Scooby-Doo in Arabian Nights

I am really sorry guys, but I didn't like this film at all. I love Hanna Barbera and I love Scooby Doo, but this movie was not great at all. In fact a vast majority was awful in my opinion, which is a real shame as I genuinely wanted to like this movie. You see it had so much promise, Shaggy, Scooby, Yogi Bear, these are all great characters, the concept was good, the voice cast is of high calibre and the trailer actually looked as though it was going to be a half-decent movie.

So were there any redeeming qualities? The music score was very energetic and rousing and did have a sense of authenticity, almost like a Carl Stalling score in those great Looney Tunes cartoons. Plus it was a delight to see all those characters.

However, these characters deserved much better. Shaggy and Scooby are both woefully underused and Yogi is saddled with very lacklustre material. And the other characters? The girl who the prince falls in love with is poorly drawn while the villain is little more than a stereotype and a blatant rip-off of Jafar with a bit of Dick Dastardly in his design too.

That's not all that's wrong with this film. The animation is shoddy, with wonkily drawn characters, rushed backgrounds, flat colouring and all-over-the place editing. The dialogue is unfunny and forced, the sight gags are unoriginal, the pacing is both rushed and pedestrian, the sound effects are misplaced and the story is just a gender-reversed tale of Aladdin except one that starts off on the wrong foot and never recovers while the segments about pirates and Shaggy disguising himself as a princess are pretty lacking in originality or entertainment too and the parts telling Caliph telling the stories isn't exactly unfamiliar territory, see 1001 Rabbit Tales, it's not perfect but the links and the stories told are much more amusing(in my opinion that is). Plus I am afraid to say the voice work was poor, even with Casey Kasem and Don Messick who were given little worthwhile to work with.

So overall, hugely disappointing and a failure of what happened to be a good idea. 2/10 Bethany Cox