Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) - A Perfect Halloween Feature

Scooby-Doo Movies are pretty much a dime a dozen, wow that line feels familiar. Back all the way in December of 2018, I had the itching to watch a couple movies that I was nostalgic about, that is what pretty much started this blog. The second movie I ever reviewed here was Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, a charming, if a little sloppy Television Film. However, it wasn't until the late 1990s and early 2000s that Scooby-Doo movies would become dominating, all starting with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island in 1998, I'm actually not that much older than this movie. I think it's about time that I give a Scooby-Doo movie a better written review, and it should be perfect for Halloween.

The movie actually takes place in a bit of a time jump, if the Mystery Gang is high-school age in the original show, here they're all adults. Daphne, being fed up with how every mystery they solve ended up being a guy in a mask, takes on a different job as a TV Reporter, with Fred being her cameraman. While Daphne desires to find a real ghost, Fred gets the old gang back together as they explore the hauntings of New Orleans. After a montage of duds, they get a tip from a woman named Lena that a local island holds a real haunted house. I like that the plot is not too out of the ordinary for a Scooby-Doo episode, there is still a mystery and still a bunch of ghouls, only this time, they aren't guys in masks this time... well by some technicality the bad guys are people in a mask, but spoilers. The movie really is asking, "What would happen if the Mystery Gang was up against real monsters?" and I think they nailed it.

None of the characters feel out of character here, Velma is still the inquisitive one, Fred has a thing where he always tries to find logical explanations to everything, which is fitting since he's seen all of this before, so, being one of the more logical of the crew, he would try to find logic in everything. Shaggy and Scooby are still Shaggy and Scooby, and Daphne had a bit of an upgrade, going back to the original 1969 series (Yes, Scooby-Doo is that old) I really do struggle to think of what Daphne offers to the group, but in this movie she is very much taking charge, you could say that she's slipped into the leader role of the gang, it's actually kind of refreshing, and it makes sense given the trajectory of the character arcs. Daphne, going into TV hosting, would be taking more a lead role in this case. On top of that, we have some new characters, and I like that they throw red herrings our way with them, though I can't spill too much here, again spoilers.

One thing I also want to comment on is the voice cast, because this is probably as good of a voice cast for the Mystery Gang as possible, Frank Welker being the only person to reprise his role from the original show, and most of the other cast being replaced for one reason or another. Billy West steps in as Shaggy, B. J. Ward steps in as Velma, and Mary Kay Bergman might be my favourite Daphne, I'll have to do a lot of comparisons, but she is currently at the top for me. Don Messick, the original voice of Scooby-Doo, passed away in 1997, so he was the only original actor they couldn't bring back with Casey Kasem refusing to reprise the role unless they made some changes to Shaggy's character (Honestly, it sounds like he was being a bit of a diva), Heather North being replaced after only a day of recording, and Nicole Jaffe being in retirement at this period of time. Anyway, Scott Innes steps in as Scooby-Doo in this movie, and he's pretty good, I grew up with Frank Welker being Scooby, but Scott does a good job. Other voice actors like Adrienne Barbeau, Tara Strong, Cam Clarke and Jim Cummings all do great jobs, and a Mark Hamill cameo is always admired.

What is also worth admiring is the animation, done by Japanese Studio Mook Animation. I have said before that going Direct-to-Video or DVD is usually a better option for movies based on cartoons, because it allows them to keep the style they have without having to give it that "Cinematic Shine", I think this movie is a good balance of the two. It definitely looks better than any other Scooby-Doo product prior, and that is a bit of a curse as much as a blessing. The animation looks great, the zombies look wonderfully decayed, but, and I am fully aware this may just be because I've been reading Uzumaki lately, there were some scenes that did squick me out a little. I wouldn't say this movie is entirely on par with the work of Junji Ito, but there is some light body-horror in here. There were multiple times throughout this movie I just had to squirm and go "Ick!", but in this case I am willing to say that it is a good thing.

And because I know some people will be shocked if I don't mention it, the music in this movie is pretty great. Everyone goes crazy for the song "It's Terror Time Again" by Skycycle, and yeah, it is a pretty great song, though I also quite like "The Ghost Is Here", I think that one should also be put on some Halloween Playlists.

Honestly, I can list Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island as another movie that I am absolutely shocked was as good as it was, I always heard it was good, but I just figured it was good " by Scooby-Doo standards" which by this point has gotten pretty abysmal, but I'll be damned this one was actually good. A solid mystery, great animation, good amount of light-horrors, a rocking soundtrack, and the delightful characters that we've all grown to... well tolerate at this point, but loved back then. I really do think this is a great movie to put alongside stuff like Hocus Pocus or Coraline for a solid Halloween movie night. I'd say it's not as creepy as Coraline, but I'm not a good judge for that considering. Still, if you are tired of the Hocus Pocus and Corpse Bride and you haven't given this movie a chance, put it on, I think you'll be shockingly surprised.

Re-Evaluating Zootopia in a Post ACAB Climate

Earlier this year, I did a review of the movie Zootopia, largely because I wanted to analyze its connections and differences between the movie Elemental. I mention this because, there has been an interesting kind of shift in how some people look at the movie this decade. I stand by what I said in the review, but there is one aspect I didn't really touch upon, and that is largely due to me not thinking about it while writing the review. See, in the 2020s, a movement was started to highlight the many flaws of the police force, largely centered on the United States, but as a Canadian I can also ask where the Hell is the RCMP on all the missing First Nations women? This particular movement has been nothing new, we've been saying similar things for ages, but now it had a real name behind it, ACAB, which is an abbreviation which I would love to share, but you probably already know what it means and frankly I still have my no swearing rule. This movement has also made some people change the way they look at media, and Zootopia, starring a police officer, has been one of those things people have started to look at differently, and I think the first thing I want to say is, I get it.

The perception of art changes for many reasons. I remember on my side Tumblr, I do a thing called the "Bad Album Cover Advent Calendar", which is where I share a bunch of hilarious, ugly or weird album covers. One of the covers was David Crosby's If Only I Could Remember My Name, a ridiculously cheesy album cover that I began to see in a different light because, not too long after I planned the selection that year, David Crosby passed away. This is something that a lot of critics tend not to discuss, because our jobs are to talk about movies, and we have to watch a lot of them, so we don't really get the chance to re-watch a movie and re-evaluate it. You really do learn the hard way plenty of times that your initial impressions usually don't hold up, and what influences these factors can be a lot of things, including major events, a death of someone involved in the work or in your life, and yes, the current political climate can also be a major factor in how a movie is perceived.

I think the reason the ACAB movement didn't occur to me while writing my review is largely because the movie is about prejudice, and not just the prejudice that Judy faces, but also about Judy facing her own prejudices. Something I did neglect to mention in my initial review was that Judy did have to face her own prejudice towards, and I really hate that the movie uses this term, predators, particularly Foxes. I do want to state that a movie where a cop realizes and deals with their own prejudices would probably be very much appreciated in a political environment where we're trying to make the police force admit to and deal with their own prejudices, however, I think the reason people aren't seeing it this way is largely tied into my biggest criticism towards the movie, the world-building really sucked.

To quote myself; "I think the problem is that they wanted to portray Zootopia as an ideal and not a metaphor, so places where they could easily show prejudices being prominent are not really there."
I say this because throughout Zootopia, the movie, they constantly want us to believe that characters like Nick, Finnick and Duke need to be conmen because the rest of the world doesn't trust them, but because these are the only three characters we see as conmen types, it hurts the main theme of the movie. Because they wanted to portray Zootopia, the world, as an ideal, a Zoo Utopia if you will, they didn't include any background details or off-hand dialogue or any other kind of hint that this kind of prejudice was really happening, like how we see the kind of prejudice that Judy faces or the kind that Bellwether faces. Ultimately, Nick is the only character we really see how the prejudice he faced really affected him, how he decided to play into the stereotypes rather than how Judy chose to fight the stereotype everyone saw her as.

This also brings up another point, which group really was the oppressed in Zootopia? Because we're lead to believe it's the prey being oppressed, with Bellwether's villain reveal and motivation being the biggest clue, but again, because the movie's worldbuilding is lacking, we don't see many cases of rabbits or sheep or mice or whatever being dismissed, being denied anything, or anything that could be seen as discrimination. Even the prejudice Judy faces, it's not like she's really facing that much. Like, she is allowed in the academy to start with, and sure the place is not built for her or others like her, but it's more likely that this was an oversight rather than specifically targeting a group of people, like you can easily believe that Judy was the first to not only make it through the academy, but even apply in the first place, and her instructor genuinely seems happy that Judy passed, like yeah she was hard on her, but I can imagine she would be equally hard on other recruits in training, so while Judy did face some prejudice, it really isn't enough to tip the scales.

To bring it up again, Maus did this idea much better, as Art Spiegelman specifically made the Jewish people mice and the Nazi's cats, this made it clear in our minds who was who, which was which, and what side we, as the reader, should be on. Zootopia doesn't really have that, it's kind of difficult to see Judy or Nick as minority figures because the mix of animals in the world kind of dissuades the viewer from thinking about it all in terms of human racism. Is Nick meant to be a minority? If he is, what minority is he specifically? If he was a desert Fox like Finnick, or had a POC voice-actor, it might have been easier to identify the struggle. Zootopia kind of wants to have its cake and eat it too in this regard, it wants us to identify with the world and characters, but it also doesn't want us to see it in terms of the real-world. It wants us to identify with the struggle and connect it to prejudice, without really connecting it to any one prejudice in particular.

To be fair, it isn't like police prejudice is the only prejudice out there, or even represented in the movie, so it could be very easy for anyone to imagine Nick as any another distrusted minority, like a Middle Eastern or Trans person. I think the idea that Nick, and all the characters of Zootopia, have to specifically stand in for one group of people is stupid, but the problem ultimately is that on some level, Zootopia does want us to think of it in these kind of terms, and it isn't good at doing it. With the whole, mistrusted dynamic, Nick could easily be seen as "The Minority Character" while Judy could be "The White Character", but with the whole predator/prey dynamic the movie implements, the roles very well could and should be reversed. Which is a problem because the police force was predominately filled with prey type animals, while the big criminals and con-artists are predator type animals.

One argument I did think about while proofreading this article was, "It's not that the movie wants you to think about it terms of predators and prey, but more of big animals with all the power and small animals with none of it." I thought about it, and I have to come to the conclusion that everybody understood the point they wanted to make, but nobody understood how they wanted to make it. In terms of Big animals vs Small animals, you could view the movie in those terms, but again, we don't see any ways that small animals are being discriminated against, they seem perfectly accommodated in Zootopia, and if they did try to do a "big animals vs small animals" thing, they really didn't do a good job of it when you consider that Bellwether was targeting predator animals indiscriminately, usage of that word being ironic.

I do want to stress that I don't hate Zootopia, but the worldbuilding is flawed and that leads to the message being flawed. I think lumping Zootopia alongside with other quote "Cop-aganda" is missing the point a little, the movie is about prejudice, I don't think it's spreading any message beyond that. With all that being said, I do have to think that the message being relatively weak is why Zootopia gets considered "Cop-aganda", it is confused in how it wants to get its message across. I said in my review of the movie that the more effective a story about prejudice is, the more adult it has to be. I said that because when you aim for an audience that isn't sheltered and impressionable, you have a lot more tools at your disposal, in keeping with this metaphor, it feels like Zootopia had some tools, but not enough of the right tools for the job. Should we keep giving the side eye to Zootopia in our ACAB climate? I'm not gonna answer that because honestly I don't really care, it's Zootopia, not Birth of a Nation.

Small tangent, but can we also stop that meme with Nick Wilde and Robin Hood, please? Yes, Nick became a cop, but Robin Hood was a royalist, so unless you want to convince people that Monarchies are good, stop it.

Lightyear (2022) - A Standard Action/Science-Fiction Flick For Better and For Worse

Thankfully this time I don't have anyone I owe an apology to. It really does surprise me just how bad of a year Disney had in 2022, not all of their cinematic releases were bad, but many had some sort of baggage attached to them, Turning Red and Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers being the most notable examples, and most of the movies just had terrible advertising, looking at you Bob's Burger's Movie and Strange World. I will admit, 2023 and 2024 have kind of forced me to re-evaluate how I saw 2022's animated feature line-up, and since their has been some ramblings about Lightyear again, I figured, even though I would like to wait five years before reviewing a movie I did a First Impressions blog on, that now would be a good opportunity to give Lightyear another look, and see if my initial impressions hold up.

Lightyear is the origin movie of the beloved Pixar character, Buzz Lightyear, and follows he and his crew as they become stranded on an alien planet. Thanks to some time dilation brought on by FTL Travel, Buzz finds himself years ahead in the future, and his crew decided to stay on the planet instead of leaving. After one more test for hyperspace travel, Buzz finds himself further into the future and leading a small junior troop of trainees to take down the invading robot army from Zurg. So... itty bitty thing, some people may view this plot as a bit complicated, and to be fair I may have put more description into it than necessary, but I kind of followed it decently fine. I grew up with science-fiction, Star Wars was the big one, but I also knew Red Dwarf, Stargate SG-1, and knew of Star Trek, though I wouldn't get into it until at least Young Adulthood. I don't find much of this all that confusing, if anything, it's kind of plain and standard for science-fiction.

I think some people might have expected, or even wanted, this movie to evoke the vibes of 90s Science-Fiction movies, to which I have to reply... why? Like what was big in sci-fi in 1995? Congo, Johnny Mnemonic, Judge Dredd, Species, Tank Girl, Waterworld, did you really want Lightyear to be reminiscent of those movies? Like 1990s Sci-Fi was actually pretty lousy when you look at what was actually released, yes there was lots of good stuff, but your Jurassic Park's and Freaked's were few and far between. Then again, it isn't also like they were really trying to evoke the feelings on 90s Sci-Fi, a lot of the writing and cinematography is very much 2010s sci-fi. Whether or not this is a bad thing I think is perfectly fine to argue about, personally, I can see both sides of the argument, this is meant to be a movie from the 1990s, the opening text straight up says this is the movie that Andy saw in the theatres, so a more 90s style would have given this movie more of an identity. However, once again, science-fiction movies in the 1990s sucked, at least sucks by today's standards, so I honestly don't think it would have made the movie that much better.

What would have made the movie better is a change in plot, because I really liked the relationship Buzz had with Commander Hawthorne at the start of the movie. I could tell they were friends for a long time and it did hurt Buzz to see how much of his friend's life he was missing out on. That montage in the first third of the movie, I would have loved to see that get fleshed out into the entire movie. Not that the other characters are bad, but they are kind of standard. You have your cowardly character, your gruff character that's just done with everything, your character that has high aspirations and needs to learn to overcome those few things that hold them back. Of course, you also have your twist villain, I'm not gonna bother hiding any spoilers here because, most people already know this, but Zurg is actually a future Buzz Lightyear. I think this irritates a lot of people because it means we have to put the relationship between Zurg and Buzz in previous iterations (most notably the Star Command TV Show) into a different light. I don't really mind it, but then again I never watched Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. So, on the one hand it's not a terrible twist villain, but on the other hand, there had to have been a better option here, right?

Speaking of better options, the animation in this movie is lacking. Not the animation itself, it's pretty solid, it's Pixar standard, no I'm talking more about the colour palette. It is largely brown and yellow, and it's just no pleasant to look at. Thankfully, when the palette does change, like the bright colours of hyperspace or the blues of the night, it doesn't look too bad. I feel like everything about this movie is just a one to three steps short of everyone's expectations, and I get it, after Soul and Luca we were kind of expecting something great, right? Well... I wasn't, I don't want to come off as saying "I knew better" because frankly, I didn't watch Soul or Luca, so obviously I didn't, but I did expect a decently entertaining movie to welcome one of the best animation studios back onto the big screen. This is a very, temper your expectations kind of movie.

I think therein lies the crux of why I don't hate Lightyear, if you're anticipating a half-way decent action/sci-fi flick, you're gonna find it here. I think the biggest problem is that people expect a lot of Pixar, and also have a lot of emotional ties to the Toy Story franchise. It really doesn't help that as far as canon is concerned, we're actually getting the Buzz Lightyear story in reverse, like we got the Star Command series first, then this movie, plus four Toy Story movies, so we can't really separate Toy Story or Buzz Lightyear of Star Command from this movie. I think if this wasn't tied to Toy Story, and was just a dumb sci-fi popcorn flick, people would have reacted much better, so I really don't know what to suggest here. Overall, I don't think it's a bad movie, trust me, I've seen much worse, but it definitely isn't one of Pixar's best. I'll go Slight Recommendation because I think, in the right mindset you can enjoy this movie, but even then, there is probably a better option for you out there.