This is a monstrously long scene, of which very little made it in to the final cut. There was a much greater focus on Shaggy and Scooby bonding, but the feeling was that making Shaggy so sad at the begining was a real downer, so all the stuff with the bully at school was cut. It was also decided that having their first case be about a Mrs. Lovett type making meatloaf out of school children was probably in poor taste! This has a number of boards drawn by Rafael Zentil and Gabe Lin which I've included for continuity's sake.
I have a question about the film. This opening is really good and explains and conveys so much more heart and depth about the meeting of both Scooby Doo and Shaggy, the gang vs the final version of the film. When did the production start to go through creative differences between the Director's and Writer's Visions for Scoob?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your kind words! To answer your question I think it was always in flux. This particular version was the third or fourth opening I did for the film, and was drawn probably the third year we were in production. By that point I had done and redone the haunted insane asylum opening as originally scripted by Matt Lieberman. We worked on that version of the film for about a year before Dax Sheppard was brought in to reshape the movie, and I drew his puppy Scooby version (where Scoob is in love with a Bichon Frise called Tailia). That version of the film was worked on for just shy of a year before Dax left the film and the production was put on hiatus for a few months during a change of management. This version was the first version drawn after the SCOOB production left the original production house Atlas Entertainment and was folded in to Warner Animation Group that produced Smallfoot, the Lego Movies, and SuperPets. Then it’s just a case of death by a thousand cuts- a ship of Theseus where bits are changed and taken out or replaced with new gags or whatever. Sequences change incrementally until the original take is lost. I think the biggest problem this version faced were twofold: the sheer length of the scene, and the increasingly problematic idea of a killer hunting kids in a school. You can still see some moments from this version in the final movie, but by the time it was being reboarded I was working on the end of the picture so another artist did the retakes.
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