Scoob! 2020

Surprising myself I actually managed to get another superhero movie into my schedule. It was very much helped by the fact that I was on my 2 year old daughter’s Max profile and she wanted to watch Scooby-Doo. I happened to notice that this movie was prominent on the list of various Scooby-Doo movies and series and I had heard it was a good movie and superhero related so I decided to put that on for us to watch together. She tuned out pretty early on as 2 year olds are want to do, but my wife and I continued to watch it through to the end and really enjoyed this movie. It has a lot of fun humor to it and tons of background Hanna-Barbera easter eggs that I quite enjoyed being someone that grew up watching a lot of Hanna-Barbera reruns on the early days of Cartoon Network. I was also somewhat surprised at the cast list full of Hollywood actors doing voices rather than notable voice actors, though Frank Welker is there to voice Scooby-Doo himself. It was a lot of fun and even though I thought this was going to be a superhero movie with Scooby-Doo in it, I was surprised at how much of it really was just like a superhero movie rather than a Scooby-Doo movie with a superhero in it.

The movie kicks things off with a bit of a flashback showing how Shaggy and Scooby first met each other. Scooby was a stray dog stealing an entire slab of meat from a gyro place and Shaggy was an introvert who was supposed to be going out to the beach to make friends. There’s a fun gag where Shaggy initially tries to name Scooby “Snacks” and shortly after becoming friends they meet up with what will become the rest of Mystery Inc who are already friends with each other and solve their first mystery together. The flashback was fun and really gets a good bead on the character’s personalities though it is weird thinking of Shaggy as a friendless introvert. Cue a flash forward montage with plenty of recognizable villains from previous iterations of Scooby-Doo and we’re in a situation where the gang is trying to actually turn Mystery Inc into a profitable company with an investment from Simon Cowell of all people. He points out the worthlessness of Shaggy and Scooby as part of the team and they go off on their own, quickly stumbling into what ends up being the plot of the movie.

The main reason why this film is being covered here is that they get picked up by the Blue Falcon who is actually the Blue Falcon’s son Brian voiced by Mark Wahlberg. It’s a little bit of a weird disconnect as the original Blue Falcon cartoon had the Blue Falcon as the competent superhero and Dynomutt as the bumbling sidekick. But here the roles are almost reversed. Dynomutt is the competent stick in the mud superhero, and Brian is the showboating-yet-incompetent hero more concerned with his entrance than actually doing any superhero-ing. And there’s also the addition of the tech slash manager Dee Dee who is the most competent of the three of them yet that fact is never really addressed throughout the movie.

The Macguffin of the movie is that the villain Dick Dastardly is searching for these three skulls to open the gates of Hell to unleash Cerberus and gain access to untold treasure somehow connected to Alexander the Great. Also somehow Scooby-Doo is the descendent of Alexander the Great’s own dog and therefore the key to unlocking everything. So the majority of the plot is a combination of a cat and mouse between Dick Dastardly and the Blue Falcon team with Scooby and Shaggy, along with the team reconciling with the fact that Scooby and Shaggy are actually a vital part of their team, and a mix of Scooby falling into the allure of the superhero life over his simple lifelong friendship with Shaggy.

The real fun of this movie are all of its Hanna-Barbera gags throughout. Some of them are more background than others, like Shaggy’s Impossibles poster in his room as a kid, the Laff-a-Lympics arcade game, the Hex Girls poster, and the Captain Caveman moment when they go into the prehistoric underground cavern. Even Dick Dastardly himself being a classic villain along with his sad tale of losing his own dog Muttley to the underworld via an ironic flashback as he tells it in a very sympathetic way but the audience sees how it happened in a much more villainous way.

But throughout the movie, it does play out much more like a superhero origin story than a typical Scooby-Doo mystery. Brian, Scooby, Shaggy, and the rest of the Blue Falcon team go through their various heroics and superhero investigating with their computers and such while the rest of the gang are mostly left to the sidelines with various gags as they get captured by Dick Dastardly and end up befriending one of his tiny robotic minions that are a cross between a Transformer and a Despicable Me Minion and able to switch between cute and scary depending on the story beat. This is also yet another Scooby-Doo story that relies on actual supernatural elements as Dick Dastardly’s plot to unleash Cerberus from the underworld is ultimately an actual thing and not some holographic display, though there is a fun double unmasking gag at the end. Ultimately this was a fun movie to watch, and it’s disappointing that the sequel was cancelled in the aftermath of the Warner Bros sale. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.