‘Scooby-Doo 2’ Did Velma Dirty

There’s been a lot of talk about Velma Dinkley this week, following the news that Scooby-Doo’s resident brainiac will be be seen crushing on a female character in an upcoming Halloween special – thus confirming once and for all that Velma is gay, like fans have been saying for literal decades. Or, to put it another way, the franchise is finally tearing off the rubber mask of prejudice and revealing the abandoned amusement park caretaker of Velma’s true self. 

Not only that, but HBO Max just dropped the first trailer for Mindy Kaling’s adult-oriented Velma series in which the teen sleuth is … seemingly butchered by a knife-wielding maniac?

In any case, confirmation of Velma’s LGBTQ+ status is causing some to reflect back on previous iterations of the character – one of the worst, arguably being Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. While James Gunn previously stated that his initial draft for the first Scooby-Doo movie would make Velma “explicitly gay” (albeit only in the form of a handful of dumb jokes) his plans were allegedly shut-down by the studio. Then for the sequel, which Gunn also penned, Velma suddenly had a romantic interest played by Seth Green – and incidentally, a lot of us are just now realizing that hooking up with Seth Green was apparently some kind of rite of passage for fictional lesbians in the early 2000s. 

In retrospect, this storyline positively reeks of the studio’s sweaty attempts to straightwash the character of Velma – especially the scene in which she dons a skin-tight red leather catsuit in order to impress Green’s character (with a little help from Daphne) thus proving once and for all to the world that Velma is super-horny for straight guys, case closed.

At least now, cartoon Velma is free to be who she is … and also to be murdered by Ghostface, apparently.

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Thumbnail: Warner Bros.