***SPOILERS AHEAD***

“Scoob!” was just released directly to VoD last weekend, so grab your Scooby Snacks and let’s get into this mystery. When the film opens, we are introduced to a young yet-to-be-named Scooby-Doo and Shaggy Rogers in 2010. Shaggy has a hard time making friends, but when the young Great Dane is chased towards him by a police officer for stealing food from a restaurant, Shaggy names and befriends the dog to keep Scoob from being taken to the pound. Thus, the lifelong friendship is born. Halloween night comes and after a couple of thoughtful bullies throw the pair’s candy into a haunted house, the rest of the Mystery Gang come along and help the cowardly boy and dog. Together, Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma, and Daphne enter the “haunted” house to retrieve the sweet treats. This leads to the crew unintentionally solving their first mystery together. Ten years later, the group has formed Mystery Inc. as they travel around solving a variety of “supernatural” cases. When Simon Cowell comes around as a possible investor, he tells Scooby and Shaggy they have no real place on the team. Hurt, they leave the meeting for the bowling alley and are attacked by a swarm of maniacal, transforming robots. As hope is lost, the friends are beamed up by Blue Falcon and the adventure begins. Turns out the robots were sent by notorious criminal mastermind Dick Dastardly. Dastardly hatched a plan to get back into the Underworld after a previous experiment failed and left his partner Muttley stranded there. That plan includes capturing Scooby as he is the key needed to open the gates. Dastardly manages to open the gates and get Muttley back, but this results in the Cerberus, guardian of the gates, being released as well. The gang manages to get the three-headed dog back through the gate, but it can only truly be locked by an unbreakable friendship. One must lock the gates from inside while the other locks the outside. Shaggy sacrifices himself and locks the inside and Scooby seals the door from outside, leaving Shaggy in the Underworld seemingly forever. However, that’s all quickly undone when Scoob says a magic phrase and a portal appears allowing Shaggy to leave and join his friends once again. The gang catches up with Dastardly and Muttley, handing them over to the police, and the day is saved…. for now.

I had a really good time with this movie. I grew up watching A LOT of Scooby-Doo, from the shows to the movies. Scoob! is a nice love letter to classic Scooby-Doo. It is a very self-aware movie and has a good amount of jokes that are based around calling out the tropes of the shows and there are a lot of references to classic Hanna-Barbera shows laced throughout. That brings me to my biggest question, who was this movie made for. Clearly, being a PG animated movie made about a children’s cartoon, it’s made for kids. What I mean is what is the demographic the filmmakers were shooting for. Again, at base-level, it’s the kids, but a lot of the references and jokes are targeted for the generation who grew up on the ‘70s Hanna-Barbera shows.

For starters, the albeit very cool aging montage at the beginning is almost a shot for shot remake of the “Scooby Doo! Where are You?” tv show opening from the ’70s. On top of that there’s Blue Falcon and Dynomutt, Dick Dastardly and Muttley, Captain Caveman, Hong Kong Phooey, Jabberjaw, and I still may have missed a few. I’m getting to the age where the kids who would be watching this, it’s their parents that are in my generation. My generation wouldn’t exactly have grown up watching all those shows. I did because my parents would show them to me from recorded tapes and there was the Boomerang network that played those shows all the time, but I think it’s a bit of a leap to assume everyone else followed suit. The original target of those cartoons was the kids in my parents’ generation. So was this intended to be seen by kids and their grandparents? Because of current situations in the world, this movie wasn’t released to theaters and thanks to being available to view on digital services, it’s easier and more affordable for the whole family to get together and watch it. I’m curious though to what that theater audience would’ve looked like and who you would see laughing when Fred puts on his iconic ascot for the first time here and runs into battle.

Scoob! is a good time for any age. It does fall into some of the cliches it tries to call out, but could easily have been made intentional. It’s a movie for kids so you’re not going to get any deep life lessons from it outside of the importance of friendship, but if you’re a fan of any era of Scooby-Doo, you’re going to enjoy this. 

One last thing. Matthew Lillard has been the voice of Shaggy since he portrayed the character in the live-action Scooby-Doo in 2002. From what I’ve read online, Lillard was never approached for the role and instead Will Forte was cast. Forte did a fine job as Shaggy, but I did miss hearing Lillard saying “zoinks!” 

Scoob! is now available on Video on Demand services.