- Starring
- Mindy Kaling, Glenn Howerton, Sam Richardson, Constance Wu
- Creator
- Charlie Grandy
- Rating
- TV-MA
- Genre
- Animated, Comedy, Horror, Mystery,
- Release date
- January 12, 2023
- Where to watch
- HBO Max
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Velma serves as an alternate universe origin story for Mystery Inc. The show revolves around Velma Dinkley and other human members of the famous group before their official formation. In this series, Velma tries to solve a mystery regarding the disappearance of her mother and the murders of local teenage girls.
Velma
Velma is an adult cartoon that reimagines the origin of the Scooby-Doo gang as told from the perspective of the intellectual of the group, Velma. You can forget everything good you might remember from the original (like likable characters and fun stories) because it’s all been thrown out the window, tied to a horse, dragged away, shot, defiled, and spit upon. Velma, voiced by Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project, The Office), is now a snarky horror show about a human being who is constantly miserable and makes everyone around her miserable. However, that’s okay because everyone (and I mean everyone) in the show is an @$$hole, with the exception of Shaggy, who is just as dumb or as bright as the situation needs him to be to further the plot. Kaling gives the standard one-note douchy performance that she’s been doing since she left the lovably self-obsessed Kelly Kapoor in Scranton, PA. However, she adds the sound of boredom and waiting for the HBO paycheck to cash. She’s not alone; the rest of the voice performances fall just as flat, except the always-dynamic Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), who plays Freddie.
Unfortunately, not even Glenn’s high-energy performance can overcome the horrid and amateurish writing and the hashed and re-hashed jokes the writers found crawling out of a bloated and rotting dead horse already kicked by their betters. The opening shows two cockroaches crawling out of a garbage can and begin humping, and that gag is the top of the comedy mountain. From there on, every joke is a self-referential, self-aware meta-statement about the state of (what the writers consider to be) current cultural norms and every gag is a childish sexual one…every gag. It wouldn’t be so bad if even one of them were funny.
HBO’s Velma gives the audience no one for whom to root, no jokes at which to laugh, and no events about which to care. If you want to watch a side-splitting spoof on Scooby-Doo, check out Robot Chicken. If, however, you want to be bored to tears and waste your time and energy, watch Velma.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
Velma is honestly a just a pile of absolute woke turd.
How can these morons keep making this crap which is meant to appeal to the very small woke/mental minority.
It’s seems the hatred of men and white men in general and the supposed patriarchy is absolutely out of control and we are being fed the “message” 24/7.
This show is a cynical grab at a beloved 70s kids show. They cant leave anything alone, so sad.
Absolute trash ! They took a beloved kids show and made it into an abomination, meant only to push their political agenda. The art is awful the writing is just atrocious.
Hahahaha you watched it.
I didn’t watch this show, but please allow me to engage in some unsubstantiated speculation.
The people who made this show likely aren’t complete strangers to the Scooby Doo franchise. They obviously watched some of the shows and movies that came before it so they could pull out cheap nostalgia references when necessary. The thing is, I remember back in the 2000s when online animation pioneers got lots of traffic by taking popular TV shows, video games, and pop culture icons and completely defiling them in the most intentionally gory and vulgar way possible. I don’t watch Family Guy, but I know from people linking to it that a lot of their jokes consist of exhuming lost pieces of nostalgic popular culture only to defile it in the most annoying and shocking possible way, and somehow this is popular with enough people to justify going on for more than twenty seasons. And this kind of abuse continues online to this day, where it gains millions of views and millions of dollars for those who create it while naive fans suggest moving such popular parodies onto television.
I would say something about gatekeepers ensuring that new fans treat the old material with respect, but in my ugly experience, it’s usually the crass and the most vulgar who obtain most of the power by crowding out and bullying everyone else. That’s why they think it’s funny to act all smug and superior while defiling the source material they claim to love and respect. Except now, the shock jocks have graduated from the cheap parody realm into the official realm. I don’t know how they got there or how they obtained the legal rights to these properties, but that’s what modern popular culture seems to have morphed into.
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