This post was last modified: Oct 7, 2021 at 2:33 AM by Fun With Despair.

I've become known as MW's resident Scooby-Doo expert after the Cyber Chase and Night of 100 Frights streams, but it's not a title entirely founded on playing dog shit games. Well, 100 Frights was okay actually but anyway, I think I owe a lot of my fascination with mystery and horror to watching a lot of Scooby-Doo when I was really young. That being said, most of the franchise objectively sucks, especially in terms of films, so I'm probably going to regret this.

To start this garrison off, I spun my mighty Wheel of Scoob™ to see what kind of cinematic sludge I'd be stuck with as my grand opening special.

Unfortunately, Scooby-Doo: Stage Fright is neither good nor notably bad. Perhaps this will be a trend, but who can really say? I only remember like, Zombie Island, Witch's Ghost, and Cyber Chase, along with one about the Loch Ness Monster. Most of these are uncharted territory entirely. When I went to start Stage Fright, I was initially confused as I figured the movie was about stage magic, getting it confused with another shitty 2010s Scoob film called "Abracadabra-doo". This is very much not that, even though it does have a magician character in the movie for like five minutes.

In actuality, this movie is about a big talent contest, an America's Got Talent type of deal. Daphne and Fred are entering with a musical act, so they're on the way to Chicago to meet the host, the first black man in Scooby-Doo since the Harlem Globetrotters. There's an interesting intro with a different animation style and a a unique, sort of catchy intro song that's used as a motif through some of the other tracks in the movie, which is sort of a neat touch even if the song isn't really anything special.

He looks how I feel.

Once they get there, they learn that the show, hosted at an old opera house, is haunted by the Cryptkeeper Phantom. Presumably he is the Phantom of the Opera, as he haunts an opera house and refers to himself as the phantom, but he is never called by that title so we will never know. He's not particularly threatening looking, resembling the Cryptkeeper in a fancy suit and possessing no supernatural traits or superhuman feats. They could just beat the shit out of him and capture him, which they do. Several times. We'll get to that.

Needless to say, he is not a very threatening villain.

The pacing in the movie is extremely weird though. Almost immediately after showing up, they're already basically trying to catch the Phantom, but he gets away. They go around after that and meet the other contestants, most of which are uninteresting one note red herring gimmick characters, so I won't talk about them. All you need to know is that there's an annoying 2013 Ariana Grande lookalike who is extremely bitchy with two annoying parents, the building owner, and the germophobic stage manager. The latter is alright, I don't hate him, but they are ALL so ugly. Everyone in this movie who isn't the scooby gang is ugly as fuck except for like, this one intern girl. It's awful.

The gang learns that the ghost's been around since the 70s apparently, when the old opera house was refurbished into a disco. His sabotage is what caused the house to go out of business until the talent show came in. They do a bunch of running around and chasing the phantom, and sometimes the phantom yells loudly that his motive is wanting the Ariana Grande girl to win. Hmm, wonder what that means? During this segment of the movie, there is one point where Scooby and Shaggy try to barricade a door from the Phantom by knocking over a decorative pillar., blocking the door off. The doors open in the other direction so it doesn't work.

For some reason this made me smile and I don't know why. Likely because it was 3 AM and the rest of the movie was boring.

Thankfully, this movie is not one of the Scooby-Doo musicals that came out in the 2010s (yes they exist, let us pray I never get to them), so the music here that happens for the talent show is kept to a minimum and really only comes up in like 30 second intervals when they have to compete. At some point vaguely around the competing, which is sabotaged and causes most of the annoying red herrings to quit, the gang finds a secret passage and walks through a sewer and finds the Phantom playing an organ in a quant little sewer room. This Phantom reveals himself to be the OG Phantom from the 70s, and not the current one, and also just some random flintstones-looking schlub.

I like this guy, because he's dumb as fuck and the movie knows it. The OG Phantom started sabotaging shit in the 70s entirely because he simply didn't like disco, and he's lived in the sewers wearing a skeleton mask for like 50 years because he thought he was deformed because the only mirror he owns is shitty. He tags along with the gang at this point for a little while, having nothing better to do, and while he isn't in the movie much, he's the only funny character so I like when he is on screen.

As for the rest of the movie, over the course of it pretty much every other character is revealed to be the Phantom, all piggybacking off the legend to accomplish something. The theater owner is a Phantom, Ariana Grande's dad is revealed to be a Phantom (no shit), the stage manager is a Phantom (he wanted to steal a diamond being held next door, classic stuff), and the black guy is a Phantom, for... no real reason. Publicity I guess.

There are two notable ones, first the theater owner, because he goes hard and fuck and almost executes Fred on-screen with a blowtorch before he was saved by a deus ex machina. Secondly is the stage manager because he has the most developed plotline and the most screentime as a villan and tries to run them over with the car.

None of them are caught in interesting ways though, besides the theater manager who has a car chase segment. Really most of them just effortlessly get their asses kicked, there's no threat because the Phantom's just a guy, or a collective of guys I guess. It really fucks with the pacing the most too because every five minutes in the back half of the movie, another phantom is getting unmasked.

Anyway, this movie was... ok. Overall I found it pretty boring, but it wasn't the worst. The mystery was bad and it wasn't very funny, but its a kids movie from a bad franchise, if this is the worst it'll give me then I'm cool with that. There were some parts I sort of liked, but for the most part I would not recommend this film. As I found it entirely middling for the most part, I'm going to put this one in the middle of the scale here, leaning slightly into the negative due to being piss fucking boring, but not actively bad. I will be slowly ranking these from best to worst in addition to my number score, so I'm starting this one at a...

EDIT: Originally I had this ranked 4/10, but the WWE movie was shitty enough that I revised my ranking. This one gets a 5.

5/10

Ranking:
#1 - Scooby Doo: Stage Fright - 5/10

i like the concept of the villain being like 5 unrelated people

i like the concept of the villain being like 5 unrelated people

This, that's kinda neat. Everyone using an old legend to create even more disarray is a good concept, but not if they all get caught in sequence one after the other, that's kinda shit.

I'm kinda shocked Scooby Doo is still going, both out of longevity and quality reasons.