Written by Musgo Del Jefe
Scooby-Doo! Where are you? Or should I say "What's happened to you?" This October brings what has become an annual event - the release of a Scooby-Doo direct-to-video release. This year's movie, Scooby-Doo! and the Goblin King is the 12th release of its kind since the 1998 comeback, Scooby-Doo On Zombie Island. Last year at this time I was heaping praise upon Chill Out, Scooby-Doo. Today I'm asking these son-of-a-guns, "What the heck happened?"
Scooby-Doo! and the Goblin King starts at the Coolsville (c'mon already) Halloween Carnival. Shaggy and Scooby upset a magician, the Amazing Krudsky, by exposing him as a fake. Krudsky decides to get his "revenge" by becoming the Goblin King. Krudsky sets about capturing a faerie who will lead him to the goblin where he can steal the scepter and get the "power of Halloween." I'm not even making any of this up, so far. This is the worst character motivation I've seen since The Adventures Of Pluto Nash.
Shaggy and Scooby end up in a magic shop in the film's first nod to Harry Potter. It is here that the shop owner informs them of their mission to save Coolsville and their friends by stopping the Goblin King. In the film's second nod to Harry Potter (when in doubt, steal from what's popular with the kids these days, right?) they are taken to the goblin land on a train that might as well have Knight Bus written on it. As we follow Shaggy and Scooby into the faerie world, we sadly realize that Fred, Daphne and Velma will be making nothing more than a guest appearance in this film.
The interaction of the whole cast is one thing that made these later movies so interesting. Even the recurring character of Del Chillman gave the older characters someone interesting to play off of. Getting back to just Scooby and Shaggy leaves only two predictable jokes - the two are either really scared or really hungry. And sometimes both.
The quest to save the faerie world still could have been entertaining. Dropped into this strange world, Shaggy and Scooby could easily have followed a Wizard Of Oz-type plot, making friends along the way to battling the Goblin King and saving both the faerie world and their own world. But the plot doesn't choose to become that interesting.
In one of the better visual jokes of the film, the two take a magic potion to sneak closer to the Goblin King to steal his scepter. Scooby turns into Velma and Shaggy turns into Daphne. Unfortunately, the scene is wasted. In what quickly becomes cheap and lazy plot turns, the two are revealed to be themselves before they can steal the scepter. Oddly, the meeting they are sneaking into looks exactly like the Pagan meeting in the Dragnet movie.
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