HBO’s Velma proved a missed opportunity, coming with the sad awareness that the Scooby-Doo spinoff didn’t have to be. Animation is an evolving landscape, and it’s become clear that it takes more than a nostalgic name to find an audience. With streaming services now a battleground for animation, with popular shows like Dead End: Paranormal Park being canceled shortly after debuting and higher standards being held to cartoons, it’s vital now more than ever that they recognize what series has potential.

Premiering in 1969, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! became a beloved name among Saturday morning cartoons. Following several successful Scooby-Doo reboots and remakes, Velma premiered on HBO Max with adult audiences in mind. Focusing on the iconic detective Velma Dinkley (voiced by showrunner Mindy Kaling), the cartoon hoped to reimagine the origins of Mystery Inc. and deconstruct everything audiences knew about them, but with questionable results, however.

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Velma Needed to Redeem Scooby-Doo’s Past Failures

Daphne and Velma in HBO's Velma

With recognizable names attached to the project, like Glenn Howerton as Fred, and a legacy dating back more than half a century, Velma had high expectations to meet. Critically panned and struggling in its ratings, Velma was not the first failure to come out of the Scooby-Doo series but was one of the most notable, given the pedigree behind it. As Scooby-Doo attempted to reinvent itself for modern audiences, Velma could have been a new direction and a way to bounce back from other past projects.

Velma, as an R-rated Scooby-Doo spinoff, felt like another attempt to modernize the franchise and give the junior detective another origin story, but similar to its antecedents failed to be either and even managed to be a grander disappointment for the classic series. Intended to be the genesis of a new shared cinematic universe, 2020’s Scoob! didn’t turn out to be the blockbuster Hanna-Barbera hoped for, its scores and reception resulting in the cancelation of projects such as Scoob! Holiday Haunt. Additionally, with failures like 2018’s Daphne & Velma spinoff still in recent memory, it’s clear Hanna-Barbera struggled to find a new direction for Scooby-Doo to expand.

Why Velma Doesn’t Work as a Scooby-Doo Parody

Velma Hbo max Scooby doo

From the beginning, it was clear Velma aired as a parody, promoting a more satirical spin on Scooby-Doo’s classic characters. The idea was to reimagine Velma, Daphne, Fred, and Shaggy in a darker setting without the Saturday morning censors to hold them back. However, critics pointed out that Velma’s writing felt disconnected from the source material and failed to recognize the cartoon’s iconic tropes that were ideal for satire, questioning if Kaling pitched the pilot with Scooby-Doo’s classic characters in mind.

Velma was a show that evoked the Scooby-Doo franchise but never did anything substantial with it. If Velma stripped away the names, the familiar character designs, and the Easter eggs, there’d be nothing uniquely Scooby-Doo about the show. Joking about its predicted backlash, making fun of stereotypes on modern television, and using mature situations for shock value, there’s nothing about Velma that feels true to the original cartoon, especially without its memorable talking dog. Velma's Scooby-Doo origin story could’ve easily been a parody of Riverdale or an original creation poking fun at Hanna-Barbera’s mystery-solving pastiche while making just as much sense and being better received.

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How Velma Could Have Succeeded As A New Show

HBO Max's Velma Meddling Kids

Scooby-Doo, in the past, had self-awareness and wasn’t afraid to get dark at times. Projects like Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island or Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated wasn’t afraid to be grim or gory with its mythology. Media like the live-action Scooby-Doo movies laughed at the expense of its premise, pointing out things like how Daphne was always the damsel in distress, Scooby’s nephew Scrappy was the character nobody liked, and the convoluted plans of Scooby-Doo's silliest monsters. Velma itself wasn’t a bad idea, but there were previously other Scooby-Doo-inspired series that used darker plots and satirical humor to better effect.

The type of humor Velma utilized had worked for HBO Max's Harley Quinn series, but it didn’t quite reflect its source material. The dark comedy and gratuitous violence could’ve perfectly commented on the potential lethality of Fred’s traps or the implications of a talking dog. Alternatively, Velma could’ve taken inspiration from the novel Meddling Kids, which had a more acclaimed take on Scooby-Doo's tropes by humorously embracing its stand-in characters while also giving them depth and a Stranger Things-inspired mystery to solve. However, Velma tried so hard to be mature and reflect Kaling's unique vision that it failed to respect its past or organically reinvent Mystery Inc.

Velma did not deserve all the backlash it received, but it was unfortunate that it never fulfilled the comedic or horror potential of an adult Scooby-Doo series. Now that HBO Max has a clue about Velma’s shortcomings, maybe they’ll redeem the series in its second season or perhaps find success with a different show moving forward. As classic characters attempt to find a place on modern streaming services, creators need to remember the key to their future is in their past because it’s what allowed these nostalgic cartoons to come so far and still be beloved to this day.

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