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So Scooby-Doo’s Velma Likes Girls. Pass the Salt, Please
The sexual orientation of cartoon characters isn’t hazardous to anyone’s mental health. More broccoli?
On Friday I made a guest appearance on CBS News to talk about the revelation in the new animated movie Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! that Velma, a main character in the long-running Scooby-Doo series, likes girls. After just one look at a comely female costume designer named Coco Diablo, Velma goes all googly-eyed.
“Jinkies!”
For anyone even vaguely familiar with who’s who in the Scooby-Doo franchise, which debuted in 1969 via the animated TV series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, this shouldn’t be an earth-shattering development. As cartoon characters go, Velma has always appeared to be fairly asexual, and if I had thought to consider her sexual orientation before (and I admit, I honestly hadn’t), she easily could have gone either way.
James Gunn, who wrote two Scooby-Doo movies in the early 2000s (2002’s Scooby-Doo and 2004’s Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed), wanted to make her “explicitly” gay, but studio interference prevented him from going there. In 2020, Tony Cervone, producer of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, sort of outed Velma in an Instagram post where he admitted to having dropped hints that she…
