Scoob!

In May 2020, the world was a very strange place. We were all trapped in our homes, baking suspicious amounts of banana bread and wondering if we’d ever see a movie screen larger than a laptop again. Into this void dropped Scoob!, a film that was originally destined for a massive theatrical rollout but instead became the guinea pig for the "Premium VOD" experiment. It was the first big-budget casualty of the pandemic era, and four years later, it feels like a fascinating, slightly dusty time capsule—the "lost" blockbuster that tried to turn a Great Dane into a Marvel superhero.

I watched this movie on a flickering tablet screen while my neighbor was power-washing their driveway for three hours straight, and honestly, the white noise of the water might have provided a more consistent narrative than the script did. It’s a movie caught between two worlds: a sweet, nostalgic origin story and a desperate attempt to launch a "Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe" (HBCU) that nobody actually asked for.

The Mystery of the Missing Personality

The movie starts off on a high note. We get a genuine "Aww" moment seeing a stray Scooby-Doo meeting a lonely Shaggy on the beach. It’s charming, colorful, and captures that Saturday morning magic. But as soon as the kids grow up and the classic "Which Witch is Which?" mystery vibes should kick in, Tony Cervone (who previously worked on Space Jam) pivots hard into a high-stakes sci-fi adventure.

Suddenly, Shaggy and Scooby are being beamed up into a high-tech jet owned by the Blue Falcon. This isn’t the bumbling hero we remember; it’s his son, Brian, voiced by Mark Wahlberg, who plays him like a TikTok influencer having a mid-life crisis. The plot involves Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs) trying to open a literal gate to the underworld to find hidden treasure, using Scooby’s DNA because—and I’m not making this up—Scooby is the descendant of Alexander the Great’s dog. Trying to turn Scooby-Doo into Iron Man is a fundamental misunderstanding of why people like talking dogs.

A Voice for Every Brand

The most controversial thing about Scoob! at the time wasn’t the plot, but the casting. Matthew Lillard, who has been the definitive voice of Shaggy since the live-action films, was famously replaced by Will Forte. It’s a weird choice. Will Forte is a comedic genius in things like The Last Man on Earth, but here he sounds like he’s doing a "clean" version of his own voice rather than inhabiting Shaggy Rogers. It’s a bit jarring, like hearing your uncle try to do an impression of your favorite cartoon character.

On the flip side, Jason Isaacs is clearly having the time of his life as Dick Dastardly. He leans into the mustache-twirling villainy with a zest that the rest of the film occasionally lacks. And of course, Frank Welker—the legend who has voiced Fred Jones since 1969—is here as Scooby. While it’s nice to have the original voice, the script forces Scooby to speak in full, complex sentences, which robs him of that "puppy-brained" charm that made the original 1960s series so endearing.

The animation by Reel FX is actually quite stunning. It’s bright, fluid, and translated the 2D designs of the 60s into 3D remarkably well. There’s a scene involving a giant robot version of Dick Dastardly that looks like it cost every penny of that $90 million budget. But the cinematic equivalent of a gluten-free dog biscuit, it looks great but leaves you feeling a little empty.

The HBCU That Never Was

The real tragedy of Scoob! is that it’s so busy checking boxes for a franchise that it forgets to be a Scooby-Doo movie. We get cameos from Captain Caveman (voiced by Tracy Morgan) and Dynomutt (Ken Jeong), and references to The Flintstones and The Jetsons are scattered like Easter eggs for parents who are probably the only ones who remember them. It feels like a movie made by a committee that looked at the success of the MCU and said, "What if we did that, but with the dog who eats giant sandwiches?"

Because of its botched release during the pandemic, the film never got its day in the sun. It made a fraction of its budget back at the box office and moved quickly to Max (then HBO Max), where it became just another tile in the scrolling sea of content. A sequel, Scoob! Holiday Haunt, was actually completed but was famously shelved as a tax write-off by the studio—making this 2020 entry a weird, lonely island in the history of the franchise.

There are flashes of brilliance here. The opening credits sequence, a beat-for-beat recreation of the original 1969 intro set to a modernized theme, is pure dopamine. But the rest of the film is a strange relic of a time when studios thought every single intellectual property needed to be a "global event."

If you have kids, they’ll probably enjoy the slapstick and the bright colors of the "dogpocalypse." If you’re a lifelong fan of Mystery Inc., you’ll find yourself wishing they’d just stayed in a haunted mansion instead of a spaceship. It’s a harmless, occasionally witty, but ultimately confused attempt to modernize a formula that wasn't broken. It remains a fascinating look at the exact moment the film industry tried to reinvent the wheel while the world was standing still.