This post was last modified: Oct 8, 2021 at 6:06 PM by Fun With Despair.

Scooby-Doo: Stage Fright is the luckiest movie ever made, because despite initially finding it mediocre, it consistently finds a way to climb the rankings due to some of these being so fucking bad that it constantly seems better in comparison. I'm going to bump it up to a 5.5/10 after this piece of shit, because apparently the wheel's decided that it must follow up every good movie with a wholehearted attempt to make my brain feel like someone fucked it with a rusty gardening implement.

This... is Scoob!

I really don't want to spend much time on the plot of this one, because not only is it the complete antithesis of what one might expect a "Scooby-Doo" movie to be, but it is an annoying mess of a film that has no mystery at all. Technically there is a ghost, and there's... robots I guess? This movie as a whole is less of a Scooby-Doo film and more of a weird attempt at a Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe, which as someone who grew up on the terrible selection of cartoons on Canadian cable in the 90s and 2000s, I SHOULD be the target audience for.

And this movie still sucks!

It starts out with a very young Scooby and Shaggy in a flashback scene. Kid Shaggy is using his... smartphone (seriously what time period is this shit even set in?) and keeps playing a bunch of songs that remind him that he is apparently lonely. Meanwhile Scooby is a stray puppy and steals a big kebab roll from a shop and runs into Shaggy and they avoid police trouble for the incident by Shaggy lying and saying he owns Scooby and gives Scooby his name based on a box of Scooby Snacks that he happens to have on his person.

Yes, Scooby still stole, and no, it's not really addressed again because the cop fucks off. I guess its fine if a dog steals a large quantity of food as long as someone owns it? Anyway the two go to a spooky house on Halloween and meet the gang for the first time and they unmask a ghost. This is the closest the movie gets to being Scooby-Doo at all, and it lasts all of thirty seconds before an admittedly sort of neat recreation of the old cartoon's intro almost shot-for-shot with the new designs and animation style. It's sort of charming but not original considering every PS2 scoob game did this too.

Flash forward to the modern...er day and the gang wants to turn themselves into a proper business rather than a group of young adults who solve mysteries. They attempt to do this with the help of creepy uncanny valley Simon Cowell's Shrek 2-lookin' ass, who is their investor. He tells Shaggy and Scooby that they suck and bring nothing to the team, and they get butthurt and leave the gang. This exactly sequence of events minus the extremely outdated cameo also happens it at least five other pieces of Scooby-Doo media, so I just... don't care.

Shaggy and Scooby go bowling but get attacked by robots, then abducted by a tractor beam. They're brought onto the ship belonging to the Blue Falcon, a classic Hanna Barbera superhero, and his sidekick; the cyborg Dynomutt, who is one of two characters in the movie I like because much like myself, Dynomutt seems to really want this movie to be over. Blue Falcon dabs to some shitty rap, and its all very unfunny.

This Blue Falcon is the son of the original, and is incompetent and stupid. There is also this black chick who is with them, I do not remember her name but I think she is from Captain Caveman. She serves to say "funny" lines like "toxic masculinity" and that's about it. Meanwhile Mystery Inc. goes looking for Shaggy and Scooby and they proceed to fuck around.

This entire movie is almost nothing but the characters fucking around. It's wildly uninteresting and basically serves as the framing device for cameos and references. Blue Falcon and the Shaggy/Scooby duo fucks around, and so does Mystery Inc. They just go around wasting time and eventually learn that the robots were built by Dick Dastardly, the other character in the movie that I like. They learn that he wants to obtain three skulls belonging to Cerberus, the mythical dog that guards the gates of hell so that he can steal... treasure from hell? and also rescue his dog Muttley, who got stuck in hell during Dick's previous attempt to open a portal. I always liked these two in Wacky Races so honestly I was rooting for them to win.

Both groups continue to fuck around more in locales like an abandoned fairground, they learn that Scooby is needed to open the gates of hell because he is a descendant of Alexander the Great's dog, and they go to an island to get the final skull where they meet Captain Caveman, who despite being visibly caucasian beneath his facial hair, is voiced by a black guy and speaks in ebonics. It's not the VA's fault, I should specify though. This script is just garbage and I can't decide if casting a black guy as the caveman and making him talk like that is racist.

Anyway, Dick captures Scooby, they go to Athens to open the gate, they succeed and Dick gets Muttley back but Cerberus is unleashed but Shaggy and Scooby seal Cerberus away back in hell, Shaggy sacrificing himself to do so, staying in hell. Except not really because less than five minutes later, an ass pull brings him back and everyone lives happily ever after. Dick Dastardly is unmasked as Simon Cowell before being unmasked again as Dick Dastardly wearing a Simon Cowell mask, robbing me of having a cinematic universe in which Simon Cowell and Muttley are canonically criminal BFFs who hunt for supernatural treasure.

The gang lives happily ever after and realize that Shaggy and Scooby are useful because they are the heart of the group. The end. Oh, and Dick and Muttley break out of prison so I guess there's going to be a sequel.

What a piece of shit.

Not only was this movie profoundly uninteresting, but it was a piss poor attempt at starting a cinematic universe considering both Blue Falcon and Captain Caveman are terrible. Maybe I'd watch a movie about Dick Dastardly and Muttley, but only if it's called Dick! or something. It's just such a waste of time. The animation is surprisingly pretty, but its wasted on a terrible script that can't decide if it wants to be a throwback to Hanna-Barbera or a shitty zoomer humor Illumination Entertainment film, and as a result ends up being the worst of both worlds.

That being said, it is still more watchable than Curse of the Speed Demon, entirely because the animation makes it much more fun to watch than that heap of crap. However it is much, much worse than Stage Fright still, which is why I'm bumping that up and giving this one a resounding...

4/10

Ranking:
#1 - Scooby Doo: Abracadabra-Doo - 7.5/10
#2 - Scooby Doo: Stage Fright - 5.5/10
#3 - Scoob! - 4/10
#4 - Scooby Doo and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon - 3/10

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Wait, hold on.

Ahem. It appears I've made a rather terrible miscalculation in my score. My apologies. Scoob! actually gets a...

9/10

...just kidding fuck this movie.

Watched this with Drei last year, my own review would be pretty much this one but worse written.

Oh, but with the bonus fact that I kept expecting Dynomutt to be the real villain because I was mistakenly giving this movie enough credit to expect an actual mystery plot.

Watched this with Drei last year, my own review would be pretty much this one but worse written.

Oh, but with the bonus fact that I kept expecting Dynomutt to be the real villain because I was mistakenly giving this movie enough credit to expect an actual mystery plot.

I sort of had the same vibe earlier on when Dynomutt was oddly insistent that they should be looking for the skulls, but honestly I went into this knowing how much it'd suck so I quashed that expectation pretty quickly

I'm so baffled because so much of this movie seems like it should go right but apparently whoever was writing the script was nowhere near as based as anyone else involved in the production. That's extremely unfortunate because a Scooby Doo film released a year ago that has fucking Dick Dastardly in it should be amazing by default, you can't possibly screw that up if you have anything remotely resembling a brain.

seems like everyone involved wanted to make a good film except whoever called the shots

I feel like they want to make movies feel like they have Potential so you'll stay interested in the brand but not too Good where they build an expectation of quality lmao

oh it gets worse. Laff-A-Lympics was essentially Hanna Barbara's massive crossover thing in the 70s, also featuring Dynomutt, Scooby Doo, Captain Caveman, etc... except strangely not Dick Dastardly and Muttley, instead having Dread Baron and Mumbley, who are almost essentially the same characters. Some of the episodes were on Boomerang when I was young and I remember it as being... alright. Essentially same sort of thing as Wacky Races but with a lot of the HB characters.

Apparently, Space Stars was also the name of the block that introduced Space Ghost. So, uh, that's a trainwreck waiting to happen eventually.