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Junked-up 'Scooby-Doo' follows old formula
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Even among dedicated toon fans, the late '60s-early '70s TV series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? is rated fairly low on the nostalgia scale. In a 1993 interview, creator Joseph Barbera himself admitted it was "not much - maybe the bottom of the Hanna-Barbera barrel."
So it's not too surprising that the inevitable big-screen version - goosed up with loads of bad-taste humor, a computer-generated Scooby and special effects that reportedly spiraled the budget somewhere near the $100 million mark - is also not much.
Its bright spot is an enthusiastic performance by Matthew Lillard as the beatnik character, Shaggy. He perfectly re-creates the cheerful, whiny voice (done by Casey Kasem in the series), and throws himself into the part with a comic fearlessness that eventually wins you over.
Scooby also might boast that it's exactly what it advertises itself to be: an expanded version of a typical series episode, with no upscale intellectual pretensions, smart writing or anything else that might confound a 12-year-old's sensibility.
The story has the series' teenage crime-solving team - Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Velma (Linda Cardellini), Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Shaggy and their Great Dane mascot, Scooby-Doo, once again investigating a false haunting: in this case, strange goings-on at a theme-park island.
From here, it follows the show's old formula to a T, with vapid but innocuous situations that play off Fred's vanity, Daphne's shallowness, Velma's geeky intelligence, Shaggy's trusting stupidity and Scooby-Doo's cowardice - everything but commercial breaks and a laugh track.
Except that, no doubt learning from the huge flop of the benign recent version of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, director Raja Gosnell (Big Momma's House) has junked up the proceedings with toilet and bad-taste humor, including an epic flatulence contest between Shaggy and Scooby.
The film's technological selling point - having a computer-animated Scooby in a mostly live-action world - is strangely unimpressive. In fact, it's virtually unnoticeable: a testament perhaps to the audience's increasing knowledge that in today's CG-driven Hollywood, all movies are cartoons.
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