Oh yeah, I agree that we always have the option of shunning such movies in the likelihood that they'll do our fond memories a disservice, but nonetheless it's often rather painful seeing something you have some kind of attachment to revving itself up to crash and burn, regardless of whether or not you actually watch the end result or not. And perhaps it's also a tad irritating when Hollywood has to plough endlessly through antiquated franchises in order to make its money, rather than trying to entice audiences with any fresh or interesting new ideas. That in mind, inspiration
can come from a variety of sources, and there are certainly examples of TV shows which have been the foundations for quality films (I love
the Untouchables...to be fair I've never watched the original series, but I think it stands as a fine film on it's own). It's all a matter of execution, I guess.
Concerning the
Scooby Doo movie, for starters I think they could have done a lot better if they'd done away with that obnoxious two-minute farting contest (I don't remember there being anything of that ilk in the cartoon series, but maybe I can be proved wrong). True, it was a very small component of the film overall, but somehow it managed to burn itself onto my conscious more violently than anything else in the picture. Maybe that's my own problem, but I found that scene to be in bad taste and painfully intrusive.
I'll credit them that they went to more effort to capture and enhance the human characters' personalities than the
Garfield movie even came close to, but overall I think the mistake the Scooby Doo movie made was to focus too much on trying to appease modern day youngsters with endless crude humour and far-out plot development that seemed at odds with the original cartoon (I remember reading a review in Empire that pretty much summed up how I feel on the matter; "they forgot the rule that all "ghosts" must really be disgruntled caretakers running around in masks"), whilst going equally overboard with the ironic parodies designed to appeal to the cynical adults in the audience, to the point where the campy, spooky adventure that marked the TV series got engulfed somewhere in between. Judging from the opening sequence, one of the film's central jokes appeared to be that we'd actually missed the more familiar adventure story we'd come to see, and were getting something more warped and disconcerting in its place, and it wasn't a joke I was really inclined to appreciate (not because I'm particularly conservative on matters of how Scooby Doo should be portrayed - I was always a casual viewer at best - but because their alternative kind of adventure just wasn't my cup of tea). Admittedly, the film's biggest plot twist...
Spoiler Below (the one involving that little scrapper who no one - to my knowledge - actually likes)
...did help to enliven the conclusion a little and came close to making the whole affair worthwhile, but I personally think that a storyline a lot closer to that of Old Man Smithers wouldn't have gone amiss. True, no doubt it would have been predictable as hell, but with all the right moves it there's a chance that it could also have been a fair bit of fun.
EDIT: That said, the existence of
Scooby Doo movie was completely vindicated for me by a brief moment in
Looney Tunes: Back in Action..."Like, what was that? You made me sound like a total space cadet, man! If you goof on me in the sequel, I'm coming after you!"
