Mindy Kaling's Velma series 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-Doo will 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. The Scooby-Doo series only ran for 41 episodes but made a big impact on popular culture. It is one of the better-known Hanna-Barbera cartoons and 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.
Mindy Kaling's Velma Series Gets Teaser Trailer From HBO Max
Velma promises to be a harrowing origin story for the Mystery Inc. gang. In a clip posted by Variety, 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 show where 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,
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