(courtesy IMP Awards)
VELMA 2024 HALLOWEEN SPECIAL
SNAPSHOT
With just 24 hours to bring Velma back, the friends search for a dark spellbook while trying to avoid the wrath of a vengeful spirit. But as the annual Sexy Halloween party nears, Velma and the gang must face their biggest fears… if they all want to make it out alive. (official synopsis courtesy AV Club)
After just two short but batsh*t crazy, dark and loopily funny seasons, we come to the end of the bold, flawed experiment that is Velma.
While This Halloween Needs To Be More Special! doesn’t quite hit it out of the park, and finishes on a very possessive cliffhanger of sorts, it is a fitting enough farewell to a show that attracted a lot of detractors who hated the fact that it wasn’t slavishly reflective of classic Scooby-Doo! (More on that in the review of the first season.)
In this 38-minute special, Velma is a ghost – you need to watch season two to know quite why but it’s an heroic death – who is trying to cross back into her body thanks to a fearsomely powerful spell in an evil magic book held, naturally enough, at the Crystal Cover Historical Society’s building.
Narrated by Richard Kind, who is typically hilarious in his delivery even when giving voice to some very Satanic evil that can, quite literally, send you to hell – we see that happen not once but twice and I have to say it makes being good and going north when you die look super appealing – the spell book is the only thing that can bring Velma back to her body, to the loving arms of Daphne and to her weird relationships with her divorced parents.
With only slightly more than half an hour to play, This Halloween Needs To Be More Special! still somehow manages to give Velma a mystery to solve, forces Fred, Daphne and Norville aka Shaggy to confront their greatest fears and brings the parents into play in a fairly full-on but fun way.
As goodbyes go, it does a pretty good job at providing a workable happy-ever-after, and not ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- of the eternal rest kind all while making some fun, meta observations about sexy Halloweens, the supernatural (now she’s a ghost, Velma has to accept, against all long-held rationalist belief that not everything in the universe is flesh and blood and that maybe soulmates exist too; yes Daphne is delighted) and the way in which origin stories are rarely as straightforward as we think they’ll be.
While a lot of people feel that Velma was a mistake from start to finish and departed too far from the spirit of Scooby-Doo!, this special really creatively underscores that what binds the Mystery Machine gang together is that they are family to each other.
True Velma arrives at that place in a completely way, but it does get there and much of the vibrancy of this special comes from how people who once couldn’t stand each other or were estranged from each other, are not each other’s comrades in arms and friends.
The big departure of course for the series generally is that the villains and schemes are the stuff of the real dark underbelly of society, and that all the supernatural is real and not wigs and masks and smoke machines, but when you consider that recent iterations of classic Scooby-Doo! have gone that way too, Velma is not that far off where the franchise is generally.
This Halloween Needs To Be More Special! is a great way to usher out Velma and while it may not have been perfect in all its spookily surreal and madcap silly ways, the show was clever and funny and wildly creative and proof that you don’t have to just do the same-old, same-old and that you can and should push the creative envelope, because some very cool things can happen.
Velma streams on Max and in Australia on Binge.
VELMA S1
(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s always an interesting exercise to take a beloved figure from a fan-passionate franchise and do something new with it. On the one hand, you will have fans who love the fresh perspective on a character they know and love, equally, though, you will have fans who hate what you have done, and in the delightfully temperate language of the modern digital bearpit known as social media, will accuse of everything up and including crimes against humanity.
Velma, one of the five members of the Mystery Machine gang who cane to public attention in 1969 when Hanna-Barbera launched the Scooby-Doo Where Are You! series, has long sat somewhat in the shadows, dwarfed, despite being the sleuthing brains of the outfit, by the great love extended to the titular character and his companion, Shaggy.
But under the stewardship of Mindy Kaling, who acts as one of the executive producers of Velma, which was created by Charlie Grandy, she steps out from the shadow of the others and take her place as the centre of what is effectively an origin story for the Scooby gang.
It’s at this point that we need to take a step back to the opening paragraphs.
The response to Velma has been, from a fan perspective, “overwhelmingly negative” says Wikipedia, with critics attacking what they termed the limited portrayal of diversity, the way in which Velma’s sexuality is depicted and its overly self-aware meta sensibilities”.
Having said that, this reviewer actually likes the show.
Is it perfect? No, and it’s reasonable to assert that the goofy, sweet characters of the traditional Scooby-Doo iterations, of which there have been many, come across as a lot less likable and far more inherently flawed; if you want light, fun, escapist entertainment, this is likely not going to be your thing.
But just as the Scooby Apocalypse comic book series was attacked for being far too dark and irreverent, and the Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! was lambasted for being too goofily out there – for the record, this reviewer, who grew up with Scooby-Doo Where Are You! really enjoyed both far-from-traditional incarnations – so is Velma being pilloried for a vast variety on departing from orthodoxy sins.
But here’s the thing; while departing from canon can feel a little jarring because you’re not being served up more of the same, there’s something freeing about having a series like Velma upend things so magnificently.
It adds some new perspective and fun to things and much like Solo and The Acolyte played with the Star Wars formula to a significant degree, and succeeded in rewardingly upsetting the apple cart, so does Velma add some fresh interesting new angles to Scooby-Doo.
It’s gloriously and hilariously irreverent, it does a delightfully inventive job of nodding to other Hanna-Barbera properties like The Flintstones, the Jetsons, Captain Caveman and Inch High Private Eye, it serves as a really imaginative origin story for the franchise (we see where the van and “Jinkies!” comes form for instance), and it fleshes out the characters rather cleverly, and often quite hilariously.
It also makes some rather imaginative and pithy observations about misogyny, feminism, and the same tired tropes popping up endlessly in all manner of TV shoes, and it’s this tongue-in-cheek satire that really elevates the show.
Sure, it isn’t your mother’s Scooby-Doo but then it’s not trying to be, and the good thing is if you don’t like Velma, now sadly cancelled after two series and a special, you can simply fire up Scooby-Doo Where Are You! and its successors and watch them instead.
While Velma isn’t perfect, it is very funny and seditiously clever, and as someone who loves to see what can be done with characters and franchises I enjoy, even if I don’t wholeheartedly embrace the result (though I pretty much did with this), it’s good to see someone trying to push the envelope, offering up good old mystery solving, for which the gang is known, and mixing it in with some dark and angsty teen drama and some oddball humour, to rather fun and edgy effect.
Velma streams on Max and in Australia on Binge.
VELMA S2
(courtesy IMP Awards)
So how do you follow up the first season of an idiosyncratic take on the venerable Scooby-Doo! franchise?
By doing more of the same, and then doubling down on it even harder, so much so that you could well argue that the second season of Velma is quite possibly even darker, more cynical and disillusioned about the vagaries of the human condition than it’s predecessor.
Forgot the whimsical silliness of the usual Scooby-Doo! iterations, Velma heads into its second season with an eye on how just terrible humanity can be, especially in a worryingly post-truth era where people seem to have lost the art of thinking for themselves, which let’s face it, only had a brief flowering in the twentieth century, and sadly not even then much of the time, and where mob rule and entrenched attitudes are more decisive in swaying behaviour than cold hard facts.
Case in point is the fifth episode, “Burning Woman” where an enraged group of social media scuttlebutt-stoked men, aided by a populist sheriff, are intent on burning a young local Wiccan woman, Amber (Sara Ramirez) in defiance of all the facts on the ground.
Her great “sin”? Being incorrectly named by Velma, who soon regrets her rash decision, as the main suspect in a series of gruesome murders of men, all of whom have their, ahem, penises removed.
It’s a trademark of the serial killer but what makes Velma decide to accuse Amber of being the killer is less facts on the ground, and more an assumption, powered by some circumstantial evidence and by Velma’s jealousy at how close Daphne, now Velma’s girlfriend and Amber are getting.
It’s a nice piece of humanising of Velma who, in classic Scooby-Doo!, is usually the flawless voice of reason who keeps everyone else on course when they’re trying to solve one of their trademark out-there mysteries, and it also gives the show a chance to make some rather sage points about female solidarity, the unthinking herd mentality of men and how even the most noble of people can be seduced by petty jealousies and base emotions.
So, yeah, Velma is happy to going deep and dark, happy to talk openly about cut-off genitals, to make hilariously acerbic observations about religion and the unthinking nature of blind belief – mostly Christians, courtesy of Fred converting to Catholicism for a while to power his mystery-solving business, but also the Wiccans; much fun, for instance, is had with the idea of “manifesting” – and to get quite graphic about death, murder and the darkness of the human soul.
It also introduces some wonderful nods to classic Scooby-Doo! including a villain who, if you are one of many classic watchers of the franchise, is as evil and annoying as you thought he was at the time in his classic series appearances.
The nods to classic Hanna-Barbera are there too, but they are not as plentiful this time around, courtesy of less whimsy and far more graphic seriousness which means that this season, far more than the first, can be hard going at times.
Not fatally so – boom! tish! and yes, word very much used intentionally, thank you – but it feels at times like the show is trying to spin a conceit that worked very nicely in the novelty of the first season but which feels over-egged in the second.
Still, for all its try-hardedness, Velma is still satirically entertaining, skewering belief in the supernatural, interpersonal relationships, the ability of science & technology to be both good and evil, and the vapidity of wealth and its corrosive effect on good old basic humanity with extravagant glee.
It also still functions, in part, as a coming-of-age teen drama, and yes the mean girls are still doing their thing, even as brains in jars – the visuals on this are very funny and do a neat job of underscoring how hilariously shallow people can be – but mostly this is Velma being brilliant, being flawed and human and getting into her mystery-solving groove, with Fred, Daphne and Shaggy aka Norville (Sam Richardson) coalescing around her as the Mystery Machine gang we know and love.
No sign of Scooby, at least, not as we know him – his name is referenced but not even remotely as you’d expect and therein lies the fun – but Velma, if it hadn’t been cancelled and had a third season to play with, is well on its way in the second season to being the Scooby-Doo! origin story to, ahem, die for.
Alas, there won’t be any more episodes – the special that starts off this marathon review post is the final instalment in this iteration of the franchise – but that may be just as well since while Velma is clever, fun and monstrously insightful, it feels like its run its course and that we should just enjoy the inventive, imaginative madcap creative summonings of Velma creator, Charlie Grandy, and be thankful we got the weird, hilarious darkness of this show at all.
Velma streams on Max and in Australia on Binge.