Scooby Doo
Let’s try this new recipe for an evening’s entertainment. First, phase-shift the Mystery Inc gang into real-life form. Next, put them up against Mr. Bean in verbose mode. Stir in a good helping of ghouls and sundry other-dimensional life-forms. Put in Scooby Doo in full-3D animated action. Viola! You have a movie. Scooby Doo, no less.
Pass the popcorn, please. And some tissues, too. Daphne and Velma certainly looked very different in real life.
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Two years into the second millenium, Raja Gosnell was roped in by Warner Bros Pictures to direct the movie Scooby Doo. Craig Titley and James Gunn were tasked with writing the story while James Gunn was responsible for preparing the screenplay. The actors and actresses who breathed life into the Scooby Doo cartoon characters were Freddies Prinze Jr. as Frederick Herman Jones Jr, better known as Fred or Freddie, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne Anne Blake, Linda Cardellini as Velma Dace Dinkley, Matthew Lillard as Norville “Shaggy” Rogers. Scooby Doo was retained in his original animated format with Neil Fanning as his voice.
Scooby Doo was modeled after a Great Dane by animation designer Iwao Takamoto. A Great Dane, variously called German Mastiff or Danish Hound, is one giant of a dog. The current record holder for the title of “World’s Tallest Dog” is George who stands at 220 centimeters from the top of his head to the tip of his toe. That’s seven point two feet. Definitely taller than the average Joe. The minimum show qualification for a male Great Dane is 76 centimeters at the withers, with a minimum weight of 54 kilograms.
Long ago, Great Danes were used to hunt boars, and their big, floppy ears were cropped as a matter of expediency. Nowadays, cropping is banned in certain countries like the UK and Denmark. There are six show-standard colors namely fawn, brindle, blue, black, Harlequin and mantle. There are also, once in a blue moon, white Great Danes. Despite its size, the Great Dane is well-known for its gentle and friendly nature, being generally well-disposed toward humans and other smaller animals.
The Great Dane served as the model for quite a number of well-known fictitious characters. Other than Scooby Doo, there was also Marmaduke in a newspaper comic strip drawn by Brad Anderson. The cursed hellhound in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of Baskerville” was a Great Dane. So was Ace, the pet dog owned by Bruce Wayne in the Batman Beyond series.
In the Scooby Doo movie, the Mystery Inc gang broke up after solving one of their crazy cases and met again, two years later, on an amusement park called Spooky Island. The park’s owner, Emile Mondavarous, was played by Rowan Atkinson who was better known for his on-screen personae, Mr. Bean. The amusement park, as the name indicated, was built on a ghoulish theme but, apparently, not all the ghostly manifestations were the products of cunning contrivances and contraptions.
Soon demonic possessions were spreading faster than a cold virus in a packed subway. The highlight was the protoplasm scene. Protoplasmic heads containing people’s souls were switched around the members of the Mystery Inc gang producing mixed-ups with hilarious results. Of course, everyone got back their own souls in the end and went on to put an end to the evil scheme of the mastermind behind all the things that went bump in the night.
So, who was the villain? See the Scooby Doo DVD to find out. Take along plenty of popcorn. Good entertainment like this deserves generous helpings of popcorn.
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