Velma is an adult cartoon that reimagines the origin of the Scooby-Doo gang as told from the perspective of the intellectual of the group, Velma. You can forget everything good you might remember from the original (like likable characters and fun stories) because it’s all been thrown out the window, tied to a horse, dragged away, shot, defiled, and spit upon. Velma, voiced by Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project, The Office), is now a snarky horror show about a human being who is constantly miserable and makes everyone around her miserable. Although, that’s ok because everyone (and I mean everyone) in the show is an @$$hole, with the exception of Shaggy, who is just as dumb or as bright as the situation needs him to be to further the plot. Kaling gives the standard one-note douchy performance that she’s been doing since she left the lovably self-obsessed Kelly Kapoor in Scranton, PA. However, she adds the sound of boredom and waiting for the HBO paycheck to cash. She’s not alone; the rest of the voice performances fall just as flat, except the always-dynamic Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), who plays Freddie.

Unfortunately, not even Glenn’s high-energy performance can overcome the horrid and amateurish writing and the hashed and re-hashed jokes the writers found crawling out of a bloated and rotting dead horse already kicked by their betters. The opening shows two cockroaches crawling out of a garbage can and begin humping, and that gag is the top of the comedy mountain. From there on, every joke is a self-referential self-aware meta-statement about the state of (what the writers consider to be) current cultural norms, and every gag is a childish sexual one…every gag. It wouldn’t be so bad if even one of them were funny.

HBO’s Velma gives the audience no one for whom to root, no jokes at which to laugh, and no events about which to care. If you want to watch a side-splitting spoof on Scooby-Doo, check out Robot Chicken. If, however, you want to be bored to tears and waste your time and energy, watch Velma.

VELMA WOKE ELEMENTS

The entire show is a woke scree. Don’t believe me? Here’s a snippet of the opening narration, “…sure, normally origin stories are about tall handsome guys struggling with the burden of being handed even more power and, if they are about girls, it’s usually like, “hey, what made this hot chick go crazy?”

1 Vacation

2 Shop

3 Amazon

Earlier in my review, I mentioned that every joke is a self-referential meta-comment on perceived current cultural norms, and they are. Every single “joke” is just an ultra-Left-woke talking point said with a heavy dose of snark that’s vomited out at high-speed.

Velma and Shaggy have had their races changed because that’s what passes for creativity in today’s writer’s rooms.

Freddie is white, rich, and handsome. Therefore, he’s dumb, racist, self-absorbed, shallow, and has a small d!@k; and his manly wealthy dad is a toxic chauvinistic bully.

Daphne is a drug-dealing slut and bisexual, and, of course, Velma is as well.

Oh, and at one point, a black character is needlessly and randomly harassed by the police.

The sexualizing of children. From the opening nude shower/fight scene and throughout every d!@k joke, the main characters are around 15 years old.