Scooby-Doo

Dead-On Casting Makes Scooby-Doo Mindless Summer Fun

By Jeff Eason

Even though Scooby-Doo, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, came out when I was nine years old, I never really cared for it. I thought the animation was robotic looking, the characters were annoying, and the plots (I use the plural loosely) were predictable. Worst of all, it wasn’t the least bit scary.

A nine-year-old has the right to be picky about the cartoons he watches and I only watched Scooby-Doo when nothing better was on.

So not being a big Scooby-Doo fan in the first place, imagine my surprise at being thoroughly entertained by the new Warner Brothers live action movie version of the cartoon.

The new Scooby-Doo features incredible effects, lots of laughs and just enough of a plot to keep you wondering “whodunit?” The storyline involves a spring break destination, Spooky Island, where kids are arriving as fun-loving coeds and leaving as spiritless zombies. Theme park owner Mondavarious (played with restraint by Mr. Bean’s Rowan Atkinson) recruits Mystery Inc.—Daphne, Fred, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby—to do some meddling and solve the case.

The producers of the movie toyed with the idea of making it a more adult feature with plenty of inside jokes for people who watched the cartoon in their college dorm rooms. People (you know who you are) with nothing better to do than start rumors about the Mystery, Inc. gang. Shaggy’s shuffling walk, hippie slang and insatiable appetite are said to be the result of smoking pot, Velma never has a date because she is a lesbian, and Fred and Daphne are just looking for a way to get rid of the others so they can get the Mystery Machine van a-rockin’. Producers eventually dropped most of the inside jokes and instead made a movie which younger fans of the cartoon can enjoy.

That’s not too say that Scooby-Doo is exactly a movie for little kids. Some of the monsters could scare the pre-K kids and most of the non-physical jokes will go right over the heads of most kids under ten.

The monsters and most of the special effects in the movie are cutting edge and exciting, especially in the scenes with the big bowl of human protoplasm. The one effect that doesn’t meet the high standards of the rest of the film, however, is the digitally created Great Dane, Scooby-Doo. The makers of the film must have had a real quandary in the preliminary stages of the production on how to create Scooby for a live action film. Make Scooby look like he does in the cartoon and he will not look real. Make him look like an actual dog and he no longer looks like Scooby Doo.

In the end they solved the problem by cutting down the dog’s screen time. That works for the best since the film’s real strength is its dead-on casting. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze, Jr., play the glamour half of Mystery, Inc. and relative newcomer Linda Cardellini is the embodiment of the brainy Velma. Matthew Lillard’s uncanny recreation of Shaggy is the casting coup that makes the movie work. He has the creaky vocals (originally voiced by American Top Forty DJ Casey Kasem), gangly walk, and stoner smile that we all associate with Norville “Shaggy” Rogers. After years of playing the comic relief character in films like Scream and She’s All That, Lillard has a chance to shine and he makes the most of his screen time as the lovable slacker trying to keep the gang together.

All four actors handle their roles perfectly, conveying the cartoon qualities of the characters while making them seem at home in the real world. Cardellini, best known for her role as Lindsey on the television series Freaks and Geeks, deserves special recognition for taking Velma’s intellect and infusing it with emotion and humor. Everybody knows that Velma has to lose her glasses at least once in every episode of the cartoon and the movie takes this fact and uses it to show off Cardellini’s ability to go from wallflower to leading lady in microseconds.

Prinze and Gellar—set to be married later this year—do a good job with the window dressing parts of Fred and Daphne. Fred retains his vacuous vanity and ascot and Daphne her purple wardrobe and affinity for getting kidnapped. They stretch the roles but not enough for anyone to confuse this with a serious movie.

If you’re looking for mindless summer movie enjoyment, you will enjoy Scooby-Doo. It is fast-paced fun and even includes a plot twist at the end worthy of a more serious film.

Scooby-Doo raked in $56.4 million in its debut weekend, more than twice as much as its nearest competitor, the Matt Damon spy thriller The Bourne Identity ($27.5) and there is already talk of a Scooby-Doo II.

Scooby-Doo also has a chance of being the most successful adaptation of a TV cartoon to real life movie ever. The high water mark for such films is 1994’s The Flintstones which grossed around $150 million. The sequel (prequel, actually), The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, only pulled in $35 million—reportedly $20 million less than it took to make the movie. Other recent adaptations include Josie and the Pussycats and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, both considered box office duds.

Scooby-Doo is rated PG. JUNE 2002