Hey Folks, Harry here... Junior Mintz has finally seen the light, well at least the glow of swamp gas methane stinking hell that surrounds SCOOBY DOO! I don't care what anyone has shown them by Warner Brothers, the fact is the script is an abortion on scale with the worst trite pieces of crap shat from an exec eating cheese and chili with shredded glass on the side!!! BLOODY DENSE STOOL!!!! Unlike this 16 year old fanboy fantasy vixen, I grew up on SCOOBY DOO and adored those mysteries and the interaction between the characters. Casting them with 'tards and writing them as swarmy dumbshits... ACK!!! The only way to save it would be to have Scooby acting scared of Velma, Fred, Daphne and Shaggy and at the end to have the real Velma, Fred, Daphne and Shaggy pull the masks off these puppet hell robotic cretins... and still it would suck. ACK !!!! And they once had the right script! ACK!
Greetings, Boss-Geek!
It's your little breath of mintzy-freshness clocking in with her first report from the San Diego Comic-con.
We blew outta Burbank late yesterday afternoon. It was me, my friend Goth Girl Jesus, her boyfriend Dez, and a couple of guys from Dez's garage band who still read comic books - ha, ha, just kidding, guys. We all piled in Dez's wicked cool purple and white '53 Bel Air and sped down the 5, determined to get to SD in ninety minutes or less and thus make the first ever comic con preview nite. As it turned out, we got no where near SD in under four hours. The LA rush hour traffic did us in, and by the time we cleared downtown all of us were cranky. Goth Girl Jesus was in my face from the start, wondering why I wasn't bringing my AICN costume to the show. "Oh that's smart GGJ," I snapped. "Parade around dressed like the godamn cartoon which looks exactly like me (thanks Cartuna - die, die, die!) in front of a hundred AICN-burned media execs. I might as well wear a tee shirt that reads: 'Hello! I am an internet spy for Aint It Cool News. Disgruntled show-biz types please beat me hard.' No, I think I'll be sticking with my cartoon Supergirl tee shirt and cut-offs, thank you very much."
Dez's base player, a hunk of wayward intelligence named Stu thought this was real funny and wanted to see me and GGJ have an old fashioned girl beat-down right there on the backseat. I didn't like this guy, so when we stopped for Krispy Kremes in La Habra, I got Dez to ditch him. It was funny seeing him running down the street, hurling abuse and crullers at us. We went through his comic box and found a mint Hulk #181 (first full Wolverine story) which we later cashed in for a room at the Embassy Suites.
This morning I did my first run of the con floor, and it's bigger, louder, stinkier, geekier and better than ever. My first big purchase was a Little Enid Doll designed by Dan Clowes. Enid is the heroine of both Clowes' GHOST WORLD book and upcoming movie. The fact that Press-Pop toys made an action doll of little girl Enid (which does nothing despite the fact she's toting both a ray gun and a pistol on the box) is a bizarre touch that would have delighted the real Enid no end. Too bad she doesn't come with a pull-on Catwoman mask.
My second purchase, and the reason for this long, boring preamble (sorry in advance, talkbackers) was a copy of the shooting script to SCOOBY DOO. Now, some months back I had read Harry's foam-at-the-mouth diatribe about the Scooby movie with some amusement. "Jeez, simmer down, dude!" I told him at the time. "It's probably just a silly script about a silly TV cartoon." Personally, I missed the whole Scooby thing as a kid. The stories were all cookie-cutter alike and the show, to me at least, never seemed as hip, funny or creepy as those who remembered it fondly had claimed. It was just a cartoon and not a great one at that. Certainly no reason for all the fuss.
So today after beating feet outta the con floor at noon, I went back to the Embassy for some pool time and to read his so-called atrocity to both God and man. I mean, how bad could it be? Sweet fancy Moses! I got about fifteen pages into it before I was on my feet screaming. Everyone at the pool thought I had stepped on broken glass or something, I was bellering so loud. The script, credited to ten writers, is possibly the worst hunk of garbage ever vomited out by a major studio, and that's saying something. Next to SCOOBY DOO, BATMAN & ROBIN is CITIZEN KANE. I won't waste your time with recounting the trite, thuddingly stupid plot, the crash and burn non-jokes and the lame-brained attempts at deconstructionist characterization, but I will say this:
Hey WB studio morons, SCOOBY DOO, at its best (what little of it there was) was a show a lot of little kids liked. And, judging by the response it gets on Cartoon Network, still do. What you have done here in your attempts to be "witty, hip, and funny", is taken a very simple concept and killed it. You are creating a film too snide, mean-spirited and adult for kids, and too mindless, infantile and boring for adults. Good job, guys. SCOOBY DOO, like BATMAN, INDIANA JONES and the better Disney cartoons, is to a great degree, kids fantasy. The filmmakers have to believe whole-heartedly in the basic reality of that world or you have NO MOVIE. With SCOOBY, you had a chance to do what kids really found attractive about the concept, which is a slightly cartoonier version of a kid's adventure mystery, something along the lines of GOONIES or SPY KIDS. What you are making reads like a soulless lampoon of a third-rate comedians rewrite of the show. "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if Fred was an egotistical credit-stealing jerk, Daphne's a brain-dead bimbo obsessed with her skinny ass, Velma's wallpaper and Shaggy is always making not-so-veiled references to dope? Of course as we have to protect the all-important Burger King tie-in, we can never show him smoking any, but it'll be kind of a hip nod to all the guys out there who really knew what Shag was all about, right?"
No. That's not it, cretins. You got it all dead-wrong and despite all the merchandise, all the burger tie-ins, and a multi-million dollar ad campaign that will earn a number of deserving folks time in hell for foisting this train-wreck onto the movie-going public, this film and everything associated with it will die. You've taken a cartoon that was simple and fun for kids, and because of your lack of imagination, ground it into something cynical, mean, and ultimately forgettable. You were right about one thing, though. One element of the later SCOOBY cartoons was as bad an idea then as it is now. The fact you are making your entire script hinge on that one element will just hasten its demise all the faster. Ugh, ugh, ugh!
Okay, that's all for today's tirade. Me back to the convention now for more fun.
Later!
Junior Mintz
