'Velma' (2023) and the Stagnation of Pop Culture

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I'm finally back from a year-plus long hiatus. Today we're going to go over a show that has gotten a lot of press over the past week and that everyone seems to hate. This is Velma.

So what is Velma, you may ask? Imagine creating another tired old Scooby-Doo reboot but removing the titular character, making a side character the main character, race-swapping everyone except the straight white male (guess which one), aging it up for adults, removing everyone's unique characteristics and sucking out everything that made the franchise what it is, and adding underage nude scenes. Yes, really.

I will not be reviewing this because I refuse to watch this Scooby-Doo-Doo. But I've heard enough about the show to give my two cents. This is a textbook example on how not to reboot a franchise. It's strange that Warner-Discovery, that for the past year has been purging animated shows left and right thank to their new CEO David Zaslav and cancelled two Scooby-Doo projects that were almost completed, would still let this off the hook.

Where do I begin? From what I can gather, Velma is an adult-oriented animated mystery series in which Mindy Kaling--I mean Velma (more on that later)--goes around town and solves a bunch of mysteries. On the surface, the premise doesn't sound bad. Velma has always been a Scooby-Doo character that hasn't got a lot of attention, minus the speculation about her sexuality; last year she was gay-washed in the latest movie after being non-sexual/straight for decades. (She is bisexual in this series, but I digress.) Stereotypes much? Regardless, having a series centered around Velma seems like an interesting idea for a story that can give us more insight into her character--so how did they muck it all up? In lots of ways, turns out.

First, no Scooby. He's the main character of the flipping franchise, for Pete's sake! To be fair though, it may be a blessing in disguise that he isn't associated with this trash heap, because the showrunners would have probably screwed him up as much if not worse than the other characters.

Second, the other characters are not themselves. Velma is mean-spirited and annoying, Daphne is stuck up and a drug dealer, Fred is a spoiled white boy with a small penis (I wish I was making that up), and Shaggy, I mean Norville, is a beta simp for Velma. Also, the characters don't like each other, a complete one-eighty from their original counterparts who were able to work together despite their differences.

Third, the hypersexualization of teenagers. The characters are teens in high school, so any scenes of them nude, making out, or talking about underage sex really makes this series feel more disturbing than it already is. It's not as bad as Big Mouth where the characters are children entering puberty, but it is still unsettling nonetheless.

Fourth, Mindy Kaling. If you haven't guessed by now, Velma in this series is Mindy Kaling's self-insert character, which explains everything. Though she has been accused of such benign things as liking tweets from a certain book author, the bottom line is that Kaling loves inserting herself into the things that she creates and making it painfully obvious.

This series and others like it (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power comes to mind) are symptoms of a larger problem, that being the stagnation of pop culture. Only a few decades ago, it was common for new franchises to be made that were fresh, fun, and entertaining. Now it seems Hollywood consistently wants to reinvent the wheel and regurgitate established IP over and over again, peeving off old fans in the process. There have been original brands in the past twenty years that have been well-received, of course (Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Avatar: The Last Airbender to name a few), but they are increasingly becoming few and far between, at least in the West.

In conclusion, Velma is a pile of doo without Scooby-Doo. The only positive things I can say about it are that the art style and animation look decent. Otherwise, this will surely go down in history as the worst Scooby-Doo adaptation ever made.

Before I leave, a word of advice to showrunners: if you want to make a series, either make something completely new (highly recommended) or remake something with at least an ounce of respect for the source material. That is all.