Deep within the abandoned amusement park that is the Scooby-Doo franchise, Old Mr. Warner Bros. hatched a plan to move away from cheap nostalgia toward developing new creations—and he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids who continue to make Smurfs and Alvin The Chipmunks movies profitable. So instead he’s got a new scheme, firing up his film projectors to create another pirate ghost of a Hanna Barbera cartoon to plunder your money, developing an updated theatrical version of the classic show about a group of teenage drug casualties sitting in an abandoned, moldering van somewhere in the woods, having shared hallucinations of catching “ghosts”—who are really just representations of the authority figures they fear turning into—with a talking dog. It’s for children.
Unlike Warner Bros.’ previous Scooby-Doo revivals, this new version doesn’t promise to have any elements of live-action or work for Freddie Prinze Jr. Instead it will be purely “animated”—if impurely CGI, most likely—as well as written by Matt Lieberman, the screenwriter who’s carved out a niche with upcoming updates of family-friendly films like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and Short Circuit. So don’t go looking for any knowingly adult in-jokes hiding behind the rubbery mask of its computer animation either, if you kids know what’s good for you.