‘Scooby-Doo’ origin story ‘Velma’ can’t scare up reason for existing
If the rule for covers of widely cherished songs — make it your own or leave it alone — holds for adaptations of beloved television shows, then in one respect, HBO Max’s “Velma” is a towering success.
This thoroughly modern re-imagining of “ScoobyDoo” maintains the loadbearing beams of the more than 50-year-old cartoon’s lore. It’s still set in Crystal Cove, a coastal enclave known for its gem deposits, teenage busybodies and an overpopulation of either ghosts or fallen magnates with a passion for cosplay.
Beyond that, “Velma” is irreverent to a fault. Starring Mindy Kaling and developed by her longtime collaborator Charlie Grandy, “Velma” treats most of the “Scooby” canon as suggestions whispered too low to be heard. The most obvious detour is the absence of the iconic talking dog, as “Velma” is a prequel set well before the events of the seminal “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” As the title suggests, it’s an origin story for Velma Dinkley (Kaling), who will go on to become the bookish, dowdy and aggressively queer-coded member of Scooby’s ghost-hunting coterie.
In Grandy’s treatment, Velma lives with her attorney father, Aman (Russell Peters), and his persnickety girlfriend, Sophie (Melissa Fumero). She’s already navigating a complicated love rhombus with future colleagues Fred (Glen Howerton), Daphne (Constance Wu) and a not-yet-shaggy Norville Rogers (Sam Richardson). But Velma’s most complicated relationship is with her mother, Diya (Sarayu Blue), who disappeared suspiciously.
Velma now only sees her in immobilizing hallucinations in which a vengeful ghost blames Velma — and her passion for solving mysteries — for Diya’s disappearance. But a mystery solver is exactly what Crystal Cove needs, what with a serial killer stealing the brains of the high school’s “hottest girls.”
Much will be made of the demographic swaps. Velma is Indian American, Norville is Black, and Daphne appears to be of Asian descent, though she’s the adopted daughter of married lesbian detectives Donna and Linda (Jane Lynch and Wanda Sykes). Only Fred retains his identity as the boy next door in the all-white neighborhood, and much is made of his privilege throughout the series.
But these characters are unpleasant to spend time with, and it starts at the top with Velma, whose selfish and misanthropic tendencies aren’t diluted by her moments of vulnerability. Norville is a joy, but a teetotaler deeply opposed to recreational drugs.
Norville as a drug-free square is what passes for meta-humor in “Velma,” which goes out of its way to deconstruct or lampoon
every aspect of the source material. Velma’s famous catchphrase — “Jinkies!” — is contextualized as part of one of the overworked plot lines, and another character accuses her of trying to coin a catchphrase. As a joke, it kind of works. As a reference to “Scooby-Doo,” it adds nothing. That applies to all the dialogue, which doesn’t change at all from character to character, each of them firing off pop culture references like a tommy gun. Far too many of the referential jokes are about romantic comedy tropes and could be plucked as-is out of “Velma” and dropped into “The Mindy Project,” another Kaling-Grandy collaboration.
Many of those jokes are genuinely funny, but the jokes could belong to just about any contemporary sitcom, so what exactly makes “Scooby-Doo” the ideal canvas for this vision as opposed to any other property? That never becomes clear in the eight episodes of “Velma” screened for critics, which are absent even a wisp of genuine reverence for the source material. The biggest mystery of “Velma” is why it needs to exist.