Surprise, surprise, another forgettable 2010s Scoob where nothing happens. This one is about as resoundingly "meh" as you can get. It's hardly the worst on this list, but these 2010s Scoobs are just extremely dull for the most part. Shaggy's Showdown is a movie about Shaggy and the gang going to visit his cousin in an old west-themed tourist town where Shaggy's ancestor was an infamous outlaw, killed by a sheriff who went on to be renowned as the town's folk hero. Now back for revenge, he proceeds to... not really do all that much, to be honest.

Yeah, much like Monster of Mexico, the ghost (A guy named Dapper Jack Rodgers) isn't in this one all that much. He's also another fucking green skull man like the Phantom, a trope that I feel like is going to continue with the more low-effort villains. This one's been a while in the making just due to me having nothing to talk about regarding it though, so I'll try to rush this one out.

The movie opens with a scene of this guy attacking said old west-themed tourist town, before revealing his face to be that of... a green skull man!!! He laughs maniacally a lot and shoots these green flaming "J" letters around and that's about all he does in the movie. It's a major plot point that he "looks like Shaggy" to the degree that people run screaming when they see Shaggy, thinking him to be the ghost. This kind of falls flat because even when he's not a green skull man, he only barely resembles Shaggy and even then only facially.

Shaggy and the gang roll into town, everyone screams upon the sight of Shaggy, likely for aforementioned reasons, though he may also just be ugly. Velma looks up Shaggy's cousin's ranch (The Crazy Q Ranch, notably NOT named after the conspiracy theorists) on Google and laments the shitty choice of font used for the site, then the group arrives. This is about where the movie starts to lose me in record time, as much like Stage Fright before it, the movie introduces so many pointless characters that don't serve a purpose in the film and aren't even remotely capable of being suspects.

There's Shaggy's cousin (a rather generic cowgirl), her boomer business partner who designed the website with the shitty font, a pair of twins who don't do anything, this tiktok country singer zoomer kid who will be singing at the upcoming rodeo, his emo sister, and their parents, two generic cowboy dudes who work there, and finally... fuck man, I don't even know. I can sit back and click through this movie over and over but god damn I cannot remember a damn thing. It goes in one eye socket and out the other, it's so forgettable, and not because it's BAD, it's just so utterly "fine" that absolutely nothing sticks out in my mind.

It doesn't help that most of the movie, similar to Monster of Mexico or Stage Fright, consists of the gang just fucking around. Shaggy tries to ride a mean horse, Scooby reveals that he can talk to horses because he's an animal(?) and convinces the horse to let Shaggy ride it, one of the generic old west-y townspeople says he needs someone to "shoe a horse", Fred agrees to do it because he thinks the guy means he wants Fred to play horseshoes, the girls visit the town museum in hopes of finding out more about Dapper Jack and Daphne manages to charm the guy working there into telling them the lore of the land.

The entire movie is just more of this. The country singer tiktok kid is afraid of horses because they could "stomp him", a fact which he thinks will hurt his image, but he gets over it, Fred get embarrassed and publicly shamed because he is shit at putting shoes on horses, and the ghost shows up like... 3 times in the entire movie? Ol' Dapper Jack doesn't get much in the way of a starring role this time, just showing up occasionally to shoot some green J's around, which are revealed to burn green as a result of a flourescent chemical that's being added to the flamethrower guns. He ambushes the gang at a graveyard and chases them around for a bit, standard fare.

There's also a real estate company, the mysterious and definitely-not-evil "Black Rattler Management" that is buying up shit around town. Shaggy's Cousin's Ranch is in danger of being sold off to them because the ghost is driving away guests and she can't pay her mortgage. Shaggy gets the bright idea to enter the rodeo to win a cash prize and pay her shit.

There's another like, god knows how long of just fucking around, then the gang decides on a plan to catch the bad guy while Shaggy rides in the rodeo, which Dapper Jack will surely crash and destroy. The zoomer kid sings a country song on stage as Shaggy rides a real nasty horse, believing Scooby had convinced the horse to play along, but Scooby didn't. Despite this though, Shaggy's cowboy genes mean that he's a natural, and he pulls it off anyway. Good for him, I suppose. I have extreme faith that this will never come up in another movie ever.

This song the kid sings is fucking awful too, like really bad. I don't tend to like country as a genre, but if someone put on Johnny Cash or something I wouldn't really mind. This shit though is just terrible. I feel kind of bad for the kid's VA because he's just awful at this and clearly not a singer. If a character has a musical role though, and you're not willing to cast a singer to do the musical part, at least pull a Hex Girls and give them a VA who can sing, come on. Even Stage Fright's musical segments weren't that bad.

Dapper Jack shows up and they throw a net on him but he escapes and a bunch of bulls escape from the bullriding pen and cause a stampede, allowing him to get away. The net thing is important as it becomes supremely stupid later on. Speaking of later on, that happens right now. The gang heads to an ol' country hoedown where Shaggy is given the award money for winning at the rodeo, a cool, crisp $10,000. Not bad, not bad at all. What IS bad, however, is how they catch the ghost here. They just turn on a black light and arrest one of the two generic cowboy dudes because a crisscross pattern shows up glowing on him and the gang reveals they coated the net in glowing shit so they'd be able to figure out who Dapper Jack is if he got away.

This is... probably the dumbest way they've caught a villain yet. This entire plan relies on the guy somehow not showering after the rodeo chase, and even worse, Dapper Jack is a fucking costume, a costume that this guy is no longer wearing. He wouldn't have ANY of this shit on him anymore at all It's just an ass pull and it robs us of a proper unmasking scene. After the police just... drag the guy away, the gang raids his home and finds the Dapper Jack costume, along with a business card for Black Rattler Holdings and the diary of the sheriff who took down the original Dapper Jack.

Through the journal, the legend of Dapper Jack is revealed to be fabricated by the sheriff, who murdered the real Dapper Jack (a nice guy) in cold blood and began disguising as him to commit crimes and frame him. With Dapper Jack's name cleared, the gang heads back to the hoedown, where they reveal that the ghost must have had a mastermind as the museum guy sucked and was too irrelevant and also couldn't have let out the bulls at the rodeo, which is a point they weirdly focus on despite bulls being notoriously violent anyway and very easily could have just busted out.

They accuse Shaggy's Cousin's business partner, claiming that he must be the owner of Black Rattler Management because..... the font on the business card is the same one used for the website and Velma INSISTS that the font is so bad that no two people would ever use it. The business partner decides to steal Shaggy's money (even though $10,000 really isn't that much) and steals a wagon and rides away. Shaggy and the zoomer ride horses after him and he gets caught. The end. As the gang drives away into the sunset, the ghost of the REAL Dapper Jack watches over Shaggy from the distance.

I have a feeling that "bland and really contrived but tolerable" is going to be the running theme for everything from this point on. This one and Stage Fright are very similar in that regard, but the monster's relevance is constantly shrinking in this franchise. Not to continue to fellate Witch's Ghost and Zombie Island, but they did way more investigation in both of those movies and both of them literally weren't even mysteries for half the movie. Not that the franchise has ever been fucking Sherlock Holmes or anything, but these are less mysteries and more just an hour and a half of the gang doing some vaguely themed shenanigans while a ghost shows up occasionally.

The Phantom(s) at the very least tried to murder people outright, Dapper Jack's flavor of green skull man just pops in to laugh and shoot some J's around and leave.

That being said though... yeah this one is fine I guess. It does suck, but I think I enjoyed it more than Curse of the Speed Demon and Monster of Mexico, which are both way worse. Stuff like the stupid net plot hole probably doesn't matter as much if you're a kid who likes the old west so I find it too hard to really shit on it for that. The zoomer kid is probably much the same, a character for little kids in 2017 to identify with, even if I find that archetype very annoying. I am not a kid and I don't really much care for cowboy stuff; having grown up in Canada's Texas has largely made me want to respond to the notion of the old west by going full high noon on my fucking brain.

Anyway, this is an extremely inoffensive, bland, boring, and uninteresting film, but at least it's not like, actual shit. The animation is alright, and despite being our third skull man of the series so far, Dapper Jack looks sort of cool I guess. While nowhere near a good movie, this is about what I expect the baseline to be, so I'm giving this one a...

5/10

Ranking:
#1 - Scooby Doo on Zombie Island - 10/10
#2 - Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost - 9/10
#3 - Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed - 8/10
#4 - Scooby Doo: Abracadabra-Doo - 7.5/10
#5 - Scooby Doo: Stage Fright - 5.5/10
#6 - Scooby Doo: Shaggy's Showdown
#7 - Scooby-Doo and the Monster of Mexico - 4.5/10
#8 - Scoob! - 4/10
#9 - Scooby Doo and WWE: Curse of the Speed Demon - 3/10
#10 - Daphne & Velma - 1/10

This post was last modified: Oct 21, 2021 at 11:49 PM by Draku.

>the net thing

what the fuck? how does that even remotely make any sense

>who murdered the real Dapper Jack (a nice guy) in cold blood and began disguising as him to commit crimes and frame him.

damn thats actually pretty fucked up and a kind of neat backstory. a shame its wasted on this film

HOW IS LETTING BULLS OUT SOMETHING YOU WOULD NEED A LOT OF INFLUENCE FOR, THAT SHIT WOULD HAVE BEEN PULLED BY ANY OTHER SCOOBY DOO VILLAIN AS PART OF A CHASE SEQUENCE AND NOT EVEN BE FOCUSED ON

HOW DOES SHAGGY EVEN LOOK ANYTHING LIKE DAPPER JACK I WAS WONDERING IF HE GOT A REDESIGN OR SOMETHING BUT NO

>who murdered the real Dapper Jack (a nice guy) in cold blood and began disguising as him to commit crimes and frame him.
damn thats actually pretty fucked up and a kind of neat backstory. a shame its wasted on this film

yeah I think this is one of the parts of this movie I actually liked but I feel like a much better movie would have put that reveal earlier on in the film rather than right at the ass end and have it serve as an "oh shit this can't be the real ghost... he wasn't evil!" moment but by the time this factoid rolls out, they already caught the damn ghost so it serves zero purpose.

>who murdered the real Dapper Jack (a nice guy) in cold blood and began disguising as him to commit crimes and frame him.
damn thats actually pretty fucked up and a kind of neat backstory. a shame its wasted on this film

yeah I think this is one of the parts of this movie I actually liked but I feel like a much better movie would have put that reveal earlier on in the film rather than right at the ass end and have it serve as an "oh shit this can't be the real ghost... he wasn't evil!" moment but by the time this factoid rolls out, they already caught the damn ghost so it serves zero purpose.

yeah that's a good point, finding evidence like that earlier would help build up the mystery and narrow down a suspect list, as it is it's just a cool bit of information that doesn't add to the experience you'd get actually watching it

what a bizarre film

how he get up there??

how he get up there??