The movie opens with Scooby and the gang arriving in the Windy City because Fred (Frank Welker) and Daphne (Grey Griffin) are finalists for a talent show, called Talent Star, meanwhile, Velma (Mindy Cohn) is interested in checking out the local showing of the famous “Soap Diamond” while Scooby and Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) or more focused on the city’s famed deep-dish pizza. Unfortunately, the opera house which the show will be held in is being terrorized by a masked phantom, surprisingly this is information that Shaggy takes in stride, “Of course it’s haunted, like when do we ever go to a place that is not haunted?” Though the opera house is over one hundred years old this particular phantom made his first appearance back in the 70s when the place had been converted into a disco.
I guess organ music and disco just don’t mix.
With Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright we not only get a nice homage to Gaston Leroux’s literary masterpiece, with the Phantom demanding that his Christine win the talent show, but we are inundated with possible suspects as to who the real phantom could be. First, we have Brick Pimiento (Wayne Brady), the host of Talent Star, who points out that the Phantom’s attacks are doing wonders for the show’s ratings. Next is Mel Richmond (Jeff Bennett) the theatre owner, who has been losing money on the opera house ever since he inherited it from his dad, and he jokes about burning it down for the insurance money. We meet you violin virtuoso Emma Gale (Isabella Acres) whose family needs the contest prize money so the bank doesn’t foreclose on their farm. We also have singer Lotte Lavoie (Vivica A. Fox) who constantly threatens violence on her fellow contestants, one of which is stage magician The Great Pauldini (John O'Hurley) whose stagecraft could easily create The Phantom’s antics, and finally we have Chrissy Damon (Ariel Winter) aka Christine, a spoiled girl with overbearing stage parents.
An angel of music she is not.
As much as this is a Scooby-Doo spin on The Phantom of the Opera there are major differences from the source material – Gaston Leroux didn’t even have a dog in his story – in this version, Christine is an abrasive diva, not the sweet ingénue of the book and is more like the character of Carlotta, but here we also have Lotte Lavoie’s who kind of takes on aspects of Carlotta as well, and it is her voice that is sabotaged by the Phantom. In Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright there is no true Christine analog as this particular Phantom has no muse, at most we have Fred and Daphne’s love story filling in for Christine’s and Raoul’s tryst from Gaston Leroux’s book.Now, it is the love story between Fred and Daphne that is easily my favourite part of this movie, first we have Daphne quietly mooning over the seemingly oblivious Fred while everyone else in the Scooby gang are completely aware of the pair's feelings for each other, but we get a wonderful payoff with Daphne writing a love ballad to music that Fred wrote, leading to the two finally declaring their love. Unfortunately, the film later undercuts this during the end credits with Fred and Daphne both wondering if that declaration was just part of the act or if the other really meant it. Aside from this return to the “status quo” I found this movie handled the Fred/Daphne relationship better than any film before or since.
“Summer lover, don't go away.”
Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright also has one of my favourite meta-exchanges between characters, with Daphne pondering the strangeness of the Scooby gang constantly running into ghosts and monsters, leading to this wonderful interchange.Daphne: “Fred, why do ghosts and monsters and stuff turn up wherever we go? Is it something about us?”
Fred: “No, this happens to everyone. It would be too much of a coincidence if this only happened to us, so logically, everyone must run into ghosts and monsters all the time.”
Daphne: “Really?”
Fred: “Sure! It's simple math. They must be everywhere.”
You can’t argue with that kind of logic.
So who is the Phantom of this particular Opera? The villain reveal aspect of this movie makes this entry stand out from the rest, in the past, we’ve had villains wearing multiple masks, and in Chill-Out, Scooby-Doo! we had a monster and a villain that was not actually connected but in Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright we get four villains, all with their own motives. First, the gang chase the Phantom into the sewers below the opera house, where they discover the lair of Steve Trilby (Paul Rugg), who was the notorious Phantom terrorizing the opera house back when it became a discotheque, but he's not actually behind the current attacks on Talent Star, he was only prowling around looking for food to steal, he had remained a reclusive Phantom all these years because thought he was hideous freak, unfortunately, this was only due to the fact that his only mirror was a funhouse mirror. Then Mel Richmond is unmasked and admits to trying to burn down his "money-losing theatre" for the insurance money, which makes his early joking faux pas extremely stupid. Next Lance Damon, in Phantom garb, is caught trying to break Emma’s violin because he wanted his daughter Chrissie to win the talent contest. Then another Phantom is revealed to be assistant director Dewey Ottoman (Peter MacNicol) who was using the Phantom threat to draw the police away from the museum that displaying the famous Soap Diamond so that he could steal it. And finally, we have Velma revealing footage of Pimiento putting on the Phantom costume which he admits that he used the Phantom to boost the show's falling ratings.
They all would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling kids.
Stray Observations:• In this movie, Fred’s character is treated with a greater amount of respect and though he may still be a little trap obsessed – we find out that he sleeps with a net – when up against the villain he is a true man of action. He even uses his ascot to grapple with the Phantom.
• Steve Trilby believed he was disfigured due to his only mirror being a funhouse mirror, but this means he somehow went through his ENTIRE life growing up without ever looking at his reflection. Even for a Scooby-Doo movie that is a bit of a stretch.
• Chrissie ends up being one of the final three finalists but shouldn’t she have been disqualified immediately when her dad was exposed as being one of the Phantoms?
• Fred and Daphne’s love ballad win them more votes than Emma, which means Emma’s family would lose the farm, and they then start telling bad jokes so as a way to throw the contest, but how would that even work? Can people call in and un-vote?
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