Mindy Kaling’sVelmaseries will be unlike anything audiences have ever seen from the Hanna-Barbera franchise. Promising to be an adult-oriented take on the Mystery Inc. gang, the series will feature a notable absence:Scooby-Doowill not be present in the show, and Kaling recently revealed why that might be.Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!first introduced audiences to those meddling kids and their dog, too, in 1969. TheScooby-Dooseries only ran for 41 episodes but made a big impact on popular culture. It is one of thebetter-known Hanna-Barbera cartoonsand has inspired many parodies of its easily-identifiable formula: four teenagers travel around in a green, psychedelic van with their Great Dane, solving mysteries that usually turn out to be a man in a mask. Sometimes, however, the frights are more real, and the dangers are palpable.RELATED:Mindy Kaling’s Velma Series Gets Teaser Trailer From HBO MaxVelmapromises to be a harrowing origin story for the Mystery Inc. gang. In a clip posted byVariety, the crew discussed why they felt leaving out Scooby-Doo was the right call. Essentially, the crew felt that Scooby-Doo was too much of a character geared toward kids, and they did not feel right using the character in a showwhere the iconic Scooby-Doo villains are real murderers. Additionally, the crew stated that Warner Bros. even went so far as to expressly forbid them from using Scooby-Doo at all.
The crew explained during their panel at New York Comic Con. “When we were going into the show, and thinking about adapting it, we wanted to be respectful. We didn’t want to just kind of take these beloved characters and put them in outrageous or gross situations, and say like, ‘Isn’t it crazy we did that to Velma?'” the crew said. “So, when we were thinking about what made it a kid’s show, and what makes an adult show, the dog, Scooby, is what really seemed to… we couldn’t get a take on it that was like, ‘How can we kind of do this in a fun modern way?’ It felt like what made [the original cartoon] a kid’s show was Scooby-Doo. That coincided with Warner Bros. Animation saying, ‘Hey, you may’t use the dog.’ So we’re like, ‘Great! This works out well!'”
Reception to this turn of events has been mixed. Many fans feel thatScooby-Doo is the heart of the franchiseand that to make a cartoon about Mystery Inc. without Scooby-Doo is tantamount to cutting out the main character of the universe. Some have gone so far as to say that the show will become a footnote in the history of the franchise - just another one of the forgottenScooby-Doocartoons.
SinceVelmais a prequel, however, it’s possible that subsequent seasons could introduce Scooby-Doo to the cast. Plus, maybeScooby-Doo can meet some other fictional charactersfrom the Hanna-Barbera universe.
