Towards the end of June, which serves as Pride month for the LGBTQ+ community, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated producer Tony Cervone confirmed that Velma Dinkley is a lesbian in his version of the long-running franchise. Cervone's animated series was the eleventh incarnation and ran for two seasons comprised of 52 episodes.
In a post on Instagram, Cervone made the revelation alongside an image of Velma Dinkley and Marcie Fleach against a background of pride colors.
"Marcie and Velma - Mystery Incorporated. I obviously don’t represent every version of Velma Dinkley, but I am one of the key people that represents this one. We made our intentions as clear as we could ten years ago. Most of our fans got it," Cervone wrote. "To those that didn’t, I suggest you look closer. There’s no new news here."
He also clarified, in response to a fan angered that Velma's lesbianism went against the canon of Scooby-Doo, that she "is not bi. She's gay."
"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," he wrote (via Buzzfeed). "I don't think Marcie and Velma had to act on their feelings during the main timeline, but post reset, they are a couple. You can not like it, but this was our intention," he concluded.
Piggy-backing off Cervone's comment, James Gunn, who wrote the script for the 2002 live-action film and its sequel, added that Velman was supposed to be "explicitly gay" in his adaptation of the Hanna-Barbera animation. Unfortunately, studio brass kept his version of the character from ever making it to the big screen.
"In 2001 Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script," Gunn wrote on Twitter. "But the studio just kept watering it down & watering it down, becoming ambiguous (the version shot), then nothing (the released version) & finally having a boyfriend (the sequel).
Scooby-Doo has been around since the 1960s and has seen many iterations since then. Knowing that Velma was gay in at least two versions -- making it official canon -- it will be interesting to see how the character is portrayed in future adaptations. Scooby-Doo and the Mystery, Inc. gang recently returned in the CG-animated feature film Scoob!, which released on premium VOD and digital in May.