Velma Dinkley has had a big week. The fictional brains behind Mystery, Inc. trended on Twitter for days after the newly released Trick or Treat Scooby Doo video depicted a Velma who is attracted to other women. It wasn’t the first time Velma was hinted at being gay and fans have certainly speculated for years about it. James Gunn even once said in an interview that the live-action Scooby-Doo movie he wrote years ago explicitly made Velma gay but that it eventually got cut by the studio.
All this comes on the heels of HBO Max’s more adult-oriented animated series titled Velma, executive produced and starring Mindy Kaling in the title role. A few days ago, HBO Max released an original poster hinting at a bloodier affair than previous Scooby-Doo adventures:
Beyond that though, little was known about the project up until now. Even the character design of this member of Mystery, Inc. had been shrouded in, well, mystery. And while we don’t know if Kaling’s Velma will also be gay, Thursday at New York Comic Con, Kaling and series showrunner Charlie Grandy revealed that, like the woman voicing her, this Velma would be of South Asian descent.
“She has an Indian family. I love this opportunity I have now to be able to have representation,” Kaling told the NYCC press room. “I identify so much with the Velma character.”
“The whiteness of the characters didn’t feel integral. . . except for Fred. Fred just felt like a very white person,” Grandy said. “Fred had to be white,” Kaling agreed.
Grandy said Kaling connected with the character. “It’s like here’s this girl who’s sort of the smart one who does all of the work and doesn’t get nearly enough credit. So you connected on that level . . . So it wasn’t until we got much farther down the road where it was like this might happen that we started to talk about how this character should look. Should it be South Asian?”
“I knew I was going to do the voice and with the animation, the possibilities of animation are so big,” Kaling said. “So it was like, why not make the character Indian? We were so inspired by the Spiderverse. Other characters can embody these truly iconic franchises. We loved Scooby-Doo so much. We’re going to honor it.”
The other big conversation in the room concerned the more adult elements of the series. “We always wanted to do adult animation, Grandy said. “For me, I loved Scooby Doo as a kid, but it also scared me. I was scared very easily, but I was interested in kind of taking the comedy and the humor of the original and sort of adapting it, making it with harder jokes and scarier as well.”
“It’s not for kids,” Kaling added.
“I have kids, and I’m very interested in family dynamics, Grandy said. “And for me, one of the big mysteries of Scooby-Doo originally is how did these 4 very different people come together. Like, what really drew them together, and what sort of kicked it off? And, you know, how they were really made by their parents. And that’s such a trope in teen dramas, especially today. I really kind of wanted to pull that into this series.”
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