Scooby-Doo: The Anatomy of a Good Live-Action Adaptation

before live-action adaptations and remakes of animated properties became utterly exhausting to hear about there was the scooby-doo movie in 2002 replete with weed jokes and oozing early 2000's energy it's a film i remember fondly despite its imperfections i'm not going to claim it's a cinematic masterpiece but i can wholeheartedly say this is a film that manages to preserve the spirit of his source material while still being just as entertaining something it does surprisingly better than many of its higher budget competitors most live action adaptations i've bothered to watch have a distinct quality of blandness regardless of their superior technology or loyalty to the source material i've been trying to pinpoint why this is and thought the silly 2002 scooby-doo movie would make a good template for comparison so in this video as opposed to the plethora of forgettable adaptations they continue piling onto us i want to examine how scooby-doo got it right scooby-doo first graced our televisions over 50 years ago with a simple rinse and repeat formula four teens and a great dane driving around in a van dubbed the mystery machine solving supernatural mysteries and unmasking bad guys it's julie it was produced by hannah barbera productions like so many other televised cartoons at the time and as this writer in a washington post review put it it was 1969 and to underline the social unrest of the times the teenagers would always rip the mask off an authority figure who turned to crime another writer posited what better way to toy below the surface with the cultural tensions of the late 60s and early 70s even the show's signature line and i would have gotten away with it if not for you meddling kids sounds like it could have been uttered by richard nixon this may very well be one of the main reasons for scooby-doo's durability as a franchise it's hard to overstate how bonkers it is that has been going strong for this long i mean it started airing back when cartoons still had laugh tracks and it's definitely outlasted the rest of hannah barbara's properties in a big way with spin-off after spin-off and dozens of animated films there's even an adult animated show called velma heading to hbo soon and from the sea of spin-offs scooby-doo the movie emerged in 2002. it's certainly not the first of its kind live-action adaptations of animated works were gradually becoming more commonplace as technology advanced it's not even the first adaptation of a hanna-barbera cartoon but it was the most successful up to that point and even surpassed the june box office record at the time when doing a remake i think it's important to ask who wants this i guess i can understand the little mermaid but who asked for this dumbo movie who wanted a yogi bear movie what i will say is that adaptations of properties you were never interested in in the first place usually won't be for you as demonstrated in roger ebert's review of scooby-doo where he confesses not only am i ill-prepared to review the movie but i venture to guess that anyone who is not literally a member of a scooby-doo fan club would be equally incapable this movie exists in a closed universe and the rest of us are aliens i'll agree the film's not that deep but i think it's a good example of live-action adaptation done right as it stays true to the source while still bringing something new to the table i know that's a vague claim so i'll elaborate by considering three important elements first off it has a new story to tell scooby-doo's plot is simple enough though not as bare bones as the original series it starts off in the midst of the gang solving a mystery establishing who they are and their individual roles in the group it's something of a nod to the structure of the old episodes daphne's been captured by the bad guy fred and velma try to carry out velma's plan and shaggy and scooby mess things up in such a way that the villain is captured in the end and of course they remove the monster's mask to reveal [Applause] the creepy janitor this was a perfect way to introduce the characters and acknowledge the original series before moving on to the film's own storyline yeah i quit i'm out of here [Music] good riddance within 10 minutes the gang we know and love splits up i think it was a great choice to set this conflict right at the beginning rather than having them fight just before act 3 like we would typically see in kids films it immediately adds an element of newness and intrigue the concept of the gang splitting up has also been explored in the later series scooby-doo mystery incorporated one of the best iterations of the show anyway two years pass and shaggy and scooby are recruited to solve a mystery on the mysterious spooky island the rest of the gang have also been separately invited and they're reluctantly set off to the island resort it may be that episodic material might be more favorable for a film adaptation since a new story can be created with the same characters without feeling like it's too far removed scooby doo's plot has somewhat of the same framework as the original but it doesn't just regurgitate a story that's already been told well a problem that several adaptations grapple with that's why it may be more interesting to watch something like maleficent or cruella rather than live-action lion king or beauty and the beast at least these stories bring something new a fresher perspective to the experience i'm not saying that always goes well since making pointless changes can also be lame for example the live-action mulan where they subtracted beloved characters and added insignificant ones for no real payoff but as we saw with lion king which was nearly a shot for shot remake there's even less value in painstakingly recreating a film just because you can when asked about what he brought to the project scooby-doo screenwriter james gunn yes that james gunn said the problem with cartoons to movies is that they attempt to be exact replicas of the cartoons i never wanted to simply watch a couple hundred episodes of scooby-doo cartoons and then vomit them out in a different order longer and with real people instead i wanted to say let's take it as fact that there's this dog that can talk and this group of mystery solving teenagers who have in the past come up against numerous men in mass posing as supernatural entities and let's take it as fact that all the other traditions of scooby-doo really happened as well if that were all real what would these people be like what would be their strengths and weaknesses what problems would they have between them what are they like between mysteries what don't we see on the show in essence if they're real who are they that was a starting point for me while simultaneously putting mystery inc in a bigger more threatening situation than they've ever been in before the more threatening situation in this case and another foreign concept to include was the protagonists having to face real monsters there's even a gag where velma tried to unmask a monster before realizing there was no mask to remove i think for me the big breakthrough in finding out where i wanted to go with scooby-doo was making the choice to make the monsters real [Music] and at that point i thought back to the movie i loved the most as a kid which was abandoned costello meets frankenstein and the reason was because the movie was both very scary and very funny this change made it a more high-stakes scenario something they also implemented in the 1998 animated movie scooby-doo on zombie island it also somewhat darkens the overall tone which makes it more compelling to a wider audience it's an interesting departure from the show which came into existence because people thought other cartoons were becoming too violent for children but pleasantly there was still a mask to pull off in the end [Music] puppy power james gunn felt he had to include scrappy just because of lore but like a lot of fans he hated scrappy so much he made him the villain i quote i can tell you i hate the little with all my heart and soul it's funny because scrappy saved the show in the late 70s like nice going scrappy yeah right they added a new character to try to improve ratings and he was actually a big hit at the time but it seems the studio overdid it with his character and people got sick of him by the 90s he'd become widely hated and at this point even has a negative character trope named after him wow i haven't seen look away daphne we all promised each other that we would never speak of him not ever so it's fitting scrappy was the big bad guy in the end since it's seemingly the only way he'd be a welcome addition for the audience the story also involves the gang exploring spooky castles switching bodies and getting possessed providing ample opportunities for entertaining scenes that often hearken back to the scooby-doo antics of yore like the gang dressing up in nearby outfits to outsmart enemies passing by the building they're exploring is a right at the resort literally called spooky castle which i thought was a pretty clever way to include a throwback setting like this all in all these creative decisions make for a story grounded in novelty that doesn't drift too far off base which leads me to my next point characters and casting or the way a character's personality is performed and who is playing them the last airbender infamously got both wrong and like everyone else who's watched it it's one of the worst movies i've ever seen all airbenders should be dead kill him i can't stress enough how boring this movie is except for when it's unintentionally hilarious and most of the blandness is due to character performance aang and saka or i guess i should say ong and soka my name is goofy children who often play the role of comedic relief are mostly portrayed as solemn same with uncle iro as for the casting do i even need to say it i know it's easy to pick this film apart because it's such a hot mess and we'd all rather pretend it didn't exist but for the sake of comparison here the characters are one of the absolute worst aspects scooby-doo manages to preserve the essence of the original characters while adding dimension they didn't previously have for this franchise in particular they had to play off pretty one-dimensional old-fashioned roles and update them to add character growth i'd imagine this isn't easy to do with characters whose main traits are repeating words like jinkies or zoinks they also had to age up the characters so they'd have a believable level of experience and autonomy then as james gunn detailed they had to establish motives like the emotional grounds for the group split in an effort to stop them from fighting shaggy says everyone plays their own role in the group like the ingredients of a banana split you're the big banana daphne you're the pastrami and bubble gum flavored ice cream and velma you're the sweet and sour mustard sauce that goes on top this kind of flew over my head as a kid but the fact that shaggy listed ingredients that don't go well together at all is what led velma to quit first you know what shaggy you really put it in perspective for me i quit velma is historically the brainy character the nerdy one who sports a frumpy turtleneck and who's effectively blind without her glasses in this film she's finally fed up with fred undervaluing her contributions and taking credit in spotlight for her achievements as a nerdy little kid i really identified with velma and admired the way she stood up for herself i realized this film didn't exactly give her a flaw to work on but more so focused on the tense dynamic between her and fred a pairing that wasn't typically explored beforehand meanwhile daphne didn't want to be stuck with the archaic damsel in distress role that her character had always been relegated to in the animated series i'm so over this damsel in distress nonsense so she spent the two-year time skip training in martial arts so she could defend herself while this arc draws a little too much from the corny surface level girl power stuff hollywood can't seem to let die at least they didn't vilify femininity the way so many women's badass transformation arcs do she didn't cut her hair short and start wearing black she still embraced her pink and purple outfits and traditionally girly interests and her personality didn't materially change she was still ditzy she just had more agency i know how to handle this guy hey you what are you doing yes that is masterful they flipped the script in the end and made her a heroine without making a big deal of it so you have to keep the traits and keep the attributes that everyone looks forward to and that they like and her at the same time make her more well-rounded and make her more of a person and as for fred well i guess he just didn't feel like trying to convince velma and daphne to stay so he quit too well went out wait a minute wait a minute maybe i quit i do yeah i quit which funnily enough does play into the fact that fred is the character with the least personality he didn't do much growing during the two years but did appear to take in velma's criticisms throughout the film and made more of an effort to include her and in the end he finally took a back seat so she could have the credit and recognition she deserved in these ways gunn addressed the original shallow archetypes of the show and added some nuance made them more human-like in such a way that their interactions and dynamics could be used as a tool for plot development and actually entertaining scenes my name is scooby and shaggy meanwhile were the glue that held the gang together no scoob friends don't quit they're still cowardly gluttons and the main comedic relief like always but with an added air of sentimentality after all they're the lovable symbols that represent the show the most associated with the fearfulness and whimsy of our childhoods to insert a conflict of their own gun added a love interest for shaggy to mildly test their friendship even during their fight their chemistry throughout the film is surprisingly endearing mostly thanks to the perfect casting of matthew lillard who was clearly born for this role he later went on to voice animated shaggy after the original guy retired if you need to in your retirement years you can pick up the voice for the future cartoons and things like that if it gets that bad yeah if i end up going off to do cartoons this casting decision was on par with glenn close in 101 dalmatians as cruella deville who in my opinion is the movie's main highlight it just goes to show how good casting can essentially save a film from the dark pits of forgettability and although no one can ever match our boy robin williams picking another comedic actor like will smith for the genie in the aladdin adaptation wasn't too bad despite his initially jarring appearance the casting for the whole gang and even rowan atkinson as the villain was pretty much perfect linda cartellini's velma is spot on and adorably dorky and casting sarah michelle gellar the iconic vampire slayer as daphne was somewhat poetic considering buffy's inspirations to quote that atlantic article again buffy winked at its predecessor by imagining a group of teen monster fighters led by a superhero version of daphne buffy and her pals even refer to themselves as the scoobies freddie prince jr on the other hand admittedly didn't have a lot to work with character-wise but let's just say he was a solid choice for fred it was so ahead of its time it had a story they they worked hard to figure it out and it wasn't gender specific it wasn't a boy's cartoon or a girl's cartoon or any of those things it was a talking dog you know what i mean freddie was popular amongst teenage girls because of his rom-com roles so the way he played up fred's vanity to make him more interesting may have been drawn from his own experiences he would always just show shades of arrogance and and just a touch of ego and so as an actor you see that as a huge opportunity to just make him as narcissistic as humanly possible and lillard had incredible chemistry with the empty air he was talking to this performance is still a rather impressive feat scooby was originally going to be a puppet crafted by the jim henson company but the studio opted for cg instead overall the film had the advantage of having mostly human characters instead of animals i say it's an advantage because at that point the character design decisions can become a little dicey do you use real animals like the lady in the remake a movie i didn't know existed until i researched for this video do you do it like lion king creating cg so similar to real animals that is boring as hell to watch or do you go the sonic route and create an abomination people rage about so much that you hastily change it within a delayed production scooby's not terrible looking considering the 20 year old effects he looks a lot better than the monsters at least they also cast an unknown who actually knows how to voice his character rather than casting a regular actor simply to bank on popular appeal in my opinion his design and animation is a nice happy medium between cartoonish and hyper-realistic not too zany not too great danny he was a talking dog the obsession with realism and a lot of these live action adaptations is a good segue into my next argument about style and tone obviously stylistic choices are important for any film or work of art in animation you can pull off certain styles and dynamic energy that's difficult or impossible to achieve to the same level in live action this issue escalates when live action becomes too cartoony to the point of cheesiness or when realism is valued over creativity watching the musical number for i just can't wait to be king side by side really puts this into perspective [Music] even the lion king broadway musical had a better grasp of the colorful and expressive tone embedded in the soul of the original film the live-action or rather cg version zapped the color and made it feel utterly lifeless right down to the lion's nearly non-existent facial expressions it was a stampede he tried to save me it was an accident it was a piece and he tried to save me it was an accident i didn't mean for it to happen the narnia movie did it better with aslan and that was in 2005. in comparison another disney adaptation 2016's the jungle book managed to grasp its own particular style and tone rather well this film also mostly featured animals but their expressiveness and sometimes exaggerated proportions made the jungle feel like a legitimately dangerous place for the main character and was loki pretty scary at times not gonna lie it's a newer darker interpretation of the work but it fits well with the premise and in cinderella the gorgeous aesthetic matched the fairy tale quality of the story being told aladdin was also colorful but most of it looked like a sound stage instead of genuine locations so it took away from the immersion meanwhile scooby-doo kind of feels like you're watching a longer fleshed-out episode of the cartoon in the best way like i mentioned it has a distinctly early 2000s vibe but with its pamela anderson cameo daphne fighting a pro wrestler and mtv spring breakers these aspects certainly date the film but i don't consider that a bad thing true that i'm up to snizzle on all popular trends word scooby doo has a certain flexibility for modernization the over-the-top style and flair of the early 2000s paired well with the ethos of scooby-doo which was often gaudy and absurd so this setting in context doesn't feel too out of place for these 70s characters i think it adds to the fun and liveliness scooby-doo was originally supposed to be pg-13 but according to james gunn it ended up with an r rating so the studio cut it in favor of making it a pg kids film instead as this washington post reviewer says this is where the makers of scooby-doo have done the smart and safe thing both in terms of taste and capitalism the smoke in the mystery machine is coming from a barbecue grill inside thelma gets a boyfriend fred and daphne are chased yet chased the movie is as it should be for children referring to the smoke from the mystery machine and velma getting a boyfriend in the original cut shacky was a stoner and velma was a lesbian oh man talk about toasted for example there's a watered-down version of a scene where velma's drunkenly singing a love song and it's unclear whether she's pointing to fred or daphne these character traits weren't initially included for the sake of edginess people have speculated on these characteristics for decades you sort of get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what the characters might be like and sort of all the things that are alluded to as you get older and as a young adult you realize them might have been hinted at in scooby-doo there were also some raunchier scenes cut from the film as well some scenes that were deemed too scary for kids but you can still notice remnants of the original rating in the weed jokes and excessive cleavage i'm mary jane like that is my favorite name really yeah it's hard to say whether making it pg was the better choice but the released version managed to match the levity of the original series without being overly self-aware a lot of the humor still holds up too if you don't count the farting and boogers the film surprisingly made me laugh out loud a lot i got a call for a mr dude [Music] scooby-doo has somehow managed to survive throughout the generations and i think this film certainly aided that reputation again from that washington post article about the film the essential scooby world view remains pleasantly intact kids should meddle dogs are sweet life is groovy and if something scares you you should confront it in all these ways the scooby-doo movie manages to avoid belonging to that special brand of adaptations that are bad in a boring way some of the films i've mentioned have one or two of the elements i've discussed but i think you need all three to really make the project worthwhile but honestly how about they just stop making them entirely that would probably be for the best i know they're gonna keep making them though so hopefully they get it right every once in a while like they did with scooby doo thanks so much for watching i hope this video wasn't a hot take and that you enjoy this movie as much as i do but either way let me know what other films you think passed the test hopefully you're enjoying the halloween videos so far we have a couple left so i'll see you guys next time peace [Music]

Channel: Quality Culture

Views: 785,593

Keywords: scooby doo, scooby-doo, scooby doo 2002, scooby 2002, matthew lillard scooby, scooby doo analysis, scooby doo essay, scooby doo breakdown, scooby doo remake, Scooby doo movie review, Scooby doo review, scooby doo live action, scooby doo review, scooby doo live action review, scooby doo live action analysis

Id: rxuteSlss3M

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021