Late at night, looking at HBO and asking the question “why do I pay for this?” I found a reason. I stumbled across a movie based on one of the most infantile, unfunny, shoddy and predictable creations of Western culture, a thing whose very name fills me with hot heavy stones of shame and anger. Its name summons up all the contempt some feel for Precious Youth, how they’re content to serve up hogsheads of steaming tripe to goggle-eyed children who don’t know enough to know better. And now they’d made a movie about this . . . this thing. I was actually curious: how bad could it be? Could it be as bad as I wanted it to be?

Five minutes into it, I’m impatient: c’mon, start sucking more!

Ten minutes into it, I’m dismayed: stop being intermittently aware of my expectations, and confounding them!

Fifteen minutes into it, I hit the TiVo record button and went to bed; we’ll see if we’re still so charitable tomorrow.

The next night I watched the rest. And I enjoyed it, for what it was. Oh, the CGI was horrible in spots. Some miscasting, some eye-rolling grrl power moments. But damn: that dude was Shaggy.

(shocked gasps from the audience)

True. True. If you’ve been with this site over the years, you know that there’s little I despise more than Scooby-Doo, for all the reasons you might expect. Not funny. Sonny Bono cameos. Not funny. Two sound effects, three music cues, one plot. Hanna-Barbera dreck distilled to a lethal purity. I have long begged for someone to make a Scooby-Doo mod for Soldier of Fortune:

“Rooby Roooo!”

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If you don’t know, don’t ask. Grown men are not comfortable explaining why they want to use the sniper rifle on fictional dogs with speech impediments.