Fun Fact of the Week #171

The soundtrack for the Scooby-Doo live action movie gave many now-famous artists their big debut in the music world. Solange Knowles, who is now a famous singer alongside her sister Beyoncé, released her debut single, "Thinking About You" (feat. Murphy Lee) on the Scooby-Doo soundtrack, six months prior to her official album entitled Solo Star. To give their first album more publicity, Simple Plan released their song "Grow Up" onto the Scooby-Doo soundtrack three months after they released their debut feature-length album. Only a short while later, Simple Plan would also be hired to sing the What's New, Scooby-Doo? theme song, in addition to having "I'd Do Anything" featured as the chase scene song for "It's Mean, It's Green, It's the Mystery Machine." Uncle Kracker also requested to be on the soundtrack, one year before he achieved widespread popularity for his hit songs "Drift Away (feat. Dobie Gray)" and eventually "Smile." Just as they were gaining popularity, the rock band MxPx also offered to be on the movie's soundtrack by contributing their version of the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You theme.

Additionally, some other artists who had already achieved moderate popularity were invited to contribute to the soundtrack in order to further boost their popularity. Artists such as Shaggy, Lil' Romeo, Outkast and Busta Rhymes specially created songs, many of them directly mentioning Scooby in the lyrics, for the movie to boost commercial performance. The Baha Men, the one-hit wonder group responsible for the popular single "Who Let the Dogs Out?", were also asked to pen a Scooby-themed track entitled "Scooby D." for the soundtrack due to their only single relating to dogs.

The only artist who already had widespread popularity at the time (and had achieved global fame) that contributed to the soundtrack was Australian singer Kylie Minogue, whose song "Whenever You Feel Like It" was the eighth track on the compilation. At the time of the movie release, she had already been releasing music for over ten years and was being referred to as "The United Kingdom's Madonna" due to her immense commercial success. Just before the movie's post-production was finished and the soundtrack was being put together, her latest single "Can't Get You Out of My Head" had become a #1 hit around the world. Though never officially confirmed or stated, many Internet sources claim that her increasing popularity made it difficult to get her to be on the soundtrack, due to the majority of the artists being less famous at the time and just starting out their music careers.

Credit for researching and writing up this fun fact goes to Kylie fan and fellow Scooby lover (as well as amazing friend!) KylieTastic. Thank you Kylie, for taking the time to extensively research and contribute this fun fact to the site, and of course for just being plain awesome! :)