Chill Out, Scooby-Doo! (2007) – Review

When it comes to creatures in the Scooby-Doo universe, the most common has to be the snow monster, having shown up in one form or another at least a half-dozen times, whether it be the Yeti from the episode, “That’s Snow Ghost” in the original series, or the snow monster Mister Roundy from the episode, “Be Cold, Scooby-Doo!” in the series Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! But today we are looking at one of their more infamous snow adventures, Chill Out, Scooby-Doo! the eleventh entry in the Scooby-Doo direct-to-video movies.

Fred (Frank Welker), Velma (Mindy Cohn), and Daphne (Grey Griffin) find their Parisian vacation cut short when Shaggy (Casey Kasem) and Scooby (Frank Welker) fail to show up at the appointed time.  It turns out that the cowardly duo were tricked into an “All you can eat flight” by Alphonse LaFleur (Rene Auberjonois), a world-renowned hunter who wants to find and kill the legendary Abominable Snowman, and he thinks the best way to catch a monster is to have the very best bait, which apparently is Shaggy and Scooby. Now, it is true that Shaggy and Scooby-Doo have been chased by many a monster in their time, from Dracula to the Loch Ness Monster, but for the most part, those were criminals trying to scare our heroes away, with actual monsters being a rarity even in the Scooby Universe, so a hunter desiring to find a real monster could probably do a lot better than these idiots.

Not meeting real monsters is their true superpower.

With Chill Out, Scooby-Doo! we do get a plethora of suspects — unlike the previous movie. The person behind this particular hoax becomes pretty obvious early on, but let’s round up the usual suspects for old times’ sake. First, we have Professor Jeffries (Alfred Molina), a man obsessed with finding the fabled lost kingdom of Shangri-La, and he is aided by Sherpa guide Pemba (James Sie), who refuses to take Jeffries further up the mountain into the forbidden lands. Next is Pemba’s sister, Minga (Kim Mai Guest), who ignores her brother’s orders to evacuate the area because she wants to join the group on their trek up the mountain to the weather station, claiming she came to warn them of an oncoming storm, but her real motivation is that she has a huge crush on the station’s Disc Jockey. This DJ turns out to be Dell Chillman (Jeff Bennett), who we last saw in Scooby-Doo and the Loch Ness Monster, but who has now given up on searching for Nessie and wants to find the Abominable Snowman instead. Finally, we have the High Lama (James Hong), who explains that the large crystals he keeps in his temple are there to protect the villagers from the Abominable Snowman’s powers, a large crystal that Jeffries seems very keen on checking out.

“Gee, I bet a crystal like that is worth a lot of money.”

Stray Observations:

• This is a very Shaggy/Scooby-centric movie with the rest of the Scooby gang taking a backseat to their “running in terror” shenanigans.
• The High Lama spookily floats along the ground much like David Lo Pan did in the John Carpenter film Big Trouble in Little China, and James Hong played both of these characters.
• Early on, Velma remarks that impressions in the snow left by the Abominable Snowman’s huge feet aren’t even as deep as Daphne’s boot prints. This clue immediately dismisses the idea that the monster is real, yet everyone will still react throughout the movie as if it were.
• Minga goes missing and is believed to have been abducted by the Abominable Snowman. If the Scooby Gang didn’t have the collective memory of a goldfish, they’d realize that anyone who goes missing at the beginning of the mystery is usually the monster.
• We get an impressive mine car chase that is right out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
• Shaggy briefly takes over DJ duties at the weather station and his “On Air Radio Voice” is Casey Kasem’s real voice, a nice nod to his other job of hosting “Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.”

“Here we go with the top monster hits of the nation!”

When the mystery finally wraps up, it should be a surprise to no one that Minga turns out to be the Abominable Snowman — she did it to keep Del around because of her feelings for him — but we still have a villain to uncover as well, and that would be Professor Jeffries who was looting the mountain of its crystals. I have to give Chill Out, Scooby-Doo! points for having a monster hoax that wasn’t related to the criminal they end up apprehending, I just wish the story itself wasn’t as thin as the air atop Mount Everest. Our cast of characters are all fun and engaging, with the voice talent providing solid work and staying on point, but most of the movie’s short run-time is wasted on seemingly endless Shaggy and Scooby chase sequences with the mystery itself seeming like an afterthought. Worst of all, we get this moment where Shaggy and Scooby-Doo discover Shangri-La, and yet the writers do absolutely nothing with this amazing location, it’s a two-minute pit stop that is simply used as a backdrop to another lame chase sequence.

A Lost Horizon of Potential.

Chill Out, Scooby-Doo! is another light and fluffy Scooby-Doo mystery, and the best thing that could be said about this episode is that the character designs were interesting — the design of the Abominable Snowman being particularly good — and there was some really nice animation throughout, but overall, there isn’t much to praise or denigrate as the movie is fairly forgettable and the plot itself would have probably worked better as a thirty-minute episode and not stretched out to seventy-two minutes. This is an entry that only completists should bother checking out.

You can find all my reviews of the various Scooby-Doo shows and movies collected here: The Wonderful World of Scooby-Doo.