I Checked Out The WWE Scooby Doo Movie

So I checked out the WWE Scooby Doo movie tonight and was actually entertained. If this isn’t a good enough tease: John Cena hits the Five Knuckle Shuffle on a bear.

I won’t go into a point by point plot synopsis but the basic premise is pretty basic: Shaggy, Scooby and the gang win tickets to Wrestlemania when Scooby wins a WWE video game contest. They go to WWE City (more on that later) and are attacked by a ghost bear. Scooby is accused of stealing the WWE Title belt and has to team up with Shaggy in a handicap last man standing match against Kane in the opening match of Wrestlemania to clear his name. It’s law in WWE City. Seriously. This leads into a plot to destroy Wrestlemania by the villain, who is of course revealed at the end.

If you’ve seen a Scooby Doo movie, I’m sure you get the story structure as it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but this time it’s with WWE. That’s my world and there were some rather interesting points to it which I’ll list off here. There won’t be much context to these but you’ll see them if you watch the movie, which you should.

There’s a WWE City with a 50 foot HHH statue pointing the way. You can totally imagine Vince opening a WWE theme park one day. It comes complete with the Vince Hotel, Mr. McMahon’s Waffle House and Tombstone Tacos. There’s also a picture of the WWE Title carved into a mountain. I would so go there every summer.

This isn’t WWE related but I took notes chronologically. As they go on their trip, it turns out Shaggy forgot to pack the bags. Shaggy: “What difference does it make? We wear the same clothes every day.” That got a good chuckle out of me.

The animation on Miz and Cena is off. Miz is far worse than Cena but they messed up Cena’s hair badly. That’s hard to do as Cena has a really simple haircut. Christian was off as well.

Oddly enough, Sin Cara is arguably the most important wrestler in the movie. He’s at worst second and is about equal to Cena as far as importance. If this were based on the current roster, he’d be Daniel Bryan. HHH is in the movie but has about as many lines as Brodus Clay. He’s not featured for the most part save for a few moments that had to be overdone on purpose.

There’s a scene at a house show which had HHH, Vince, and commentary from Cole. There’s also a running gag where Cole gets annoyed that his announce table keeps getting broken which made me smile. Oh and it was the Raw Titantron instead of the house show one.

One of the problems with this that is going to date it slightly is the title belt, which is a big plot point, is the old spinner belt instead of the new one. The new belt has been out for over a year. You would think they could have changed that in time.

There’s a training area that has the old Smackdown fist set as a backdrop. Then later on there’s another version of it where that set is the only wall and the ring is outside otherwise. That was rather odd. However, we get a training montage with AJ getting our heroes in shape, set to Let’s Light It Up. Shaggy describes AJ as Kane wearing lipstick, which I’m surprised hasn’t happened at some point throughout his career.

Speaking of odd, the Ghost Bear keeps changing size. At one point it’s the size of a human and other times he’s about 10ft tall. The same is true to a less degree about the wrestlers, as Cena goes from being about his usual height to roughly 6’8.

At one point Shaggy calls Vince the Higher Power.

You know it’s coming, but let’s get to the John Cena superhero power list. At various points in this movie, Cena displays the powers of producing house show tickets at a moment’s notice, shove boulders around (with his theme music playing in the middle of a cave), falling asleep after being rammed into a wall, lift trucks out of ditches with his bare hands, and speaking masked luchador. That’s a quote from the movie, as Sin Cara doesn’t speak a line in the movie but explains the backstory while Cena translates. We also get a good tagline for Cena: “He’s Cenamazing!” That’s a t-shirt if I’ve ever heard one.

Wrestlemania’s opening match is an unannounced handicap last man standing match which is later put inside a cage. I checked the credits for Vince Russo but he wasn’t listed as a writer. Must be under a pseudonym.

To wrap it up, hearing Vince McMahon chant SCOOBY DOO is bizarre.

The movie is good if you turn your brain off and have fun while considering it’s made for eight year olds. They throw in enough stuff to make older fans smile and it’s your usual Scooby Doo style move. I was only a mid level fan of the character but it was entertaining enough and runs about 80 minutes before the credits. Check it out on Netflix or Red Box (assuming it’s there) on whatever newfangled video rental system you people have today.

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