¡Scooby!

If you or your children never watched "Scooby Doo, Where Are You!" then it stands by itself as another kids movie to watch with your family. If you're a nostalgic person and love that feeling, then Scooby Dooby Doo not watch.

The first 15 mins of this are great. Why they couldn't have just kept this as an origin story of how the gang met and started solving mysteries is beyond me. Instead the story spirals off into a million directions and is filled with tons of poorly executed pop culture references. The animation is stellar, but the plot diminishes this one a lot. I'm not expecting it to be just like the TV series, but my kids got more excited at the beginning of the movie and started to lose interest as it went on. Sometimes I wonder if these screenwriters working on kids movies actually have kids. So disappointing and a big missed opportunity.

It started well, with a touching scene of the main characters meeting for the forst time as kids (or puppies, in Scooby's case) and then having one of their traditional adventures. However, this only lasts 15 minutes, and from there the movie stops being a Scooby Doo movie and starts being a superhero movie, with Dick Dastardly as the supervillain, and Blue Falcon and his gang as superheroes, with the Scooby gang stuck there in a movie that is not their own.

Because let's face it, just like in a James Bond movie we have certain expectations, in a Scoob movie we also have expectations, and they are not met. That distinctive type of adventures where they explore a haunted location and, after many scares, end up discovering that it was all a not supernatural trick by some criminal, is not here, except for a brief nod at the beginning. Instead, we get a generic modern children's movie, with characters running around from chase to chase, battle to battle and explosion to explosion without a compelling plot, while making pop culture references. The plot involves saving the world from a large-scale supernatural threat (really supernatural, none of the subversion characteristic of the source material).

So, if we forget about wanting a Scooby Doo movie and focus on the movie we get, it's not very good either. You can see where they try to have jokes for the adult watchers, but they lack the wit and talent to make them funny. They occasionally remember that this is supposed to be a Scooby Doo movie, and they have traditional gags like having Scooby and Shaggy, in the middle of being chased by the critters, turn around and serve the critters as waiters, disconcerting them for a while, but it's too little and done without much talent. You also get a scene where two male characters fight and a female character says it's toxic masculinity, which is kind of a hateful message to send to children.

In short, if you want a Scooby movie, this is not it, and if you want a generic modern kid's movie, this is not a good one.

I had so many expectations. Scoob! sets on a completely different track from the original stories, which I would welcome if it was better written. The jokes are unfunny, the movie feels unenthusiastic just like Gina Rodriguez's voice for Velma. Stick to the Direct-to-Video animated films. They're clearly superior.

Scooby-Doo is one property that has probably done just about everything you can think of for a franchise that has gone on for a few decades, I'm not going to even bother listing all the things this intellectual property has had its hand, er, paw in because we could be here all day (or all night depending on when you're reading this...). The news of a big screen reboot just made me go "meh!" at it, on account that this franchise is still going and it seems like they release a new direct-to-video feature or TV series every week at least, but I guess you could do worse since Scooby-Doo these days is mostly stale but not offensive. I didn't mind the look of the characters, you could have done worse in design. I didn't mind the change of voice actors all that much and I like the idea of a Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe (Because why not? It's been done before on the small screen and comic strip books). I didn't see it in theatres (Obviously, I don't need to go into the specifics as to why, if circumstances had been different I probably would have seen it in the theater) and I didn't want to spend more than $20 to rent it, so I waited till it came on HBO Max to see it. Overall I would say it's 40/60, 40 percent being good and 60 percent being meh to dire. There are some nice ideas, good voice acting, and funny moments throughout, but the plot isn't particularly well thought out and, as my summary states, it's less of a Scooby-Doo picture and more of a Blue Falcon movie, so much so that I was left to ask myself on repeat "why didn't you just make a Blue Falcon movie, Warner Bros.?" Blue Falcon isn't as well-known a property as Scooby-Doo, so you can have more free reign to do with that in crafting a narrative and potentially gaining a new audience in the process - Worked for Marvel with Iron Man, Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, and many others. Will the family like it? I think they will, it has problems but it's not what I would call boring either, wouldn't mind seeing a sequel, just tone down the world building and, I don't know, have some mystery to the plot, because last I checked Scooby-Doo is about Mystery Incorporated.