The first two new episodes of the “Velma” show aired Jan. 12, it was produced by HBO Max and has sparked the attention of many – but not in a positive way. The show is an adult remake of the original kids’ show, “Scooby-Doo, where are you!” but the new show mainly focuses on Velma’s origin story.

Considering this was supposed to be a spin-off of Scooby-Doo, people were really mad when they found out Scooby wasn’t even going to be in the show. In my opinion, Scooby is what brought the comedy to the show and since this show is in the comedy genre,  for them to remove him wasn’t that great of an idea. Learning that the only reason why they didn’t add him in was that they felt like he made it a “kids’ show” was confusing because they could have just made him mature like the other characters.

What I didn’t really like was how they changed how everyone looked and their personalities. If you’re going to do that, just make a whole new show instead of doing a spin-off. I understand that they wanted to make this more of an adult series, but they could have just added in more mature, scary scenes and some adult jokes. It’s cool that they added people of color into the show but it feels different. The character Shaggy is now African American, Velma’s south Asian, and Daphne’s Asian. The only white person is Fred, but he is now portrayed as annoying and a feminist. They also changed Shaggy’s name to “Norville ” because they thought it fit him better considering he’s now African American.

The jokes in this show are unfunny, they make zero sense and most of them are racist. They used racism and shock humor as a crutch because the show doesn’t know how to be funny.  There are also a lot of stereotypes. In one of the scenes, Fred assumes that Velma is his housekeeper because he thought she was Mexican and he would also copy off of her in Spanish because, again, he thought she was Mexican. Another stereotype towards Velma was that she had hairy arms and a strong facial structure because she’s south Asian. She also apparently hates her own culture.

The show was so bad that it got a 1.3 out of 10 rating on IMDB, this is IMDB’s worst rating. Even with the bad ratings, the show is still getting renewed for season two. HBO has canceled a lot of great shows and movies so they could renew the “Velma” TV show, but it honestly isn’t worth it.

Overall, the show is really bad and they failed at trying to do a spin-off. If they just kept the characters the same and actually made funny jokes, I would have probably liked it. Many people said they didn’t like the animation but that wasn’t really a problem for me, it was just the way the characters acted. Maybe this show can redeem itself in season two, but I doubt it.

“Velma” ★☆☆☆☆