Tag: cartoon

Let me begin by saying that neither ‘Scooby Doo: The Movie’ nor ‘Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed’ are real winners. Neither is going to win any awards, and neither is really going to stand the test of time and become a classic in twenty or so years.

However…

These two movies wind up being perfect partners. The first Doo is an attempt to take the cartoon characters and put them in the ‘real world’. They give them real problems and make them deal with them, while telling a story thats mildly interesting and moderately funny. The second Doo is a live action cartoon, complete with ‘running in place over an empty pit’ and the goofy ‘sneaky big step walking quietly’ they always do. Its story is pretty much exactly out of the old cartoon, and the humor is actually better simultaneously comically paying homage and sending up the original.

** SPOILERS AHEAD **

If you just missed it, I’m about to tell some specifics of each movie, so stop reading if you don’t want things to be ruined.

I mean it. This is your last warning for the spoilers. If you keep reading and get mad because of spoilers, you are an idiot.

Now, on to the spoilers…

In the first Doo the biggest laughs really came in the Scrappy Doo scenes. Admit it, you hated him too. EVERYONE hated Scrappy. He totally ruined the Shaggy/Scooby & Fred/Velma/Daphne formula of the show that made it as enjoyable as it was. So when they show a flashback of Scrappy Doo being an ass, peeing on everything and then getting left in the middle of the desert I was literally cheering. YEAH!! Then at the end, when the villain turns out to BE Scrappy in a robot-human suit, I was rolling on the floor laughing and having trouble breathing. Sure, the movie had some other funny scenes, but the flashback and the end were head and hands above the rest of the film and made it worth watching.

The second Doo movie was overall more enjoyable. I was snickering and laughing through the whole thing because it was just like the old cartoon only with bad actors too. There is one scene, Shaggy and Scooby are running from the Black Knight Ghost and are piling items up on a door to block it, and I’m already laughing, I see it coming. The Ghost comes in through a secret door and starts handing items to them, Shaggy says ‘Thanks’ then put the item on the barricade, pauses, looks back the ghost, says ‘Zoinks!’ and he and Scooby freak out! Classic Doo. Then in a send up of it, Fred comes in with a shield, says ‘Bring it!’ and the Knight bangs the shield about a dozen times rattling Fred’s noggin, he stands dazed for a second, says ‘He brought it’ and passes out on the floor. There is even a bar where all the ‘unmasked’ villains go to hang out and share their hatred of all things Mystery, Inc. called ‘the Faux Ghost’. They ring a doorbell and get a voice warning saying to ‘Go Away, or Else!’, Shaggy says they shouldn’t ring it, Fred asks ‘What could possibly happen?’, and when he rings it again a trap door opens and they all fall, one at a time, and Scooby runs in place for a couple of seconds before doing so. And the ghosts… the Black Knight Ghost, the Thousand Watt Ghost, the Tar Ghost, the one-eyed skeleton ghosts, Miner Forty-Niner… hehe, pure Scooby Doo.

** SPOILERS DONE **

Yeah, whatever, you read the spoilers anyway…

The only other thing I have to say, besides the fact that these movies are worth watching at least once, is that Matthew Lillard is a horrible horrible actor… however, he is perfectly cast as Shaggy. Perhaps if they keep making enjoyable Scooby Doo movies, we can keep him from making anything else.