Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Scooby Doo it again

Those meddling kids and their dog back on the big screen in Scooby sequel

By ANN MARIE McQUEEN — Ottawa Sun

BEVERLY HILLS — In Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, Alicia Silverstone didn’t seem to have much trouble slipping into the role of irritating television reporter.

The 27-year-old Silverstone, who watched the press turn on her after she failed to follow up on the success of 1995’s Clueless, says she drew on everything she knew about reporters — but no one specific — to create her character.

The manipulative, microphone-clutching bombshell is one of several would-be villains, and during media interviews last weekend, Silverstone joked that having an evil master plan is something "which you might be able to relate to journalism, to some select individuals."

The chance to play out a nasty scene with Sarah Michelle Gellar, who joins husband Freddie Prinze Jr., Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini in reprising their roles as Daphne, Fred, Shaggy and Velma in the sequel, was another draw for Silverstone. It’s something she hasn’t really done since playing an obsessive teenager in 1993’s The Crush and wouldn’t mind doing again.

"It was so much fun to be mean to her," Silverstone said. "That scene when I read it was like, ’How fun, to be able to have two girls be able to do that to each other.’ "

Silverstone, who is waiting to hear whether her critically acclaimed NBC show Miss Match will be picked up for a second season, worked on Scooby Doo 2 last year in Vancouver after shooting her series pilot. She watched the animated series when she was young but had to go out and watch the first Scooby Doo movie before deciding whether to take an offer to appear in the second.

"I thought it was a really lovely film for kids," she said."And then I started asking kids I knew what they thought of it and they loved Scooby Doo, and I’m like, ’This is really good with the little ones. If I want to be in with the little ones, I better do this.’ "

Seth Green joins Silverstone, Everybody Loves Raymond star Peter Boyle and The Good Girl character actor Tim Blake Nelson, as another of the movie’s possible villains.

He joked when reporters asked him whether it was his intention to play the role with such duplicity.

"Yes, and I hope that will be remembered at Oscar time," Green said. "Like Tim Robbins in Mystic River ... ’Did he, didn’t he?’ "

Green plays a museum curator who has a budding romance with Cardellini’s brainy, orange turtleneck-wearing Velma.

If the story was right he’d be up for a third, saying the sequel beat hands down the first attempt at melding live action with a computer-generated Scooby, which was panned by critics but topped the box- office opening weekend and went on to make $275 million US worldwide.

"It was 10 times better, to tell you the truth," Green said. "I thought it was more realized, they worked out all the kinks of doing it live. They had a lot more leeway to tell the story they wanted to tell because the experiment had already been proven successful."

Not surprisingly, many of the people involved with Scooby Doo 2 insist it’s better than the first because it’s solidly aimed at the family market and more like the cartoon series.

"The first movie was a big hit ... but we realized it wasn’t as good as it could have been," Lillard said.

Writer James Gunn said the producers wanted to flesh out the tender friendship between Shaggy and Scooby (voiced by Neil Fanning), add more action scenes and boost the stylized, cartoonish elements that did work the first time.

"In the first movie some of us thought we were making a movie for teenagers, other people thought we were making a movie for kids, other people thought we were making a movie for 45-year-old Scooby Doo fans that have their walls plastered with naked pictures of Daphne from the Internet," Gunn said.

Everyone involved with the project is now just waiting to see whether unleashing all those monsters — look for Cotton Candy Glob, the Black Knight and the 10,000 Volt Ghost among the crowd — will mean box-office success and a green light for Scooby Doo 3.

Lillard, meanwhile, said playing Shaggy to a computer-animated Scooby Doo is the hardest work he’s ever done.

"It’s a selfish thing ... I think people look at that and go, ’Whatever.’ I don’t think they care," Lillard said. "But it’s the toughest job I’ve ever had. I think doing that is a lot harder than doing straight comedy or straight drama."

Director Raja Gosnell agrees.

"I don’t think people appreciate how incredibly physically difficult his role is. He’s got nothing to act against, he carries Scooby, there are scenes where they bump chests," Gosnell said. "There are a lot of instances where the camera is rolling and no one is there."