Latex Movie Review: Scooby Doo: Monsters Unleashed

Scooby Doo Where Are You! was either the low point in American animation, or the highlight of the lowest point in America animation history. Hanna-Barbera was at one time a great animation studio. The Tom and Jerry cartoons they animated for M.G.M. are classics. But with the 1950s M.G.M. dropped Hanna-Barbera for cheaper produced cartoons first from Chuck Jones, then from a foreign animation studio. Movie studios began cutting the budgets they allocated to their animation divisions, and finally by the 1960s discontinued distributing animated shorts. The animation studios that survived these years had no choice but to move to television. Hanna-Barbera looked to cut costs with such made for television cartoons as Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound. They began specializing in reusing animation cells and music cues. These were the days when a character walked down a street he passed the same house and tree ten times. The studio broke ground with prime time animated shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, but by the 1970s were limited to animating Saturday morning cartoons. And the networks who bought those cartoons paid next to nothing. To once again cut costs Hanna-Barbera began animating their cartoons overseas, resulting in characters with misshaped faces. Scooby Doo exemplified the cheapened down cartoon. Not only was the animation and music cues recycled from episode to episode but so was the plots. Each episode went something like this: A group of teenagers, one who owned a semi-talking tog named Scooby Doo, head off in their van to a destination, usually a resort. There they discover a monster or ghost has been haunting the place and chasing people away. Deciding that this is a mystery that they need to solve the teenagers investigate without once being offered payment for their troubles. After finding clues the monster had carelessly left behind they capture him just as the police arrive and SPOILER**** remove the monsters mask revealing him to be a human that wanted to drive people off the property so he could buy it from the owner on the cheap. Despite the cheapness of the show it remained a hit for many years.

Jump forward to 2002 and Warner Brothers big screen live action version of Scooby Doo which was either the low point of CGI created characters, or the highlight of the lowest point in CGI history. The problem was the same with most movies that include a CGI character. They look freakish. It is especially jarring when they are adaptions of well known characters such as Casper or Marmaduke. And the CGI animated Scooby Doo in the live action movie of the same name was perhaps the worst. The movie was a critical failure. But it made a lot of money at the box office, and the entire cast had signed contracts obligating them to a sequel.

In Scooby Doo: Monsters Unleashed the entire cast is back. The husband and wife team of Freddie Prince Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar as Fred and Daphne, Linda Cardellini as Velma, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, and that annoying CGI as Scooby Doo. The CGI Scooby is the main problem with the first movie and it's sequel. It just looks creepy, even more so than the ghosts the gang investigates. With the first movie no one would know what the Scooby animation would look like until the film was near completion. For the sequel all involved knew what an aberration the Scooby CGI was, but now there was nothing that could be done about it. The producers sunk even more money into the production. I'll give them credit for that. They could have done a bare bones production, having a villain who wears a simple monster costume and the only special effect being the Scooby CGI itself. One example would be the spooky mansion of Jeremiah Wickles. The gang triggers a booby trap when ringing the doorbell that sends them into a ball shaped cage that in turn rolls down a roller coaster style railway into the basement holding area. A bare bones production wold have simply had the trap door drop the gang into a cell. Coincidentally, the same scene has one of the films few legitimate laughs, a comment made by the CGI Scooby about girl scout cookies. But that is the exception. The rest of the humor either falls flat, or is excruciatingly bad. That is the other problem with both Scooby Doo movies, the script. The third problem, the plot. The original Scooby Doo cartoon all the ghouls turned out to be someone wearing a costume. But for both Scooby Doo movies it was decided to have the gang fighting real ghosts. In the sequel the gang are at a museum exhibit featuring the costumes of the villains they unmasked in the past. But a mad scientist has discovered how to bring the costumes to life, turning them into real ghosts using a substance called Randamonium, and has one of the reanimated ghosts disrupt opening night. Soon all the costumes have been turned into ghosts, all seeking vengeance against the gang. This is Ghost Busters territory, not Scooby Doo. But the producers decided that big is better, and they wanted a plot that involved special effects. What they ended up with was another special effects laden mess, something Hollywood seems to be producing a lot of.

THE SCENE:
Linda Cardellini plays Velma who has fallen for museum curator Patrick Wisely ( Seth Green ). In an attempt to grab his attention Daphne gives Velma a makeover, putting her in a skin tight orange leather catsuit ( although the script seems to suggest it it latex ). She is first seen wearing it at 27 minutes, and again in an even longer scene beginning at 34 minutes. While the catsuit itself is legitimately sexy, it is played for laughs. It is constantly making farting noises while Velma walks around in it or shifts while sitting, and when she does walk around wearing it she does so very stiffly. For an ending gag she unzips the catsuit to reveal that she was wearing her trademark cowl neck sweater underneath.