BEFORE: OK, I'm back from New York Comic-Con - it's not like I really went anywhere, not out of town, just across town. And I only worked the set-up, Friday afternoon/evening, and all day Saturday - but these days, that's enough to wear me out, so it makes sense that I've cut back. In my younger days, I would have worked all four days, or traveled to San Diego a day in advance of set-up, and stayed an extra day to avoid the red-eye flight, which was essentially a week out of my life, and involved round-the-clock work (and some fun, when you factored in a couple parties and a few beer floats). Yeah, when I was a younger man, I'd party out in San Diego and come back to New York, and it would take me a few days to recover.
This was something of a "rebuilding year" for the convention, ticket sales were capped, the crowds were sparser than usual, at least on Friday, and everybody in attendance had to go through an extra vaccination check before they could pick up their badges. Masks had to be worn - not just superhero or costume masks, the surgical ones too, and people still needed to follow the social distancing guidelines - no handshakes, no high-fives, and well, nothing more intimate than that either. (Not at the convention, anyway, what you do back at your hotel room with your cosplay gear on is still up to you...)
The NY Comic-Con used to be held in February, which never made any sense to me, but then, I'm not in charge of scheduling at the Javits Center. Those first few years they had to find a place for it between the Auto Show, the Home Show, and other annual events, and it used to take up only like a third of the building, but it's grown so much that now it takes over the whole convention center, and they kept adding new wings and finding new spaces to handle the overflow. This year, there just weren't as many people, not as many booths, but that led to spaces on the main floor that just had tables and chairs for people to sit down and eat, also there were more food stands than usual, booths that sold BEER even, and one big booth that just sold fudge. Really? Fudge at a comic-con? Any other year that wouldn't make any sense, who wants to get chocolate all over their hands and then touch comic books and other collectibles? Madness.
Despite the semi-lack of crowds, our booth did more sales than ever, we had a really good year. It doesn't make sense unless you figure that the people who DID show up were more serious about collecting animation art, and since last year's event didn't happen, they were twice as eager to buy some. Umm, OK, we're happy to give them what they want and take their money - we had to pay for the booth in June, after all, at a time when nobody was really sure if the event would take place, or in what form. Anyway, it's the last day today but I'm relaxing at home, my work is done so I can get back to movies and scheduling shifts at my other job.
There's always a fair amount of Scooby-Doo cosplay going on, these characters have been around since the late 1960's and are now part of the collective consciousness. I didn't see any GREAT Mystery Inc. costuming this year, but you can always just look out at the crowd and pick out a Velma or a Shaggy, the costuming is easy enough if you just have an orange sweater and a purple skirt handy, or a baggy green shirt and brown pants for your "shaggy" hipster friend.
The voice of Jason Isaacs carries over from "The Cure for Wellness".
THE PLOT: Scooby and the gang face their most challenging mystery ever: a plot to unleash the ghost dog Cerberus upon the world. As they race to stop this dogpocalypse, the gang discovers that Scooby has an epic destiny greater than anyone imagined.
AFTER: This 2020 film took the characters back to the beginning, for an origin story that nobody really needed - though, really, there have been about 87 animated movies with the Mystery Inc. characters over the years, and maybe just nobody thought to do an origin before? It's the story that nobody really needed, but I guess it's nice to have - or maybe they have done one, and this counts as a reboot for the younger viewers, I don't know. Seriously, if I sat down to watch all the Scooby-Doo movies that would be my entire month of October, and you know they probably do all link together, but I don't have that kind of time, or the interest. So, I'm just limiting myself this year to the 2020 CGI film, and the two live-action movies that came out in the early 2000's. This will make sense in a few days, I promise - I get the feeling that I maybe say that a lot.
Scooby-Doo was once a stray puppy, and lonely loner Shaggy (aka Norville Rogers, don't ask me how I know that...) was a lonely kid who kept to himself and listened to songs about being lonely, until this stray Great Dane puppy came into his life. As with all rescue animals, there's debate over who rescued who - great message for the kids here, adopt, don't shop, only this could have been even stronger if Shaggy could have gone to an animal shelter and found Scooby there. In this version, Scooby the dog is named after the Scooby snacks, but this seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse, right? We've all heard the legend about how the dog is named after Frank Sinatra singing "Doo-be-doo-be-do" in "Strangers in the Night", but now this seems to be something of an urban legend. Wikipedia points out that "skooby-doo" was already in use in Cockney rhyming slang for "clue", which makes some sense, but also the fictional band The Archies had a single in 1968 titled "Feelin' So Good (S.K.O.O.B.Y.-D.O.O.) and considering the CBS connection to "The Archie Show", this seems maybe just as legit as the Frank Sinatra reference. Kids today don't have any clue who Sinatra was, so maybe the new name motivation is acceptable.
Then they've just got to get the gang all together - so a couple bullies steal Shaggy's Halloween candy and throw it inside a notoriously "haunted" neighborhood house, and Fred, Daphne and Velma appear on the scene to help get the candy back. Because, you know, it's not really a holiday where you can just go get MORE candy from other houses, or just go to the store and BUY the exact candy that you want, instead of a bunch of random candy that you DON'T want given out for free. (Seriously, kids, it's a dumb process, wouldn't you rather buy a small amount of your FAVORITE candy and be very happy, rather than have to sift through a giant pile of lame-ass licorice, lollipops and candy corn just to maybe find a Snickers bar or some Sour Patch Kids? I think it's time to retire the whole trick-or-treating concept.).
The four kids and the dog bond as a group, investigate the haunted house, recover the candy, and discover that the home-owners been running a "my house is haunted" scam, though I'm not really sure how that benefits him. On the old TV show, there was always somebody haunting the farm or house or other property, and it was USUALLY the person who would benefit from getting the property or the land, even as a kid I realized there was a pattern, it became like "CSI" or "Law & Order" for kids, just follow the money and after a few shows, you could pretty accurately predict who was dressing up like a ghost pirate or evil clown to try to chase the rightful owner off the property. And they would have gotten away with it, if not for these meddling kids...
But who haunts their OWN property? What is there to gain? This makes no sense, did the writers here not watch the old Scooby-Doo show and forget to follow the pattern? Maybe he just wanted to keep to himself, and he didn't want anybody else to ever visit him, so he made his house seem haunted? Yeah, there's an extra bit of motivation thrown in at the last second, but this all felt VERY forced as a story-point, there had to be a better way to get the five main characters together as a unit. Still, this was probably the best part of the movie, because after this, it just descended into greater nonsense.
The story fast-forwards into the present, where these kids are now young adults, traveling around in their van from one mystery to the next, as we're used to seeing them. Since this is a kids' movie, there's not much said about the potential romantic pairing of Fred and Daphne, or Shaggy and Velma, or even Daphne and Velma (come on, you know it's possible...). The only two love stories here seem to be between Shaggy and Scooby, and also Fred and his van. It's the classic comic-book conundrum, like most superheroes are single and asexual, because kids are reading - plus most comic-book writers are single nerds who don't know how to write married characters, so Spider-Man can have girlfriends but not ever marry Mary Jane (or if he does, which he did, the next writer's only going to undo it...) and Superman dated Lois for like 50 years before tying the knot, then that marriage got undone by the next writer, then another re-boot and he's married again, but come on, how long can it last?
Sorry, where were we? Oh, right, Scooby-Doo. The plot of this movie seems to pieced together based on what other characters from the Scooby-Doo-niverse the writers wanted to use, which means The Blue Falcon and Dynomutt, Dirk Dastardly and Muttley, and also Captain Caveman. Somehow the story had to incorporate all of those characters, who last all got together in the Laff-a-Lympics cartoon back in the 1970's (look it up) which was ridiculous, but I think still managed to make more sense than "Scoob!" does. Here goes:
Dirk Dastardly is trying to gather three giant skulls, which belong to the giant mythical three-headed dog, Cerberus (I don't know how a mythical/fictional creature left three REAL skulls behind, but whatever) and the Blue Falcon and Dynomutt are trying to stop him. (This Blue Falcon is the slacker son of the original Blue Falcon, which is interesting but problematic, how can he be both a slacker AND a superhero at the same time? A real slacker wouldn't even bother...). Blue Falcon and Dynomutt are aided by Dee Dee Sykes, a female and ethnically diverse pilot character who seems to be here mainly because she's ethnically diverse. (Prove me wrong.) Scooby is important because he's the last living decendant of Alexander the Great's dog, Peritas - which seems to me like it should be pronounced "Perr-eh-tass", as if it rhymes with "Veritas", but everybody here says it WRONG, like "Purr-EE-tas". I'm also not sure how a dog from 2,500 years ago can have thousands of descendants, but only ONE is still alive, like literally his DNA should be in nearly every dog by now. But whatever.
The Mystery Inc. team is split up, Shaggy and Scooby work with the Blue Falcon, Dynomutt and their ethnically diverse pilot friend, while Fred, Daphne and Velma take the Mystery Machine to track Dirk Dastardly to his hide-out - the method that Velma uses to find this location is very questionable, it just comes down to "Hey, I used science!" without any further details, but there's a lot of that going around here. Like "Hey, I need to take over the radio control, I just need to find the right frequency!" or "I need to stop this beam, I'll just reverse the polarity!" because why let any kids know how real science works? It's all a bit like letting teen Wesley Crusher fire the right beam from the Enterprise to win the battle by pressing a random button on the console.
Anyway, the team gets back together on a hidden dinosaur island located under Antarctica or something, where they have to fight Captain Caveman, who's protecting the third skull. Another box checked, they used all the licensed characters that we wanted to... But Dastardly deceives them all, pulls one of those "false face" disguise thingies and gets all the skulls together. This somehow opens a gate to the Greek underworld (not the Christian one), turns the ancient Greek ruins back into new-looking ones, and gives Dastardly access to Alexander the Great's treasure, also his dog, Muttley, who's been stuck in the Underworld for months with nothing to eat. Yeah, it's a lot to take in.
But still, it feels like the writers couldn't commit to any solid ideas here - Dastardly wants the gold, no, wait, he just wants his dog back. And the gold. Shaggy and Scooby want to work with their idols, the Blue Falcon and Dynomutt. Only Shaggy then doesn't want this, because he feels inadequate and like he's losing his only friend. Then he's back on board and they work things out. Jesus, stop with all the back-tracking already, pick a storyline and stick with it! The team needs to separate, the team needs to get back together. One member of the team needs to make a sacrifice, which says something about friendship - only there's a secret way around the prophecy, so everything's OK! Well, I guess that sacrifice didn't really mean anything, then, did it? This is what you get when you try to write a franchise movie via committee, I suppose.
Some of the voice casting here makes perfect sense - Zac Efron as Fred, Mark Wahlberg as the Blue Falcon, and Will Forte as Shaggy is totally great. No-brainers, but nearly any actress could have voiced Daphne, there was nothing distinctive about who they hired there, so they clearly just went for the biggest name they could get (Anna Kendrick, Karen Gillan and Bryce Dallas Howard were considered.). Cameos are another story, I'll allow Tracy Morgan as Captain Caveman, and Kevin Heffernan voices a cop that looks just like his character from "Super Troopers", that tracks. But Ken Jeong as Dynomutt? I'm scratching my head there, but honestly I don't remember what the original character sounded like. So, whatever.
The franchise doesn't really know what to do with Velma, not at all. She's been portrayed and voiced over the years by many different actresses, including Mindy Cohn, Kate Micucci, Linda Cardellini and Gina Rodriguez in this one - maybe there's a similarity to those voices (like a grown-up Marcie from "Peanuts", if you follow me) but there's no through-line to the character. She's Hispanic, she's Asian, she's plus-sized, what can we do to her to be P.C. or portray her as ethnically diverse? But "Velma Dinkley" doesn't sound like an Asian or Hispanic name, somebody's just trying to cover for the fact that in the 1970's the show's main characters were all Caucasian, but allowed guest stars of color, like the Harlem Globetrotters. And all of the running gags with Velma, about her being brainy and nearsighted, they're just not funny any more, they all just make the brainy girls in the audience feel "less than". At least she uses science quite a lot in "Scoob!", but too bad it's all junk science that could have been improved with just a little bit of research by the writers. I'm going to put a pin in this topic for now, but in the next two days I'll probably have more to say on this - but at least if they'd made her a lesbian here it would have been another step in the right P.C. direction.
Also starring the voices of Frank Welker (last heard in "Aladdin" (2019)), Will Forte (last seen in "Life of Crime"), Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Gina Rodriguez (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Zac Efron (last seen in "Liberal Arts"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "The Last Word"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Hearts Beat Loud"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "All About Steve"), Tracy Morgan (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Iain Armitage (last seen in "I'm Not Here"), Ariana Greenblatt (last seen in "The One and Only Ivan"), Pierce Gagnon (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Mckenna Grace (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Simon Cowell (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Christina Hendricks (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Henry Winkler (last seen in "Holes"), Harry Perry, John DiMaggio (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Kevin Heffernan (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Ira Glass, Henry Kaufman, Maya Erskine (last seen in "Wine Country"), Billy West (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Don Messick (last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever"), Fred Tatasciore (last heard in "Shazam!"), Justina Machado (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), John McDaniel, Pam Coats, Adam Sztykiel (last seen in "Rampage"), Alex Kauffman, Vanara Taing, Sarah Lancia, Tony Cervone.
RATING: 3 out of 10 forced modern pop-culture references
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