Velma will come out as gay in new Scooby-Doo movie

Fans had already guessed it for years, but now it's official: Velma Dinkley is a lesbian. This is revealed in the trailer for the new Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo movie that is making the rounds on social media these days amidst enthusiastic comments from the LGBTQ+ community and everyone who grew up investigating along with the ramshackle Mystery gang. In the scene anticipating the next adventure of Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Daphne, and Velma, coming out just in time for Halloween, the Mystery & Related mastermind is seen speechless in front of costume designer Coco Diablo. Unmistakable in her total orange look, with schoolgirl socks and the ever-present glasses, Velma needs only a glance to blush at the sight of her new character and to register all her qualities: from her gorgeous turtleneck to her fantastic glasses, from her brilliant mind to her love of animals.

The film that was released in the United States on October 4 is not the first project in the Scooby-Doo universe to openly address Velma's sexual orientation. In 2020 Tony Cervone, supervising producer of the animated series, recounted on Instagram that he had already tried to make her homosexuality more explicit by specifying that Velma is not bisexual and that she acted out when she dated Shaggy because it was a way of showing that "that relationship was not working for her and that it was hard for her to understand the reasons for that difficulty first." Even in the popular live-action of the early 2000s, director James Gunn's intent was to emphasize Velma's sexual orientation through a kiss with Daphne, thus giving space and voice to the LGBTQ+ community within the film, but the production "kept diluting that part of the script, until Velma's homosexuality became an ambiguous thing in the final shot, then it just disappeared in the version of the film that came to theaters, and in the sequel she even had a boyfriend." Now, however, Gunn and all of us are happy that times have changed and the character created by Hanna-Barbera is free to live her sexuality in the light of day.