- Composed by Tom Holkenborg
- WaterTower / 48m
They made so many episodes of Scooby Doo – and loads of direct-to-video movies – all of which are essentially the same. An attempt to do a live-action movie was successful enough to bring a sequel but not successful enough that anyone remembers it, and Scoob! started out as another attempt to bring the character to the big screen – but Covid-19 has ensured he will remain on the small one for now. It’s a CGI animation, brings in characters from other Hanna-Barbera animations (like Dastardly and Muttley) and has gone straight to streaming.
Tom Holkenborg has taken an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to the score. We have some classic cartoonish mickey-mousing (which sounds a bit strange, the Remote Control sound on the orchestra – usually on their animation scores it’s allowed to stay sounding like an orchestra, but not here); we have some mock-gothic horror music; surf rock; some big action cues; some classic heist-style music; some modern electronic stuff but nowhere near as much as I feared from the press release which quotes Holkenborg as saying it has “nods to industrial, hip-hop and even gabber” – whatever gabber might be, I don’t think there’s much of it here. It’s good-natured music but flits about all over the place, from one style to another every few seconds – it must have been exhausting to write and it is exhausting to listen to. It’s pretty entertaining all the same – it just needs a theme to hold it together.
Rating: ***
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The ecletic nature of this one reminded me of Heitor Pereira’s Angry Birds movie score. Though I’d recommend that score over this one (considering it takes a more leitmotivic approach), it’s still great fun. Happy to see that Holkenborg has found his way as a film composer and I hope he’ll break into four-star-territory somewhere in the future.
His earlier composed music for Justice League will be used for the Snyder cut of that movie, though. While I do like that style (probably in the minority on that front), I think his more colorful work is much better in comparison.
Fun score. I think Holkenborg is improving, it will be interesting what he does with Justice League.
James, how about something from Daniel Pemberton? Ocean’s 8, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, Motherless Brooklyn, Birds of Prey, Dark Crystal. I’d be interested in your opinion on some of his latest work.