SCOOB! a Trend-Chasing Mess

Scoob has been kind of a strange movie to follow the release of and the continuous practice of Hollywood resurrecting old properties scooby-doo is one of the few that gets a pass as its already had its fair share of revamps and new designs so a new movie with a new animation style isn't exactly unprecedented and when the character designs were released people were actually pretty excited they seemed to be modernisations that still fit the spirit of the original style except I didn't really feel that way about them they're true to the original designs in the sense that the bare components are there but the style looks very much like illumination took over like most other 3d animated movies based on older properties which have only become more homogenized as 3d animation is advanced I didn't really see how this looks suggested that Scoob would be any different than these other movies and the more information we got on Scoob but the more it became apparent that this really might as well be illumination which is hip and profitable right now so everyone's trying to do what they're doing this makes sense from a marketing perspective which is how you have to approach a franchise but I think for a lot of the same reasons illumination movies are bad so is Scoob except Scoob is arguably worse because it's not illumination but so clearly tries to do the same things those movies do after the character designs there was all the drama regarding the cast and people were upset on the behalf of the more seasoned voice actors who didn't get the chance to reprise their beloved roles instead we got a much more hip and profitable cast which I guess is nice for people concerned about the death of Hollywood star power they don't really do a great job and I found Will Forte who I'm usually a big fan of to be particularly bad at the same time though I don't think the actors should be too upset they missed out on Scoob if anything aside from a paycheck they should be upset that this movie is what it is which is to say it's not a scooby-doo movie at all and this new cast only helps divorce it from its roots casting it into the IP whirlpool this is no a pup named scooby-doo this is no mystery Incorporated even the live-action scooby-doo spheal cut from the same cloth both versions this is just an illumination core movie dressed up with scooby-doo characters but I'm not the first and noting that this isn't a scooby-doo movie because it was literally intended as a Kickstarter for a hand barbarous Cinematic Universe and it shows which makes all the other illumination checked boxes make sense but before we get into that I'm not done talking about how this film looks so as I mentioned the character designs didn't exactly excite me but what's worse is that these are pretty much the only stylized phases in the movie aside from the main characters everyone else has the exact same facial structure I don't expect them to put as much care into extras and one-off characters as the leads but it's distracting how copy/paste everyone else is it feels kinda lazy especially coupled with environments absent of any energy why is this bowling alley empty and when an environment does have energy it's this flashing neon DJ set that feels like I'm at a fortnight concert dick dastardly's dubstep theme doesn't help the movie feel less like fortnight either the characters movements are also like weirdly rigid which makes the whole thing look surprisingly dated there are actually a lot of aspects of this movie that feel dated and a lot that feels surprisingly modern and it made me realize how bizarre this film sense of time is we start with a flashback of shaggy on a very 2020 looking smartphone but this is like 10 years ago and the present-day technology is exactly the same I think this is probably a lazy way for them to relate to a young audience as much as possible not even daring to show technology they might not relate to which is certainly not unique to this movie I think it's a technique to milk as much out of the now as possible but it makes the film extremely disposable which isn't a very smart move for what's supposed to be the foundation of a whole cinematic universe that said this movie isn't gonna age poorly in quite the same way most products of their time age because it doesn't even totally plan to today's culture what's worse than the technological anachronism czar the sort of cultural anachronism zin the movie the only character who wasn't hanna-barbera and gets a decent amount of screen time is Simon [ __ ] Cowell when was the last time you thought about Simon Cowell if a Simon Cowell cameo wasn't even funny enough to make it into Shrek 2 proper and had to be a DVD extra in 2004 who thought it would be a good idea to put him in a movie in 2020 and then to make matters worse Shaggy and Scooby sing shallow from a star is born that songs been out of the public ear for at least a year now which granted isn't as long Shrek 2 but is this really the song they think people are gonna lose it to besides this isn't even a joke it's just a reference and that's another big problem these movies think just referencing stuff that's popular serves as sufficient humor Blue Falcon dabs sonic flosses hey people like Keanu Reeves let's put him in our movie for no reason I guess with Sponge Bob there was the precedent set with David Hasselhoff but I think that was a little more ironic right I mean I was like 5 when that movie came out so I don't know what pop culture was like but I'm pretty sure David Hasselhoff's cultural status back then was a little different than Keanu Reeves current status as he's at the forefront right now but scoob doesn't even use the low-hanging Keanu fruit Simon Cowell is that why they went with him is 2020 Simon Cowell of the same caliber as 2004 David Hasselhoff then we've got IKEA Netflix The Avengers but at the same time we've got songs like all I do is win this isn't low-hanging fruit this is fruit that fell off the tree long ago and is rotting into the ground maybe that's the joke maybe it's supposed to be ironic maybe the filmmakers are less out of touch than I gave them credit for but their attempts to not be out of touch just lead to pandering which opens the film up to the strangest pandering trend I've seen recently which is political catchphrase pandering in the flashback we get these woke bully characters Velma dresses up his RBG for Halloween we get a wild toxic masculinity somewhere and this reminds me of like in birds of prey when there's that voted for Bernie tidal card let me be very clear the problem isn't that these things are making the film's political everything has inherent politics and nothing is apolitical and whenever someone claims a show or movie has become political it's typically a more conservative audience member upset about some blatantly progressive aspect of a show or movie that's a whole other discourse and that's not really what I'm talking about here the problem here is actually in many ways the opposite that these political catchphrases and buzzwords aren't meant to add anything to the politics of the film that the only purpose they serve is the same referential purpose having a scene about tinder serves it's just something the target demographic recognizes and thinks hey I know about that and honestly I'd say using these political references in a pop-culture context in this way realises the reason they exist in the first place they start to mean nothing outside of specific words combined in a specific way that people recognize detaching them from their cause ultimately hindering it and movies like Scoob latching on to them contribute to their lack of meaning so while they don't directly add to the politics of the film they indirectly make the movie an opponent to the causes it references maybe with Velma it characterizes and pokes fun at her with the same ethos as a one-off Rick and Morty joke and with birds of prey there's a mention of Harley Quinn being anti taxation which is maybe supposed to oppose the Bernie thing to characterize her as a trendy hypocrite since she is a supervillain after all but it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth because these phrases then become disposable like everything else in these movies they really are on a rampage sucking in and spitting out anything they can get their hands on for obvious reasons it's the hanna-barbera IP specifically that gets the worst of it here they're basically action figures and a generic written by committee story that has nothing to do with the story structure of the properties it's using there's the problem of intertextual 'ti like we should care that fred gets an ascot at one point because you know it's Fred and his Ascot but this is the first time it appears in the movie that's how Scooby's collar felt when it's introduced but that was at least a symbol for their friendship with in the movie the power of friendship of course being the overarching theme because that's the best way to affirm relationships between beloved characters and when you get into real trouble friendship won't save the day and that's not really a new trope for this kind of movie I guess I'm not really sure any of the issues I've discussed are necessarily new but it at least feels that way a lot of the time with this modern animation style that said even if this scene establishes the collar as a symbol we don't really need a backstory for them meeting up do we especially not with so low levels of bad character name origins what's his name I can't help but feel the template plot just serves to idolize these characters and place them on a pedestal because they're so iconic afraid to actually do anything with them Scoobies always somehow universally important so it's not that surprising that he's made the descendent of Alexander the Great's dog and the support'll to another realm but Simon Cowell explicitly states all of their key character traits what makes the dynamic work in the original series and then they each get about one opportunity to showcase these traits and the film doesn't really do anything with them because as I mentioned this is not a scooby-doo movie without laying out too many criteria for what constitutes a scooby-doo movie I think it's safe to say it's a mystery that involves the gang coming to some sort of reveal of the culprit pretending to be something or someone else this is a movie about an evil person everyone knows about trying to achieve some sort of supernatural power that would let him rule the world basically it's not a mystery at all he sometimes wears disguises but we're always in the know and when he's defeated there's a pretend reveal but the culprit is still Dick Dastardly as we've been shown the whole time aside from that most of the scooby-doo characters are completely sidelined it's classic for Shaggy and Scooby to be doing something way more important with other characters while the others are off on their bee plot but the gang actually has nothing to do so they of course become hostages the whole conflict as shaggy feels useless because of Simon Cowell yes he's that crucial to the plot he lays the foundation for the whole gangs character motivations so shaggy feels useless and wants to prove himself by joining Blue Falcon and DeeDee Sykes but Scooby's really the one they wanted which makes shaggy feel even more useless and drives the rift between him and everyone which is of course resolved when they come together against a common threat but the way the plot develops Scooby is basically a MacGuffin and Shaggy and the gang all have passive roles until the very end so it's more a Blue Falcon movie than anything which is ironic because the Blue Falcon flagship is the show dynomutt dog wonder and dynomutt is relegated to the most generic quips imaginable not that Blue Falcon is even a particularly fleshed out character either he has a very subtle arc so you're saying it's heroic to be scared and even to lose sometimes resolved in no way by any contribution from the gang which further convinces me that there was a separate movie scooby-doo was injected into and dynomutt has this questionable character moment and it's my moment - my job is to have your back not sure what that's all about anyway between that and Dick Dastardly being the main villain yeah this is clearly a hanna-barbera hodgepodge so I pretend it's a scooby-doo movie when it's not because that's the most popular hanna-barbera property and you need to make sales the end credits sequence alludes to something that actually looks like a scooby-doo movie why not make that the movie certainly not just because it's a team-up movie I mean like reboots and new designs scooby-doo isn't new to team-up movies either but the Harlem Globetrotters are still part of a scooby-doo mystery the gang still helps Batman and Robin with a particularly mysterious attack like the character designs this is only recognizable as scooby-doo from the bare components and even then and I'm not even particularly married to the scooby-doo formula I don't have a close-minded attachment to it that considers anything not it bad the problem isn't abandoning the scooby-doo formula it's that it's substituted for the most generic and trench chasing story template they could have possibly used so that's how a film like this gets mileage that's how you take an IP and give it enough gas to power through its 90-minute minimum so you can say you technically have a movie you remind the audience that they're supposed to like these characters because they're iconic you take the threat of them having a falling out you take a world threatening power to reunite them and you inject it with references to other IPs who become casualties in the process and for what greater purpose so you can pluck more IPs or in some cases dig them out of the dirt and give them the same treatment calling it a cinematic universe it makes sense from a financial perspective but what does any audience get out of that the common consensus seems to be nostalgia and I mean even the sound design of the film and antics like the marbles feel more like nostalgic references to the original series than something that fits this bland new aesthetic this isn't a new conclusion but every time I see a film guilty of these things it makes me think about movies and only the most corporate way which is maybe beneficial in the sense that that's my career but it's also antithetical to the whole reason I like movies in the first place and yeah it's Scoob it's [ __ ] Scooby Doo I shouldn't be upset about it but it's just another reminder of how commodified it all is I think it's fitting that one of the pop-culture references in the film is to the franchise responsible for this wave of attempted cinematic universes and it perfectly illustrates why something as laziest Scoob isn't very good for as often as the film in organically reminds you of the IPAs iconography it still relies just as much on other iconic things to keep it afloat even if the MCU often suffers from a lack of distinction when the greater universe creeps its way into standalone movies the franchise still crafts its own iconic images it's working from decades of comics but when people see Fred suiting up they know it's referencing the movies there are decades of hanna-barbera but no one's gonna see a Scooby Doo reference and go hey it's that thing from Scoob and it's not just this one image the whole film seems to capitalize on the superhero wave because it's like everything else hip and profitable I feel like Scoob isn't even a movie when you strip away all this fodder you have nothing is this just laying the groundwork paving the way for future movies and the franchise that can stay truer to their source material and tone and style and structure if so why start with a hodgepodge like this why do so many companies try to start these things and make all the worst decisions and why are they always assembled as superheroes even when the original property isn't superhero related why not a cinematic universe like debra wilds books which are just their own story with occasional overlap of characters Decalogue sort of does something like that but it's still one self-contained work not that I'm saying Scoob should try to be Decalogue maybe I'm not looking hard enough and there are film series like that and the reason they're not more popular is because of the current zeitgeist revolve so heavily around superheroes as always I have no idea I'm just here to talk about Scoob which I guess I've done now links to my social media and patreon are in the description thanks for watching and good bye you

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 90,669

Keywords: scoob, scooby-doo, shaggy, velma, fred, daphne, mystery machine, hanna-barbera, illumination, warner bros., will forte, matthew lillard, amanda seyfried, grey griffin, gina rodriguez, zac efron, frank welker, blue falcon, mark wahlberg, dick dastardly, jason isaacs, dynomutt, ken jeong, dee dee sykes, kiersey clemons, captain caveman, tracy morgan, mystery inc, iain armitage, simon cowell, tony cervone, matt lieberman, dab, sonic, harley quinn, keanu reeves

Id: r97VbPzlD2Q

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020