Going into this year I had a secret shame I knew would come out with this year’s animated offerings. Until today I had never seen anything Scooby-Doo in my life. Growing up I didn’t like anything scary or that had ghosts in it and most of the time we didn’t have cable so something like Scooby-Doo wasn’t a part of my life. In addition, the two live action feature films looked terrible so I never saw those. Everyone has blind spots of pop culture and this was one of mine.

With this gap in my animation viewing I was actually looking forward to the new film SCOOB! from Warner Bros Animation. The animation looked cute and the voicecast is impressive. My hope was the film would be a fun and dynamic introduction into the world of Scooby-Doo.

Unfortunately I am walking away disappointed with SCOOB! I don’t know how fans will feel but I didn’t care for this film.

The biggest problem with SCOOB! is the script. My understanding is this franchise is all about mystery and spooky stories with a supernatural angle to them. This film has very little of that and instead opts in for a generic, by-the-numbers superhero story. It kind of reminds me of the recent Mummy film where they took out everything that makes a Mummy movie special and replaced it with a generic cinematic universe building plot. Such a shame!

While I enjoyed the voice work and the character designs, the actual characters themselves were frustrating. The biggest problem is the script immediately splits up our team so you have Shaggy and Scooby off with Blue Falcon and company in space while you have Daphne, Fred, and Velma looking for them. I preferred the DFV team every time but would have especially liked having them all together solving a mystery!

I would like to know how long this script was hanging around because everything about it felt very dated? From the cinematic universe building to the terrible humor it all seemed to come from 10 years ago more than today. For example, there are multiple Simon Cowell jokes. What is this 2005?

People are going to be upset but I don’t think this is much better than Playmobil: the Movie. Both have nice animation but also convoluted storylines and terrible humor, flat characters. SCOOB! has a more recognizable IP to its name so it will definitely do better but the films themselves are similar.

If you are a Scooby-Doo fan and love this film please tell me what I am missing. I would love to hear your insight. As for me, this is a a definite skip!

3 out of 10

Frown Worthy