Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Incorporated gang have been solving spooky hijinks since 1969, but with their first ever theatrical animated feature Scoob! they’re about to take on their biggest, most personal mystery yet. And it’s not just their most global adventure, it’s giving the long-running franchise a dose of one of the biggest forces in filmmaking today – superheroes, of course!
“I guess our new movie is an origin story,” Shaggy says in the new Scoob! trailer. “Every hero should have one,” Scooby-Doo replies while munching down some popcorn.
Indeed, the new film from director Tony Cervone looks to dig into the origins of the Scooby Gang, from how Scooby-Doo and Shaggy became BFFs (and an answer to the old “What came first, Scooby or the Scooby Snacks?” question) to the very first spooky mystery that brought the gang together on a fateful Halloween.
“We see how they met, we see how they met the gang”, Cervone said during a recent visit to the Scoob! editing room. “We'd see why this weird little group of mystery solvers form to begin with and then then we go into a mystery that is more personal than one we've before, because it involves them. One of the keys to the mystery, is one of the gang.”
And that mystery is taking the gang to exciting new places – for starters, an honest-to-god spaceship, the Falcon Fury, where Scooby-Doo and Shaggy come face-to-face with fellow Hanna-Barbera classic animated characters Dynomutt and the Blue Falcon. Voiced by Ken Jeong and Mark Wahlberg, respectively, the dynamic duo aren’t just a perfectly matched foil Shaggy and Scooby, they’re a shortcut into the world of superhero cinema.
“I love superheroes. So it was kind of like, Oh brilliant, it was a new sandbox or play in a little bit,” Cervone said. “This superhero thing, also, let us go more global, too,” added producer Pam Coats. “It's hard to hop from country to country in the Mystery Machine, right? So then you put the Mean Machine and the Falcon Fury in there and the world opens more easily to you. That's been fun playing around with different locations.”
This isn’t the first time the Scooby Gang has come face-to-face with superheroes, in fact there isn’t much they haven’t seen over the decades, from the classic creatures like vampires and the Chupacabra, to the world of WWE and even rock ‘n roll icons KISS (Scooby-Doo! & KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery was directed by Cervone himself.) In 2018, the gang crossed over with Batman in Scooby-Doo! and Batman: The Bold and the Brave. But in Scoob!, Dynomutt and the Blue Falcon offer an opportunity for Warner Bros. to tap into their Hanna-Barbera catalogue for a new superhero universe all their own.
In the footage we saw in the edit bay, we got a taste of the personality we're gonna get from Dynomutt and Blue Falcon and it might be a little different from what fans of the old-school cartoons are expecting -- or as the character himself says it, "This ain't your daddy's Blue Falcon." “I love Blue Falcon and it was fun to do a different Blue Falcon," Cervone said. Wahlberg's take on the character skews ridiculous, and as we learned in the footage, it's not the original Blue Falcon but his "large adult son," who is carrying on the mantle for his father (who retired). And it turns out Dynomutt doesn't have a whole lot of patience for his old partner's kid. Ad yes, that's the original Dynomutt, though his personality might be a bit different. "You think of this as like Dynomutt's been updated over the years and somehow got more and more cynical."
But that new potential for expansion and reinvention doesn't stop with the Falcon Fury and Cervone teased a bit of that new universe, hinting that Scoob! exists somewhat in its own timeline. "If you want to get super granular, I do think there are different timelines within the property," he explained. "This universe is not exactly the classic universe, it’s not the Mystery Incorporated, this is kind of its own universe." That opens up an opportunity for a whole new world of adventures (where any ol' Hanna-Barbera character may pop up along the way.) "I feel that it's a rich universe, they could go anywhere with it in Hanna-Barbera," he said.
Scoob! arrives in theaters on May 15.