Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Black girl in Velma real name is actually Gigi and not Scooby-Doo and she isn’t sa food reviewer following misinformation on Twitter.
Tomey wrote: “No. Her name is Gigi. She’s not a food reviewer, she’s one of Daphne’s popular girl clique friends who becomes a real character of her own later on goes out with Norville.
“Im not even tryna defend this show but as someone who REVIEWED IT, stop spreading misinformation.””
Scooby-Doo and Mystery, Inc. have been reinvented across the mediums of television and film for over 50 years. After decades of entertaining children by solving mysteries, now seems a more appropriate time than ever for those meddling kids to get that grown-up reinvention. Granted, Scooby-Doo (2002) screenwriter-turned-DC-films-head James Gunn attempted to do that before WB meddled with the edits to maximize their profits. With Velma, showrunner Charlie Grady and executive producer Mindy Kaling attempt to solve the mystery of retooling the gang for a mature audience, while adding depth to the most one-dimensional 2D-animated characters in history. Sadly, they’re a few clues too short from unmasking a serviceable series.
Velma tells the origin story of the brainiac behind every mystery, Velma Dinkley (Mindy Kaling), a smart and pushy teenage South-Asian sleuth in the making, on the search for her missing mother, Diya Dinkley (Sarayu Blue). She leads an isolated life: her neglectful father, Aman (Russell Peters), puts all of his attention on his pregnant girlfriend, Sophie (Melissa Fumero). At her high school, Velma butts heads with her former best friend turned enemy Daphne Blake (Constance Wu) and her clique of fellow popular girls, while pining for the spoiled, rich, beta-male nepo-baby Fred Jones (Glenn Howerton). Her only consolation is her best friend Norville (better known as Shaggy) Rogers (Sam Richardson), who simps for Velma harder than Milhouse for Lisa .In Velma’s town of Crystal Cove, a serial killer is on the loose and targets all the popular girls at Crystal Cove High, slicing open their heads and leaving their bodies without a brain. With a mystery pretty much at her front door, it’s up to the scrappy wannabe detective to tackle the case on her own, along with settling the love quadrangle that forms around her.
Out of the adult animated comedies fare, Velma’s animation takes the cake as one of the most visually striking shows I’ve seen in quite some time. It strays from Hanna-Barbera flair and goes for a cartoonish graphic novel style, bearing resemblance most to classic Archie Comics along with an anime-influenced backbone for its fast-paced expressions. The unique character designs that race-bend most of the characters, excluding Fred, have a variety of sharped-edged, angular-faced features that makes them stand out from most of the prior mystery team designs.
There’s great animation detail that took me off guard, particularly with the use of shadow, lighting, and color styling to add a refreshingly suspenseful atmosphere to the scenery. One fascinating juncture is that whenever Velma gets panic attacks, she experiences hallucinations of grotesque personifications of whoever is on her mind. Art director Valerio Ventura gives the backdrop of Crystal Cove a ghastly, dreadful feel that nails the small town Midwestern vibes, resembling a mix of notable horror media locations such as Hawkins and Woodsboro.
The series also flourishes through the voice performances of its comedy-heavy cast, who bring their respective characters to life. Kaling’s Velma is as charismatically Mindy as you get. Constance Wu lends a well-rounded range of fierceness and sweetness to Daphne. Sam Richardson brings his typical high-energy nice guy approach to Norville (no, they don’t make him a stoner stereotype either, and it’s cheekily addressed immediately). The MVP is Glenn Howerton as the clueless, dim-witted Fred. Out of the ensemble, Howerton is the only character who puts on a voice. He has this consistently shrill and whiny tone that garners good laughs, as if Dennis from It’s Always Sunny didn’t get his Adam’s apple. The other supporting voice cast—featuring Jane Lynch, Wanda Sykes, Gary Cole, Yvonne Orji, Stephen Root, and Fortune Feimster, to name a few—deliver the same magnetic charisma as the main to keep the energy of the series humming.
As far as other Kaling-variants go, Velma parallels Never Have I Ever’s Devi to a tee. They’re both judgemental, possessive, selfish, and in a lonesome rut due to the loss of a loving parent. Thankfully, Velma breaks the Kaling syndrome of her lead being in pursuit of a mediocre white dude. Her jumping-off crush point is Fred, but those feelings for him shift faster than the speed of sound as a sweet and well-developed romance between Velma and her frenemy Daphne is explored. Thank the heavens for that, because the swirl relationship trope within her South-Asian leads was reaching Kenya Barris levels of alarming.
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