BY DANIEL BAIG | The makers of Scooby-Doo, the movie, had two competing proven-successful (box office-wise) templates for turning a beloved lowbrow pop culture television program and set of characters into a decades-after-its-inception motion picture between which to choose.

They could have gone down the path of gentle mockery, informed by hipster irony, of a guilty pleasure, as exemplified by Dragnet and, infinitely more successfully, the ne plus ultra of this rather specialized genre, The Brady Bunch Movie (the first one, not the comparatively mirthless follow-up, A Very Brady Sequel, whose funniest joke was probably its title).

Alternatively, the other obvious way to go was a straight-ahead kids movie, like Casper or Inspector Gadget, with perhaps a few mildly eyebrow-raising bits, like Halle Berry in a fur bikini, thrown in for some of the older folks in the audience -- i.e. The Flintstones.

Not at all surprisingly, Scooby-Doo ended up largely in the latter camp -- which makes sense considering, as with Casper and Gadget, the source material was an animated kids show. (Casper the Friendly Ghost actually started out his animated life ((or should that be death?)) as the star of a series of theatrical shorts dating back to 1945!)

(The only obvious example of the live action film version of a TV cartoon aiming a little higher than tykes in whom it was directing its humor at is The Adventures of Rocky Bullwinkle -- but in that case, the original show itself was also partly written with an adult audience in mind. And more significantly, from Hollywood, Inc.'s point of view, the movie was a major financial flop.)

One of the key words in the previous non-parenthetical paragraph, though, is RlargelyS -- this new Doo dips its toe just enough into more, er, RmatureS waters to let us imagine what it might have been like if its makers had decided not to make a children's movie.

So we get some mild sexual humor, and a you'll-only- see-it- if-you're-looking- for-it indication or two that recent speculation about Velma's sexuality may not be completely off base . . .

Scooby-Doo's opening scene is so awful it practically defies belief. If I had snuck into this movie, I'd have snuck right back out again after the first two minutes. It's a straight retread of the final moments of a typical Scooby-Doo TV adventure -- the Mystery, Inc. gang running around being pursued by a RghostS until they finally catch him. The whole sequence, set in a factory at night, looks hideous (and I mean aside from the criminally ugly hairdo they've given Freddie Prinze, Jr. as Fred ((which it turned out was just for this prologue portion of the movie))). And it ends with a terribly unfunny cameo appearance.

I was sitting there in the theater, surrounded on all sides by noisy little kids, and I was wondering what I had done to deserve this fate.

Thankfully, it turned out this whole opening was just strategy -- the makers of the movie were (apparently) deliberately trying to recreate the unamusing insipidity of the cartoon at its worst -- to then break with it, and try to make something better and bigger.

It was a very clever move. Because the rest of the film ended up being so superior to this initial sequence that it ends up smelling like a rose (well, with the exception of the prolonged farting contest which Shaggy and Scooby engage in).

Screenwriter James Gunn deserves a lot of credit for freshening up the standard Scooby formula (after giving us a glimpse of it in its stale state in that opening), chiefly by finally letting the gang go up against genuine supernatural forces, as opposed to yet another caretaker or real estate developer in a glow-painted mask. This, in turn, allowed director Raja Gosnell to engage in some amusing special effects sequences.

Speaking of special effects -- while for the most part they're fine, the biggest effect of all -- the star of the movie -- is, I'm afraid, none too impressive. CGI Scooby looks awful. Yes, his motion is good -- his walking, his tail wagging -- but his texture and basic appearance is just nasty. He certainly doesn't look real. He doesn't even look as good as Rocky and Bullwinkle did in their movie.

(And Scrappy-Doo -- don't worry, he's not in the movie much at all -- is so ugly and repulsive it's disturbing.)

As far as the rest of the cast, Matthew Lillard sounds uncannily like Casey Kasem's original Shaggy. He clearly invested himself body and soul into this performance; it's an extraordinary act of mimicry. Lillard even manages to be touching when he and Scooby have a brief falling out.

Linda Cardellini is also quite good -- funny, fully committed -- as Velma.

Sarah Michelle Gellar unfortunately brings nothing special to Daphne. The part needed someone more like Alicia Silverstone.

And Freddie Prinze, Jr., gung-ho as he clearly is, was poorly miscast. He's just not Fred. Fred should be bigger, and he's supposed to be WASPy and whitebread; he shouldn't look like a swarthy, permanently-five-o-clock-shadowed guy with a dye job.

A final note about performers -- Mark McGrath and the rest of Sugar Ray show up, and amusingly play themselves as (unwilling, and unwitting,) bad guys. But it appears that they only made themselves available for shooting for a limited number of days. Their characters just disappear from the action after a certain point.

In addition to Lillard's performance, the other obvious triumph of Scooby-Doo is its production design, overseen by Bill Boes. There are some really good sets, most noticeably in the interiors of the themed (Disney-resort-style) hotel much of the story takes place in. I really would love to stay at this place, which, of course, sadly only exists on celluloid.