SPOILERS are ahead for the first two episodes of Velma, now streaming with an HBO Max subscription. Tread lightly if you don’t want the early mysteries of the series revealed.
Scooby-Doo has been a mainstay on television ever since CBS premiered its first series back in 1969 with the same ingredients in place: a group of four teenagers, a Great Dane named Scooby-Doo and their trusty The Mystery Machine solving supernatural mysteries. Over more than fifty years, the Scooby-Doo franchise has remained one of the most popular TV cartoon series of all time and found many iterations, from the live-action Scooby-Doo movies, to numerous animated films and TV shows. The latest from the property, HBO Max’s Velma, from producer and star Mindy Kaling, is looking to be the most controversial yet due to the many ways it updates the classic Scooby-Doo gang.
When the series starring an Indian Velma premiered last week, critics and audiences alike slammed the show for changing the identities of many of the characters. The reaction isn’t surprising given Velma totally recontextualizes them for a contemporary and adult audience. Having tuned into Velma after being a longtime fan of the franchise, I totally see why many will stop in their tracks of all the changes here. But, rather than moving Velma right to the doghouse, I want to talk through how exactly the series is seeking to revise the classic Scooby-Doo gang.
Mindy Kaling’s South Asian Velma Has Depth And Mystery
When executive producer and the new voice of Velma, Mindy Kaling, previously spoke to the decision to change the Scooby-Doo character’s race, The Office star shared that they felt that the character was “not necessarily tied to her whiteness.” Additionally, Kaling felt she could personally identify so much with Velma, so they decided to make her Indian like her for the series. Velma feels like a completely new version of the character, who doesn’t hold the same innocent “jinkies!” just-lost-her-glasses at all times presentation of previous iterations, though does embody her to essence to a degree. Rather, it seems the writers were going for a more realistic depiction of who a Velma would be in 2023, with a new backstory and all.
Although Kaling’s Velma doesn't have the same sweet charm of the original character for sure, she does have an increasingly interesting backstory as the show unfolds that we've not seen from the teen detective before. As we learn early in the show, she’s been long haunted by her mother leaving her and her father when she was a child and how it’s connected with her love for solving mysteries. At the moment, she’s too traumatized by her abandonment issues to go into mystery mode, but as the season presents a tantalizing one for her to dig into, it looks like she’ll have to face her fears and embrace her character’s destiny.
Velma Is A Super Raunchy Adult Animation Series
Another difference between Velma and the Scooby-Doo we know is through the fact that it is no longer an all-ages affair. The property has been rated G for decades, except for the R-rated James Gunn movie that never came to be, but this HBO Max series imagines it as a purely adult animation property that very much is walking right past its family-friendly roots in fun and cheeky ways. And yes, that’s the slippery slope for Velma since casual audiences clicking on the series might assume it's adhering to its typical branding, along with the assumption that animation is typically for kids.
Though, the case I’ll make here is this is for the curious who don’t mind seeing the book thrown out to see these characters conceptualized in entirely different ways. What if Scooby-Doo had debuted today without its half a century of nostalgia for an adult audience? To determine whether that is your cup of tea, the question you have to ask yourself is if you can laugh at these characters in this reimagining or are they too precious to you to be desanitized?
The Series Reimagines How The Scooby-Doo Gang Came Together
Noticeably absent from Velma is Scooby-Doo himself, but as it’s made apparent in the intro episodes for the HBO Max series, it will explore how Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Fred come together and perhaps become a mystery-solving team. We’ve seen prequel type stories for the Scooby-Doo gang before, but this one uses its modern and adult spin to craft how the four unlikely crew become entangled together through this lens.
The first season revolves around a string of brutal killings at their high school where popular girls are found dead with their brains removed from their bodies. Velma becomes the first suspect of the case before Fred gets accused and prosecuted for it early in the season. Through the prosecution, Velma characterizes Fred as a privileged teen who can’t do anything himself whereas Shaggy is a Black man who is super into snacks and secretly in love with Velma, but not at all the stoner he is famously thought of to be. It certainly feels like Velma knows the history that comes with each character and is playing with our expectations to shock and play for laughs along with coming up with a bigger central story as to how the gang comes together. Oh, and as for Daphne…
Jinkies, We Might Get Velma And Daphne’s Love Story
In Velma, Velma and Daphne are childhood friends who have grown apart as they grew up due to them fitting into different social circles in high school. Whereas Velma is an outcast, Daphne is a popular girl, which makes perfect sense. Played by Constance Wu, Velma establishes Daphne as Asian American who secretly sells drugs to other students to raise money to find her biological parents. This is when things click between Velma and Daphne again. Between Velma’s own abandonment issues regarding her mother and Daphne’s own obsession about her family secrets, a flirtation forms.
Velma has long been a lesbian icon among fans and recently got a queer storyline in a recent animated Scooby-Doo movie for the first time. And those fans have particularly often shipped Velma with Daphne. Two episodes in, Velma looks to be very much leading toward telling a love story between the two Scooby-Doo characters not unlike the raunchy animated Harley Quinn series has done for Harley and Poison Ivy.
There you have it! That’s the scoop on how Velma updates the classic franchise. While I agree with some early criticism of it definitely not honoring the spirit of the source material, color me curious regarding how its twisted humor will continue to rethink the classic franchise just cause, including by having a more inclusive cast of characters. We can always go back to good ‘ole Scooby-Doo when we want to and here's hoping the characters how we know and love them continue to exist in new forms as well.
