Coming to HBO Max in 2023 is the hand-drawn adult animated series VELMA. It’s a new origin story of Velma Dinkley and her Mystery Inc. pals, starring and co-executive produced by Mindy Kaling. “The Office” and “The Mindy Project” actress, who also co-wrote and co-starred in the 2019 film “Late Night”, has lent her voice to a number of animated projects over the years — from “Inside Out” and “Despicable Me” to “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Monsters at Work”.

I recently attended a New York Comic-Con press conference with Kaling and VELMA showrunner and co-EP Charlie Grandy. “The possibilities of animation are so big. Why not make the character Indian?,” Kaling said to a room of two to three dozen reporters. She hopes to “honor the character” and looks to Sony’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” for representation inspiration.

Kaling has a four-year-old daughter who loves the “animation style” and “iconic colors” of the old Scooby-Doo show. But VELMA is not for kids. “It’s a scary show,” Kaling said, though “the characters don’t swear that much.” VELMA is about “high school kids being very brave” and going through “what teens deal with.”

Grandy loved watching Scooby-Doo growing up. One of his goals with VELMA was to stay very true to the original “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” series, though he admits those episodes “don’t move as quickly as you remember them.” According to Grandy, on VELMA “the banter is more heightened. I was interested in taking the comedy and the humor of the original and adapting for older [viewers]… harder jokes and scarier.”

Charlie Grandy and Mindy Kaling

As for the origin aspect: “One of the big mysteries of the original Scooby-Doo was… how did these four very different people come together? What really drew them together and kicked it off? In the original, they are chased by seemingly monsters but criminals. It feels like their life is in danger every single week. And yet week in and week out, they keep doing it and it’s seemingly for free. What did they go through in high school that was so bad that kind of pushed them to want to do that?”

I asked Kaling how her previous voice work prepared her for VELMA. She told me, “I was honestly excited because this was the first time where I wasn’t playing a creature. On ‘Monsters at Work’ I play a creature. In ‘Inside Out’ I play another creature, an emotion. So it was great to be playing a young woman, and it was nice to get direction from Charlie to make sure it didn’t sound like Mindy Lahiri or Kelly from ‘The Office’. That was a unique challenge for me. And I hate challenges! So it was great to be able to do that.”

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Jackson Murphy

Jackson Murphy is a movie critic and entertainment columnist. He is the creator of the website Lights-Camera-Jackson.com, and has made numerous appearances on television and radio.

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