For Kids of All Ages. Review on Scooby-Doo Movie

Scooby-Doo will appeal to two types of people: kids, and adults who grew up watching the cartoon, which had debuted in the late 1960's. It concerns four young people and their talking Great Dane who roam the country solving allegedly supernatural mysteries. They have apparently been doing so for years.

Unfortunately, the group, Mystery, Inc., is coming unraveled. Brainy Velma (Linda Cardellini) is getting sick of the egotistical Fred's (Freddie Prinze, Jr.) constantly taking credit for her ideas. Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is getting just as sick of her role as ''the damsel in distress'' and hates being helpless. Despite Shaggy's (Matthew Lillard) efforts to keep peace between them, they end up disbanding.

Two years later, however, they are all contacted by a mysterious businessman (Rowan Atkinson), who lures them to his theme park, Spooky Island. It seems that some of the patrons are being attacked by supernatural forces that then seize control of them. It's up to the folks in Mystery, Inc. to investigate this matter. After a fair amount of initial squabbling, they proceed to do just that.

The four leads do good work with their parts. Lillard manages to sound just like the cartoon Shaggy and portrays him as the overgrown boy that he is, whose main interests are food, girls, and his dog, whom he considers his best friend. My only complaint about Lillard is that there's too much of him. (Shaggy has always been my least favorite character of the Mystery, Inc. kids.) Gellar, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame portrays Daphne as somebody with something to prove. Sick of being helpless, she has spent the two-year hiatus studying karate and has just earned a black belt. She is now hoping for a chance to put her new skills to use. (I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that she gets her wish.)

Cardellini and Prinze are spot-on respectively as Velma and Fred, but less is done with their characters than with Lillard's or Gellar's.

The film includes almost all the gags from the cartoon, such as the hokey dialogue: ''Jinkies!'', ''Zoiks!'', and ''I'd have gotten away with it if not for those meddling kids''. There's also a scene in which Scooby-Doo is smuggled aboard an airplane-- disguised as Shaggy's grandmother. He looks preposterous, but, as in the cartoon, nobody bats an eye. There are also the chase scenes set to music. There are also a couple of scenes in which somebody tries to hide in something silly: under a suitcase or in a large urn, for instance. The film's best gag, though, has to be the true identity of the villain.

The film is about as kid-friendly as a parent could want. The violence is strictly of the cartoon variety. There are no guns and there is no swearing. The monsters that turn up later are ugly, but prove to have a rather handy weakness that makes them relatively unthreatening. There are some gross-out gags, most notably when Shaggy and Scooby-Doo engage in a belching contest. So take the kids without fear; they'll have a blast.