Scooby-Doo on DVD

When the high point of a movie is a farting contest between a man and a dog, you know you’re in trouble.

Scooby-Doo is a big-budget, live-action version of the famous TV show. The cartoon characters are played by flavor-of-the-month young stars, and everyone’s favorite Great Dane is fully computer-generated.

To make matters worse, the story is not the least bit engrossing, the direction is average at best, and Rowan Atkinson is wasted with a pointless role.

After solving the case of the Luna Ghost, Shaggy (Matthew Lillard), Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.), Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Velma (Linda Cardellini) get into an argument, and Mystery Inc. becomes nothing more than a memory. Two years later, the four of them are invited to Spooky Island to solve a case, so they have to put their differences aside and become Mystery Inc. once more.

That’s as much of a plot as the writers could come up with, but if you’re watching Scooby-Doo for a powerful storyline, you’re going to be disappointed anyway.

The film’s main problem lies in the fact that it’s completely unnecessary. The characters aren’t given anything to do that they didn’t do a hundred times in the cartoon, and it’s just a standard ghost-running-amok Scooby-Doo storyline. Another major problem is that we don’t see Fred and Daphne; we see Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar. They look, sound, and act exactly like they do in real life (well, in as close to real life as we’ve seen them), and it makes us wonder if they’re even acting. And as good as Linda Cardellini is as Velma, even she is outdone by Matthew Lillard, who does a great Shaggy. The hardest part of being Shaggy would be getting his voice right, and Lillard does it perfectly.

Even though the CGI Scooby looks pretty good, there’s never a second when you mistake it for a real dog. The other computer effects are poorly done, and some look more like claymation.

But we all know it’s going to be a bad movie. Maybe that’s why we’re able to enjoy it. Our standards are so low that it couldn’t possibly disappoint us. It does deliver a few laughs (particularly during the farting contest, I’m not ashamed to say), and that’s really the point of a comedy.

Despite its $150 million box office take, this is still a pretty lackluster DVD. Like many, it looks more impressive on the box than it actually is.

The picture quality (available in separate widescreen and full screen editions) is not very good for a movie that just came out last summer. It should be perfectly crisp, but is instead very soft. There’s not much in terms of foreign objects, but there is some halo effect, and it’s not as clear as it should be. The audio is equally disappointing, especially since there is plenty of opportunity for surround use. During the “action” scenes there are lots of sound effects and monster noises that would have worked beautifully from the rears, but not even a single word of dialogue comes from anywhere but in front of you. I guess it’s really a kids movie, and the kids don’t really care, but still...

There are two horribly uninteresting audio commentaries on the disc. The first is by director Raja Gosnell, and the second is by the four main cast members. In all honesty, I could not sit through either one of them for very long, as not a single person involved had anything worthwhile to say. Equally pointless is the behind-the-scenes documentary, which is a 25-minute PR piece. It features interviews, minimal behind-the-scenes footage, and tells us nothing about the making of the movie itself. There are also some painful deleted scenes (scenes that weren’t good enough for a bad movie are always a treat), a two-player challenge game, a music video, seven ROM games, and some easter eggs.

A movie this successful should be able to garner a somewhat decent DVD.

Scooby-Doo, from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
86 minutes, anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) 16X9 enhanced, 5.1 Dolby Digital
Starring Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Matthew Lillard, Linda Cardellini
Produced by Charles Roven, Richard Suckle
Screenplay by James Gunn
Directed by Raja Gosnell

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