Every Scooby-Doo Movie Ranked, Worst to Best

Here’s how the Scooby-Doo films stack up, worst to best. With almost 40 Scooby-Doo animated movies and 14 TV shows, Scooby-Doo has kept its status as one of the most famous cartoons for over five decades – also spawning five live-action films and numerous shorts, TV specials, video games, comic books, and even theater plays. First produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1969, the franchise quickly rose to popularity thanks to the charisma of the Mystery Inc. gang – composed of the cowardly Shaggy, the brainy Velma, the confident Fred, the danger-prone Daphne, and the titular talking Great Dane, Scoobert Doobert.

Two of the Scooby-Doo live-action films, Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins and Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster, were made for TV, while the prequel spinoff Daphne & Velma was released direct-to-video. The latest installment to be released is the 3D-animated film Scoob!, originally intended to hit theaters but later switched to a VOD release following the 2020 health crisis that forced all theaters worldwide to close for a considerable part of the year.

Every Animated Movie Coming In 2020

For all Scooby-Doo’s longevity and popularity, that hasn’t always been the case when it comes to his big screen outings. So. how do the theatrical Scooby-Doo movies (including Scoob!) rank in terms of quality? Here are all three Scooby-Doo movies, ranked worst to best.

3. Scoob! (2020)

The first 3D-animated Scooby-Doo film to grace the screen explores the birth of the iconic friendship between Shaggy (Will Forte) and Scooby (original Fred and Scooby voice actor Frank Welker), and how Mystery Inc. is founded when the famous team enters their first haunted house as children on a fateful Halloween night. Years later and with countless solved mysteries under their name, the gang realizes they’re part of a bigger universe when they meet the son of the Hanna-Barbera superhero Blue Falcon (Mark Wahlberg), who takes Shaggy and Scooby aboard his spaceship and recruits them to fight the wicked villain Dick Dastardly (Jason Isaacs).

Scoob! has a star-studded voice cast with the likes of The Greatest Showman actor Zac Efron as Fred, Community star Ken Jeong as Dynomutt, and even a cameo by the American Idol judge Simon Cowell. Their performances excel at recreating every character’s original voice and the animation style perfectly blends the classic style from the cartoons with a dynamic 3D rendering of the vibrant world of Hanna-Barbera. The vibrant colors and faithful designs capture the essence of the classic cartoon and faithfully adapt it for a new generation.

However, the weakest part of the movie is its script, which draws too much from the current superhero craze. Spaceships, warrior cavemen, and cyborg dogs replace the distinctive spooky mysteries the gang always discovered to be staged – a change that drastically drifts apart from the formula of the original cartoon. Besides, the main members of the team get sidelined by copious amounts of Hanna-Barbera teases and characters that suggest a rush to create an MCU-style shared universe, rather than focusing on this movie first.

2. Scooby-Doo (2002)

Written by Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad director James Gunn, the first live-action Scooby-Doo feature film reunites the Mystery Inc. team after a two-year hiatus due to each member’s frustration with becoming their own cliché. When Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and Scooby (Neil Fanning) accept an invitation to solve a new mystery in Spooky Island, they realize that Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Velma (Linda Cardellini), and Fred (Freddie Prinze Jr.) are also invited. The gang finds it difficult to work together again when they fight increasingly realistic apparitions in the haunted island, but finally solve their differences and overcome their stereotypes to unveil their host Emile Mondavarious (Rowan Atkinson) as Scooby’s abandoned nephew Scrappy-Doo (Scott Innes) in disguise.

The film nails the tone and the comedy from the original cartoon, while also flipping many of its elements on their head to create an updated take on the classic mystery-solving adventure. Recurrent tropes like the band splitting up, the defining traits of the characters, and the twist reveal of the culprit are used for a fresh purpose. This time the gang strives to work together again, they transcend their former personalities (Daphne leaves behind her image of damsel in distress, for instance) and Scrappy becomes an actual monster after being discovered.

Some may argue the Scooby-Doo movie is a bit over the top. For a live-action film, the characters are still too cartoonish and the audience truly needs to suspend their disbelief to stay on board with all the movie’s goofy twists and turns. Some effects look slightly less dated than the film’s pop culture references and the dialog is firmly committed to replicating the original speech pattern of the cartoon, which at times can be jarring from the mouth of flesh-and-bone characters. But all in all, the flaws in this adaptation only come from its sincere desire to be as faithful to the source material as possible.

Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed (2004)

The sequel to the 2002 live-action film came only two years later with writer James Gunn, director Raja Gosnell, and the whole original cast returning. In MonstersUnleashed, an Evil Masked Figure (Scott McNeal) brings Mystery Inc.’s deadliest enemies back to life while TV journalist Heather Jasper Howe (Alicia Silverstone) tries to discredit the gang in front of all of Coolsville. Amidst their biggest mystery to date, the team realizes that the monsters are their original enemies’ costumes artificially brought to life by Dr. Jonathan Jacobo (Tim Blake Nelson), who was presumed dead years before.

Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed preserves the outrageous comedy from the first installment and manages to tell its story in a slightly more contained way. Some moments of heartfelt character introspection stand out from any other Scooby-Doo title, such as Shaggy yearning to finally become a real hero and Velma confessing to Daphne that she’s afraid to come out of her “world of logic and facts”. Also, the well-balanced blend of practical effects and CGI still holds up today and succeeds at translating the spooky feel of the original cartoon – with droves of creatures that actually look quite scary like the Cotton Candy Glob and the Tar Monster.

Unfortunately, the film didn’t perform well at the box office and the plans for a third live-action Scooby-Doo film, which was set to dive even deeper into Shaggy and Scooby’s psyche, were scrapped. The criticisms were mostly aimed at the movie’s recurrent gags and the main villain’s illogical plan – but all things considered, those are also two of the countless elements that Monsters Unleashed faithfully brought straight from the original cartoon.

From an absurdly fun Supernatural crossover to appearances in comic books alongside The Flintstones and even TV movies with Batman, Scooby-Doo has become a long-lasting franchise that retains its charm with every new iteration, regardless of how far-fetched its concept may sound at first. The Mystery Inc. gang has solved countless mysteries in all kinds of media so far, but two live-action theatrical films and a 3D animated movie can still be just the beginning of a more successful presence on mainstream cinema.

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