You probably know Scooby Doo character Velma Dinkley for her bold orange turtleneck, short red pleated skirt, and knee-high socks. But there's much more to her than that.
This week Tony Cervone, the supervising producer on animated series Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, confirmed what many have long suspected - that the famous teen sleuth is a lesbian.
“I’ve said this before, but Velma in Mystery Incorporated is not bi. She’s gay,” Cervone wrote on Instagram.
“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.
“There are hints about the why in that episode with the mermaid, and if you follow the entire Marcie arc it seems as clear as we could make it 10 years ago,” he added, referring to Marcie Fleach, a character introduced in the series, which ran from 2010 to 2013.
It's not the first time Velma's sexuality has been up for discussion, with the director of the live-action Scooby-Doo movie, James Gunn, claiming that Velma had initially been written as “explicitly gay”, before being vetoed by Warner Bros. studio.
Linda Cardellini, who played Velma in the 2002 film, has previously supported Gunn's version of events.
"James Gunn wrote that script and it originally had a lot of funny stuff tackling that, but a lot of it got taken out of the movie," she told in an interview.
"I had this whole scene where Velma got drunk, danced on a piano, ripped open her shirt, and had on this orange and red Cross Your Heart bra. I sang a love song, and at the end I pointed.
"Because she’s drunk, the point was right between Daphne and Fred, so they looked at each other and couldn’t figure out who I was pointing at. There was an ambiguity there that people felt from the cartoons. But I think that scene got cut because the studio didn’t want kids seeing Velma drunk."
