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Fictional teenagers Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers, and their beloved mystery-solving companion, the Great Dane Scooby-Doo came into existence on September 13, 1969, by Hanna-Barbera Productions for CBS Saturday Morning. Most people remember the cartoon series for its humour, levity, and surprising twists at the end when the teenagers unmasked the purported “ghosts” and “monsters” to discover that they were mostly always people. But what is not commonly known about the series is its somewhat dark origins.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a period of political turbulence in America. Up until 1969, most major American TV networks produced action-adventure cartoons that focused on violence, in which the heroes would use whatever means necessary to defeat or even kill the villain (for example, The New Adventures of Superman). However, after March 1968, government regulations over children’s programming increased following the events of the Vietnam War, riots over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the assassination of Robert F Kennedy in June 1968.
Kennedy’s political identity was intertwined with his public persona as a fatherly figure, and he was widely revered as someone committed to protecting children’s rights. He was also vocal about issues like ending child hunger and poverty. What followed his assassination was a “moral panic” in America around children’s programming, which eventually led to the censorship of fantasy-inspired violence and a turn towards family-friendly comedies. This was when the light-hearted show, Scooby-Doo, Where are You! was born.
The ‘moral panic’
Sociologist David Garland explains that the term “moral panic” was rigorously defined in sociology in the 1970s as a social condition, episode, person or group of persons who emerge to be defined as a “threat” to societal values and interests. This threat is exhibited by a sudden and excessive feeling of alarm or fear, usually leading to exaggerated efforts to “secure” society. In the 1960s, political turbulence in general and the assassination of Robert F Kennedy, in particular, led to the creation of a show in which the main characters, while always in peril, were never really in serious danger or life-threatening harm (of the kind that Batman and Superman faced, for instance). Scooby-Doo, Where are You! was intentionally light-hearted, and humorous, and has since spawned thousands of episodes, multiple spin-offs, many live-action and animated movies, and most recently, two iterations that have received significant media attention, the first being the 2022 animated movie, Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! And the second, an upcoming animated TV series by HBO Max titled Velma.
In Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!, Velma comes out as lesbian, ending years of speculation about her sexuality. Her sexuality is revealed when she admits to Daphne that she has a crush on Coco Diablo, one of the key villains in the movie. James Gunn and Tony Cervone, who were involved in the live-action movies admitted that they actually wanted to depict Velma as a lesbian in the initial scripts, including in the 2002 Scooby-Doo movie. However, the studio was hesitant to do so because they were concerned about facing public backlash, which is why her sexuality has always remained ambiguous since then. It should be noted that the early 2000s were marked by fierce public opposition to same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian depiction in American media. In 2002, only 51% of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center believed that homosexuality should be accepted by society. Fast forward to 2015, after the US Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage nationwide, that number surged to 72% in 2019. Because of decades of activism, the gay and lesbian depiction is slowly becoming more mainstream in American programming now.
In HBO Max’s upcoming series, Velma, screenwriters plan to depict her origin story in a more mature way, given that the show is aimed at a more adult audience. In it, she is voiced by Mindy Kaling and portrayed as South Asian (instead of white). Daphne is voiced by Constance Wu and reimagined as Asian, while Shaggy/Norville is voiced by Sam Richardson and reimagined as black. All of these characters have been white in previous versions of Scooby-Doo.
Creating archetypes
While Velma is yet to be aired, the past few months have shown that some critics have not taken too kindly to character changes that involve greater representation. For instance, Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid has already been met with severe backlash when it was revealed that the titular character, Ariel, would be played by a black actor, Halle Bailey. Most fans remember Ariel as a white red-headed mermaid and did not take too kindly to the movie’s trailer, which, as of September 17, 2022 received a whopping 2.4 million dislikes on YouTube, making the ratio of dislikes to likes, 5:1. This racist “moral panic” on the issue of racial representation continued with some fans angered towards the new adaptations of The Lord of the Rings series which now features Black and Asian characters (fans argued that Tolkien’s setting for Middle Earth is based on medieval Europe and strictly featured only white characters).
Perhaps a more contemporary global instance of this “moral panic” came from the outcry over Disney Pixar’s animated movie Lightyear which featured a same-sex kiss between two female characters, causing the film to be banned in 14 countries — mostly in South East Asia and the Middle East where public acceptance of homosexuality remains extremely low. Other films such as West Side Story (2021), Chloé Zhao’s Eternals (2021) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) have also been banned in most of the Gulf countries for referencing LGBTQ+ characters.
Invisibilisation of identities
So, while the “moral panic” in the US in the late 1960s emanated from excessive depictions of violence in children’s programming, the “moral panic” of today — globally — seems to be about diverse representation, especially LGBTQ+ representation in children’s and young adult shows.
It should be noted that homosexuality was still a crime in the US in the 1970s, and it was only in 2003 that the US Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality, which is perhaps why Velma’s depiction as an openly gay character in the 2002 film did not make the final cut. Then again, this was probably a lost cause for setting the stage for greater inclusion at a time when social attitudes towards homosexuality in America needed to be changed the most.
As media studies scholar, Elfriede Fursich points out, mass media plays an important role in determining the social construction of reality. Just as the media steers conversations towards important issues through representation, the invisibilisation of identities and expressions (such as expressions by people of colour, the Latinx community, Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi communities in India and the LGBTQ+ community globally) is directly correlated with negative social attitudes towards these groups. Perhaps this explains why a same-sex kiss between two women and a Black mermaid has received so much backlash — because in many ways these kinds of depictions are novel in children’s programming. And while the backlash to Velma’s gay character has not been too intense in the US, it remains to be seen how her South Asian character will be perceived.
As we come closer to the end of 2022, it is time for us to introspect harder and reimagine not just children’s characters like Velma, Daphne, and Shaggy, but others too, in a way that preserves these characters’ core essence. It is vital for storytellers to create archetypes that are broad enough to accommodate diverse experiences — especially those that have been historically excluded from media representation due to bias or stigma.
(The author is a Programme & Communications Manager at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and Nyaaya and can be reached at sahgalkanav@gmail.com)