James Gunn has said he initially wrote Scooby Doo character Velma to be ‘explicitly gay’ when working on the 2002 live-action Scooby Doo movie.
The 53-year-old filmmaker, who is better known nowadays for directing the Guardians of the Galaxy films, claimed that film studio Warner Bros ‘watered down’ Velma’s sexuality in Gun’s script – with the character then getting a boyfriend in the 2004 sequel.
In an online question and answer session with the director, one Twitter used asked: “Please make our live-action lesbian Velma dreams come true.”
Gunn responded: “I tried! In 2001 Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script. But the studio just kept watering it down and watering it down, becoming ambiguous (the version shot), then nothing (the released version) & finally having a boyfriend (the sequel).”
Linda Cardellini played the bespectacled snoop in the 2002 movie, a role which she reprised for the sequel Monsters Unleashed.
Tony Cervone, the director of the 2020 Scooby-Doo adaptation Scoob! has since said that Velma is gay in later incarnations of the classic Hanna-Barbera animation.
“Velma in Mystery Incorporated is not bi. She’s gay,” he wrote in a statement on Instagram.
“We always planned on Velma acting a little off and out of character while she was dating Shaggy because that relationship was wrong for her and she had unspoken difficulty with the why.”
Elsewhere in Gunn’s Q&A session, another fan asked whether we could look forward to seeing a Scooby Doo crossover in his upcoming Suicide Squad reboot/sequel The Suicide Squad, which led to a second fan joking Mystery Inc may work better with the Guardians of the Galaxy characters.
“Scooby and the Guardians might be unlikely considering it’s Warners/Disney,” Gunn replied. “But, you know, an animated Mystery Ink [sic] /The Suicide Squad film is always possible."
