“SCOOB!” had the promise of being an excellent film but all the issues plaguing it make this a sorry excuse for the franchise.
“SCOOB!” is a 2020 animated film based on Scooby-Doo and is considered an origin story for the characters of Mystery Inc.
The plot of this film revolves around Scooby meeting Shaggy, Velma, Daphne and Fred as they spent years together solving mysteries. An issue happens between them, which leaves Scooby and Shaggy alone and being attacked by a group of robots led by Dick Dastardly.
The Blue Falcon saves them and tells them that Scooby is the key to the treasure. Now, Scooby and Shaggy must team up with the Blue Falcon to stop Dick Dastardly from unlocking the key to the underworld while having the rest of the gang looking for their friends.
The plot was generic as many cliches surround the movie, with the group getting separated over an argument, a generic villain who wants the main character to join him and to steal an ancient treasure and with the two best friends arguing over their views of friendship.
The jokes are rarely funny, though. It’s good that there isn’t a single fart joke in the film. The rest won’t make adults laugh, though the jokes did have some friends call back to the cartoon with the gags being familiar to spot.
The side characters do not work and aren’t appealing to the audience, as nothing functional or appealing happens to them.
The Blue Falcon’s character is the most disliked while watching the movie, as many people did not like the way he acted throughout the whole film.
The voice acting is pretty bad as its delivery for every line of dialogue is either going too fast or just doesn’t sound right.
It’s already bad enough that the studio replaced long-time voice actors from the cartoon with celebrity actors.
It makes it seem like a big corporate marketing gag to get people who are fans of those celebrities into watching the film. It just feels wrong to throw away people that have been doing this for years, only to use actors that many would recognize for marketing purposes.
The animation was, albeit ,really fantastic as many have never seen how fluent the animation looked in a long time. The facial expressions looked well made with over a ton of them being nice-looking.
The movement is also really well done as it felt like it takes from the animation from the past cartoons.
The callbacks to previous Hanna Barbara cartoons are a plus as well, giving fans a small taste of their Cinematic Universe with these characters.
Sadly it seems like many aren’t interested in this series to continue as it lacks build-up and moves straight into the team-up aspect, which was something that the Mummy (2017) did, and that failed, leaving that cinematic universe down the drain.
This film is a one out of five stars. It could have been amazing but it fails to deliver because of its boring plot, unlikable voice actors, and pacing issues.
It’s just one series that should strictly stick to TV cartoons.
