and aim for pleasing adult fans as well—and there are a large number of the latter, seeing as the show hasn’t been off the air since its debut in ’69. For the most part, however, Scooby-Doo 2002 aims for the kiddie demographic, giving us elder Scoobyphiles not a whole lot to root for. There’s a plot about the Mystery, Inc. crew splitting up acrimoniously and being brought back together to solve a crime by circumstance. And there’s also an Invasion of the Body Snatchers twist which isn’t half bad. But then there are the unfortunate elements: the unnecessary but somehow obligatory romantic interests (this despite Velma’s obvious lesbian status). Still,
the movie does deserve some Scooby-snack bonus points. At last, Scrappy-Doo,
without a doubt the most irritating animated sidekick in the history
of the medium (not to mention the most cloying bid for a ratings boost),
is put in his proper place. For that alone, this movie deserves an Oscar.
We also need a sequel, of course, so that Velma can come out of the
closet and show her true Rainbow-flag colours. : Scooby-Doo opens Friday, June 14 |
It may
come as a surprise, but some of us are taking the feature-length version
of the long-running Saturday-morning mystery cartoon Scooby-Doo very,
very seriously indeed.