HBO's Velma, an adult animated comedy prequel about the Mystery Inc. gang, is being battered by fans, scoring a miserable 6% for its first season among its audience on Rotten Tomatoes.
Yes, first season, as it seems that the show has been renewed by Warner Bros. according to a scoop from the Entertainment Identifier Registry. This hasn't been actually announced yet and this might be due to the fact that Velma has been very poorly received. For comparison, the critic score for the prequel lands at 55%, which still isn't fantastic.
Check out the trailer for Velma here!
Velma used race-blind casting for the characters, changing the races of Daphne, Shaggy and Velma to reflect their respective actors (Constance Wu, Sam Richardson and Mindy Kaling). Unfortunately, this did see a significant backlash from racists that Kaling addressed at New York Comic Con last year. "I think of the characters in this as so iconic, but in no way is the gang defined by their whiteness, except for Fred," she said.
"So, I was a little bit surprised and I think most Indian-American girls when they see this skeptical, hardworking, kind of underappreciated character, can identify with her."
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For the more rational fans, they are struggling to reconcile the absence of Scooby-Doo, the reinvented personalities and the angsty relationships between the characters. "What in the everloving... what... how can something this utterly dreadful get made?" complained one in their review. "Why did anyone greenlight a PG-13 self-Insert fanfic of the Scooby-Doo characters?"
"An unfortunate attempt to bring a beloved classic to life with an edgy new twist that falls hard on its face," added another. "Velma won't bring you nearly enough laughs and thrills as it does cringe moments that will leave you scratching your head and reaching for the remote to change the channel." It's available on HBO Max, for the morbidly curious.
Topics: TV And Film, Warner Bros