Mindy Kaling’s Velma Will Reimagine Character As Being Of East Asian Descent, Won’t Include Scooby-Doo Or Mystery Machine

Mindy Kaling’s Velma series on HBO Max will apparently re-imagine the Scooby-Doo character as a girl of East Asian descent. Velma will also be skipping over some big franchise connections like the Mystery Machine or Scooby-Doo himself. WanerMedia’s Tom Ascheim, president of Warner Bros. Global Kids, Young Adults and Classics, gave a keynote address about the upcoming slate, and shared first details about Kaling’s vision for Velma: “Not for children, but we have a Mindy Kaling project called ‘Velma’ because she was excited to re-imagine what Scooby-Doo would be like if Velma were of East Asian descent and lived in a different world.”

Ascheim continued by saying that in Velma “There’s no dog, and there’s no van, but we have our four key characters through a different lens. And I think it’s great. So allowing our creators to play with our IP is super powerful.”

The “four key characters” that Ascheim is referring to are Velma Dinkley, Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, and Shaggy Rogers, who form a mystery-solving detective crew, aided (and often tripped-up by) their talking Great Dane dog, Scooby. As Ascheim made clear, Kaling’s version of the mythos won’t feature Scooby (at least at first?), and the mystery crew presumably won’t yet be fully established.

Naturally, that premise has a lot of Scooby-Doo fans asking themselves: does Velma even qualify as part of the Scooby-Doo IP? On the other hand, some fans are down to see where Kaling’s series takes things…

Not My Velma

I didn’t take Twitter long to start up with the #NotMyVelma uproar… 

Relax, Sis

An important reminder. ?

Why Not A New Character?

This close-cousin of ‘diverse re-imagining of popular characters is not MY version of said character’ soon reared its ugly head, as well. 

She Can Be Whatever

Just about everything in Velma’s “character” is vague and superficial – “brainy, geeky, glasses, orange sweater, red skirt, dress shoes.” Beyond that, there’s a lot of filling in you can do.  

Velma BEEN Asian

Linda Cardellini (Avengers: Age of Ultron) played Velma in the live-action Scooby-Doo movies, however actress Hayley Kiyoko (who is part Japanese) played Velma in the Scooby-Doo TV movies The Mystery Begins (2009) and Curse of the Lake Monster (2010). So technically, having an Asian Velma in a Scooby-Doo origin story has already been done. 

Mike Tyson Did It Better

 

One more reason people should be checking out the slept-on Mike Tyson Mysteries animated series – which already gives Scooby-Doo a more colorful re-imagining, in every way. 

Oh Velma Is Trending…

People saw “Velma” trending and knew it could be bad. They just never figured it would be this absurd. 

So Many Ways To Velma

Let Mindy Kaling do her thing. The Scooby-Doo franchise has already set the precedent.