Dog Tired
Scooby-Doo doesn’t know whether to appeal to children of the ’70s or children of today—and fails to register with either
by Noel Murray
Scooby-Doo
dir.: Raja Gosnell
PG, 87 min.
Now playing at area theaters
Pre-release buzz pegged the live-action Scooby-Doo as a creative train wreck of colossal proportions—a foolish attempt to sneak sex, drugs, raunch and self-awareness into a kid-friendly franchise, while staying far enough in bounds to sell plenty of ancillary merchandise. At the outset, though, Scooby-Doo is exactly the sort of light, colorful kiddie mystery that it should’ve been, true to the amiable if slackly paced Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. Even the post-Gen-X casting of Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy and Linda Cardellini as Velma doesn’t come off as misguidedly opportunistic. All four are charismatic performers and seem bent on staying fundamentally sweet.
But even while director Raja Gosnell and a team of screenwriters (led by Troma castaway James Gunn) are establishing the proper tone in the early scenes, they’re also sowing the seeds of the movie’s collapse. After solving yet another ghost-related mystery, Scooby and the gang split up over a clash of egos—a concept that’s a wee bit too postmodern, but not egregiously so. Only in retrospect, when it becomes clear that spoofing the dynamics of the Mysteries Inc. relationship is the film’s sole, semi-successful clever idea, does the effort put into it become blatantly pathetic.
The quartet of humans and their CGI mutt regroup for a visit to Spooky Island, a college student-friendly amusement park run by a nervous fellow named Mondavarious (played by Rowan Atkinson). He has contacted Mysteries Inc. because the tourists who come to his resort as party-mad youths are leaving as slang-spouting, dressed-for-MTV zombies—which doesn’t make any sense, because is there any real difference between the two? Some attempted satire must’ve gone haywire in the movie’s development process. Still mad at each other, the MI detectives split up to look for clues and uncover a plot to steal souls and loose evil upon the earth.
This isn’t exactly the pull-the-mask-off-the-scheming-caretaker plot of the Scooby-Doo cartoons, and indeed, the action culminates in an effects-heavy “forces of darkness” battle royale that’s really too violent for a kidflick. Of course, long before the climax, Scooby-Doo has begun shedding its core demographic. There are a few mild references to Shaggy’s stoner persona early in the picture, then about a half-hour into the proceedings, Scooby and Shaggy engage in a burping and farting contest—not unusual for a contemporary children’s movie, but nowhere near the spirit of the source material. Soon after that, Fred is told he “doesn’t have the scrot” (scrotum) to complete a certain task, and Fred, in turn, takes Scooby to task for once “cleaning his beans” at a Don Knotts Christmas party.
OK, so that last one’s kinda funny, but it’s still inappropriate for the movie’s younger viewers. Reports that Scooby-Doo had to be edited down from a PG-13 to a PG leaves one to wonder just who the filmmakers thought their audience was. Presumably, Gosnell and company made the movie for children of the ’70s, who remember the reliably dopey series with affection—hence a story filled with twentysomethings, rather than preteens. But the PG rating and the sunny, “summer fun with the Scooby gang” opening suggest that the movie is going for a much younger crowd. Sure enough, the theater I went to was packed with preteens, who sat with stunned, joyless expressions as the movie’s tone turned increasingly snide and grim. And the real irony is that Scooby-Doo probably would have appealed much more to post-Boomers (and to kids as well) if it had simply stuck with the formula that’s been popular for more than 30 years. We’d really rather take our nostalgia straight, without the cynicism chaser.
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