For decades now, Velma Dinkley, the crime-fighting heroine of hundreds of Scooby-Doo cartoon and movies, has been trying to come out of the closet. In the early 2000s, when Warner Bros made two live-action Scooby-Doo movies, the screenwriter, James Gunn, attempted to portray her as an out and proud lesbian, but the studio was having none of it.
“I tried!” Gunn told a fan in 2020. “Velma was explicitly gay in my initial script [for the 2002 movie Scooby-Doo]. But the studio kept watering it down, becoming ambiguous.” For the 2004 sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, she even acquired a boyfriend.
