Movie Review: Aloha, Scooby Doo!

I’ve got two girls at home—one princess, 6, and one would-be paleontologist, 5—and I’ve been trying to wean them off of Disney for a while now.  I mean, the princess movies are okay, but they aren’t what I’d call empowering.  They don’t teach much in the way of self-reliance.  And I want my girls to at least get some exposure to heroes who kick ass.  Or, at a minimum, resolve their own problems in a way that’s more proactive than waiting for their respective princes to arrive.  Hence last week’s showing of Starblazers: The Quest for Iscandar (Disc 1).  Thankfully, my younger daughter, the would-be paleontologist, has taken a decided interest in Scooby Doo.  So this week, I streamed an older Scooby direct-to-DVD movie off of Netflix for her called Aloha, Scooby Doo!

Of the Scooby direct-to-DVD movies that we’ve seen, Aloha, Scooby Doo! is easily the most traditional in terms of its plot and structure.  The gang is out someplace doing something that’s fun and basically touristy, in this case visiting Hawaii as part of Daphne’s swimwear design business, when they run into a monster-mystery.  Aloha’s monster is the dreaded Wiki Tiki, a radical native Hawaiian surf zombie dedicated to scaring beachgoers on behalf of the local surfing scene’s racial purity.  Which is to say that the Wiki Tiki wants to keep the beach for locals only.  And as you might expect, wackiness ensues.

For better or worse, Aloha, Scooby Doo! is exactly what you expect it to  be.  The story plays out over a little more than an hour, during which time it strictly follows the beats of a typical episode of Scooby Doo, Where Are You?  This gives time for any number of chase scenes—in a cave, at a luau, out in the pipeline, through the jungle—and all of that is fun.  Several of the set pieces are clever, and the usual sight-gags abound.  Certainly, my daughter liked it.  She bounced up and down, pointing and screaming at the TV almost the whole time.  Well, that’s why we watch, right?  As for me, I’ve always loved the goofy visual comedy of Scooby Doo, and I knew what I was getting myself into when I turned the movie on in the first place.  The only part that I found annoying at all was the mechanic of the eventual reveal.  Put simply, setting that scam up would’ve cost twice what the crooks were looking to clear via its execution.  But, y’know, that’s a common problem in adult crime thrillers, too.  At least Scooby Doo has the grace to be up front with its goofiness.

Aloha, Scooby Doo! is a fine addition to a generally entertaining and inoffensive series of kids’ TV movies.  If you or your kids are fans of Scooby Doo, and you enjoyed the traditional story structure of the original TV show but wish they’d made more episodes, then Aloha, Scooby Doo! is for you.  We’ve seen four or five of these Scooby movies now, and while I can’t say that this one was the best, it certainly wasn’t bad.  I enjoyed it, my daughter enjoyed it, and we got it for free via Netflix live streaming.  I don’t know what else you could ask for out of a Scooby Doo cartoon movie than that it entertained Emma and me on a rainy Sunday afternoon.