Set
Visit of Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
On the
61st day of its 71-day production schedule, I arrived on the set
of next spring’s big blockbuster sequel, “Scooby
Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.” With its enormously
vast sets and high-profile cast, which includes Sarah
Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., Alicia Silverstone
and Seth Green, this reported $80 million production
seems destined to do gangbuster business with its family-aimed
crowd.
In their new mystery, the Mystery
Inc. team, which includes Scooby (voiced by Neil Fanning),
Daphne (Gellar), Fred (Prinze Jr), Velma (Linda Cardellini)
and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard), confront an anonymous
masked villain who is plotting to take over the city of Coolsville
by wreaking mayhem with a monster machine that creates Mystery
Inc.’s classic foes like the the Pterodactyl Ghost, the
Black Knight Ghost, the Creeper, Captain Cutler and the 10,000
Volt Ghost. Meanwhile, the gang’s detecting abilities are
scrutinized by relentless reporter Heather Jasper-Howe (Silverstone),
aided by museum curator Patrick Wisely (Green) and thwarted by
the nasty Jeremiah Wickles (Peter Boyle).
 Production
commenced on this sequel in April of this year in Vancouver, BC,
Canada. The original creative team, consisting of director Raja
Gosnell, writer James Gunn and producers
Charles Roven and Richard Suckle,
have all been brought back to continue the story of our mystery-solving
pals that struck such a chord with its audience (to the tune of
over $250 million worldwide at the box office) the first time
around.
The sets are both extravagant
and innovative, as production designer Bill Boes
got to improve on the work he did with the first “Scooby”
film. “There was a lot of things we didn’t
get to do in the first one…in this one, we got to conceptualize
where [Mystery Inc.] live and work, which is cool.”
Boes explains to LatinoReview.com, “There’s
a lot more elements in this…there seems to be a lot of classic
Scooby Doo moments.” Many of the sets have
a late 60’s, early 70’s feel to them, especially the
Mystery Inc. headquarters, which is filled with orangey-Barbarella
colors and space-age velvet furniture which could have come straight
out of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There are no straight
lines, he tells us, in the Mystery Inc. headquarters, and the
set looks very much like a retro/futuristic sci-fi movie that
would have come from the 60’s. “We took
a lot of reference from the 70’s and the 60’s because
the show came out in 1969 and we’re trying to keep the retro
flavor in there,” comments Boes. Were there
more sets to be built this time around? “We
have 60 sets on this one and last time we had 50…there’s
a larger variety of things in this one.” Other
sets, like the Mine Shaft set, were partially shot on location.
One shot at Vancouver’s Brittania Beach, which actually
has a real old mine, was allowed to be used for the movie. Another
set is Jeremiah Wickles’ haunted mansion. Long hallways,
filled with stone faces, candlesticks, dusty old books and cobwebs,
outline this set, which is strikingly similar to Disneyland’s
“Haunted Mansion” ride.
The Coolsonian Criminology Museum
is the biggest set of them all. A giant soundstage houses this
massive interior set, where the movie will open up. In this scene,
the Mystery Inc. gang are being honored for their detective work
by the city as all of their captured ghosts are on display in
glass cases for the public to view. But all hell breaks loose
when somebody with the intention of destroying Mystery Inc.’s
reputation sets free all of the captured ghouls.
 Almost
10 original “Scooby Doo” ghosts are
brought back from the original cartoon for this scene. But only
a handful, such as the Pterodactyl Ghost and the 10,000 Volt Ghost
(which will, among others, both be CGI), will get significant
screen time in the film. This should bring back a sense of nostalgia
for old fans of the series that was arguably lacking from the
first movie. “One of the things that I was hoping
that we could do is actually pull some of the nostalgic elements
of the cartoon into the movie,” explains producer
Richard Suckle. “You know, that’s one
of the things that we’re hopefully doing successfully, which
is including some of the very famous monsters from the original
show.” “It’s really
fun, as a fan of the cartoon, to see those monsters come back,”
confides Linda Cardellini, “and I think part
of the fun of ‘Scooby Doo’ is the nostalgia, and for
me, it’s sort of a trip into the nostalgia of ‘Scooby
Doo’ during my childhood.” Sarah Michelle
Gellar comments: “The monsters are great. It
has a real feel for the cartoon…it reminds you. It gives
you something to work off of.” Matthew Lillard
agrees, saying, “It’s very clever. It
brings back elements of the cartoon that people love that we didn’t
necessarily have in the first one. When you see Captain Cutler’s
ghost…and the Black Knight ghost and all these ghosts you
recognize from the series, I think that’s fun and I think
that kids and adults will love that.”
Suckle tells us they are going
to great lengths to give fans of the series a real, genuine look
back at familiar elements that were successful from the original
cartoon. “The first movie was Mystery Inc. going
to the mystery, and this time, in some ways, you can look at it
like the mystery comes to them, by having the movie set in Coolsville,
their backyard, I think that allows us to do some more interesting
things such as we get to go to Mystery Inc.’s offices, and
see what they look like,” he tells us,
“…other things I remember a lot of fans wished we
had in the first movie was the Mystery Machine, and since we had
the gang go to this island, we didn’t really have any reason
to bring the Mystery Machine to the island so you get to really
see the Mystery Machine as a big part of this movie, sort of a
nostalgic element, [in terms of] things that fans of the cartoon
would like to see in the movie, I think that we’ve really
given them a lot more this time out.”
When did the second movie really
start getting into development? “The Saturday
the movie opened up, and we found out how well we did, Lorenzo
DiBonaventura, who was the president of production at the time,
was like ‘Ok! Let’s go!’ but actually before
that, Raja [Gosnell] and I had been talking to James [Gunn] about
what kind of story we would tell…Raja got the idea of, sort
of, including the famous monsters and try to bring this, sort
of, nostalgia element into it, so we had been talking about it,
but the studio’s ‘yeah let’s go’ came,
literally, the Saturday the movie opened.”
Suckle replies. Writer James Gunn: “I got a
call from Lorenzo DiBonaventura on Friday morning, the day the
movie opened up, and when we found out how much the movie made,
he was like ‘We gotta start working on a sequel’ and
my first reaction was, frankly, I couldn’t take it. I had
been working on ‘Scooby Doo 1’ for a long, long time.
But after a month or two months, I really missed everybody and
started having a bunch of ideas for the way things could go. I
saw what I liked about the first movie and I saw what I didn’t
like about the first movie, and I thought there was a real opportunity
to do something that was truer to what people wanted to see and
truer to what I liked.”
 Is
this film going to better than the first? “I
think we have a much better mystery than the first movie…there
wasn’t like a real, clear sense that it could be three different
people…you know it looked like it could be Rowan Atkinson.”
Suckle says. “But this time out, we truly have
three great suspects that I think the audience is going to be
wondering throughout the way, ‘which one of them is behind
it?’” Director Raja Gosnell explains:
“We’re trying to do what we did with the
last movie, but better…we’re not, sort of, hamstrung
by being in an island environment or a theme park environment,
we’re throughout Coolsville so we have a beautiful museum
setting, we have Mystery Inc.’s offices, the haunted mansion…we
all wanted to make a better sequel and we all attacked it with
that in mind.” Gunn agrees, “On
this movie, I’ve went in with a much clearer objective of
just making this a better movie, whether it’s going to make
as much money as the first movie, I don’t know, but I truly
believe that it’s going to be a much stronger film.”
Lillard vehemently concurs that this movie will be superior: “I
guarantee if you ask us all, we are all making a better movie.
Script’s better, we have a better idea. The first time we
kinda got in a logjam, ‘cause we tried to make a movie that
was ‘Shrek’ in its appeal to both adults and kids,
and I think we fuckin’ missed on both ends, we missed both
ways. We kinda, like, screwed up…this time around, I think…I
know we’re making a movie that’s for families that
adults will get a kick out of, but it’s for families. And
having that kind of commitment, that kind of focus is completely
helping out the film. It’s making a better film…the
movie’s gonna make a certain amount of money, again, box-office
wise, but hopefully at the end of the day we won’t be crucified
like we were the first time around.”
 As
Lillard was saying, it was hard with the first film to find what
the tone was going to be, but this time the cast are sure they
know its audience a lot better. “I remember
when I was in ‘Scream 2’ and our whole topic at the
beginning of the movie was how sequels suck and how sequels are
never better than the first one,” Gellar explains.
“I think what we’re seeing is that the
trend is moving away from that and what’s happening, especially
with movies based on previous material, you spend the first 45
minutes to an hour of the first movie setting everything up, whether
it’s ‘Scooby’ or ‘X-Men’ or ‘Spider-Man’…we
weren’t actually sure what our niche was the first time.
Were we a movie for kids? Were we going to be a little more esoteric
and go for a little bit more of an older, more satirical audience?
And we shot everything both ways, and it was really put together
in the edit and really made for a family film. Now coming in,
you know we’re coming in to make a family film, we know
our characters, the story is set and it makes it much easier to
jump into a story.” Cardellini sums up Gellar’s
thoughts: “We weren’t sure exactly what
the audience was…and we found our audience with a younger
crowd.”
The sequel also brings three brand
new cast members into the mix: Alicia Silverstone, Seth Green
and Peter Boyle. These new additions have brought fresh life into
the series. Gosnell explains: “The new supporting
cast…they were great…they’re in some of my favorite
scenes in the movie because they’re, like, fresh characters,
not just goofy sidekicks; they’re living, breathing people
with subtly hidden motives and so I think the mystery elements
of this are much stronger than the first time around…bringing
those three actors on board just elevated the characters and the
material immensely.” In fact, Gunn calls Green
one of the best actors he’s ever worked with. “He’s
a lot of fun…and he really came out to create his own character.”
Cardellini is ecstatic about Green as she tells us, “He’s
really such a nice guy, so easy to work with. It’s fun,
we play Scrabble…a lot,” she laughs.
And Gellar, who also worked with Green on her hugely popular show,
“Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”,
says of Green: “He’s an amazing comedian,
an incredibly gifted comedian and he’s also a really giving
comedian…what Seth does is he tries to make everything funnier.”
She says it’s also been a great experience working with
Boyle and Silverstone. “Alicia’s great.
She’s a really easy-going person…you get Alicia and
Seth to come in and it felt like they’ve been here since
the beginning. And Peter Boyle’s great! Come on, ‘Frankenstein’!”
 Gunn
told us that one of the things that worked the best in the first
film was the relationship between Scooby and Shaggy, so the new
film also has quite a few more scenes with Scooby and Shaggy than
the first. Gosnell calls them the centerpiece of the sequel. Lillard
tells us, “Me and Scooby are best friends…for
me, Scooby and I have a really great emotional blueline through
the film. But it’s also coupled with a lot of big comedy
hi-jink moments.” Working with a CG dog is
extremely difficult for everyone involved, but the person who
has to work with the dog the most is Lillard. He explains what’s
it’s like working with Scooby and if it’s any easier
the second time around. “The leap of faith isn’t
as great, because the first time it was like jumping into the
abyss and you were like ‘I have no idea how this is going
to turn out’, or even if it would work…this time it
is easier because you have an idea of what’s on the other
side.” Lillard adds, laughingly, “And
what’s on the other side is going to upstage me 99% of the
time, and that’s kind of a mean thing to do.”
He also talks about Neil Fanning, who is the voice of Scooby and
on set every single day with the actors, helping them visualize
Scooby being there with them. “Neil is my savior
in particular,” Lillard says, “I
couldn’t do this movie without him. No way, without a doubt.
Not only does he bring life to Scooby as a voice in terms of the
film, but for me, as an actor, he is a tool that I couldn’t
replace.” And is Scooby going to look more
realistic this time? “He is going to look a
lot better in this movie,” says Gosnell. “The
technology of the fur and the wet nose and the eyes…he’s
still going to have the same shape and he’s still going
to be the same character, but the look of him is going to much
stronger.”
There is a strong theme in this
movie and it revolves around being yourself and not worrying what
others think. “The movie’s about being
yourself and being true to who you are,” says
Gunn. Gellar agrees with that theme and relates it to her own
character, Daphne: “I think the first story,
sort of, revolved around Daphne finding her place. That same ‘in-between’
that I think a lot of teenagers and young adults find, which is
‘Where do I fit in? What’s my place? What’s
my purpose? What am I good at?’ because everything to her
was that she was the pretty one, [but] she never really fit in.
And this one’s more about public image and, in the beginning,
you find Daphne and she’s confident. She’s confident
because she’s deriving her strength from what other people
think. The press and the fans, and its all about public image.
But what she soon realizes is that the public image can change,
it’s fickle, and that you have to find your strength from
within before you can worry about how everyone perceives you.”
 There
was a bit of sexual tension between Velma and Daphne in the first
film, leading many to believe that Velma is a lesbian. But in
this film, Velma finally gets a male love interest. Cardellini
tells us the scoop: “She’s smart about
everything and she’s got great intuition, but the only thing
she’s really off-base on is relationships with the opposite
sex. So that’s become Velma’s arc throughout ‘Scooby
2’, her relationship with a character played by Seth Green…she’s
sort of gaga whenever she’s around him…she gets stunted
in her thought process by the love she feels for [Green’s
character] Patrick.” One of the things everybody
agrees with is that this movie may have a lot of monsters and
visual effects, but it all comes down to Mystery Inc. and the
way they work as a team. Cardellini explains: “In
this movie, we’re very much a team…it’s been
good for the characters and it’s been good for me.”
Would there be any chance of a
“Scooby 3” being made? “Right now,
we’re not actually spending any real time developing that
script. We started doing some work on it last fall, but as soon
as we got the go-ahead to move forward with the sequel, it was
almost impossible for Chuck [Roven], Raja and I to spend any time
on it,” Suckle says, “…but
I am hoping that the studio wants us to explore the idea of ‘Scooby
3’ and the early indications are that they are interested.”
Gosnell also says he’d come back for a third helping. “I
love doing ‘Scooby Doo’, and if there’s a chance
to make it better, then I really would love to. I really feel
like, for better or for worse, I’d like to own the series.”
One player who doesn’t seem to like the idea of coming back
for a third is Gunn. “I’ve been doing
‘Scooby Doo’ for an awful long time, so its become
like working on a TV show and I want to direct a film next year
that I’m working on now, so there’s a lot of different
reasons.”
ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE
FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME AT dan@latinoreview.com
Scooby Doo 2:
Monsters Unleashed is scheduled to open March 26, 2004
|
