After years of speculation, the Scooby-Doo canon has finally made it official: Velma Dinkley, Mystery Inc.’s resident bookworm and turtleneck enthusiast, is into girls. And even Google knows that’s worth celebrating.
A Twitter user posted a video from Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo!, a new Halloween kids’ movie that premiered on Prime Video on Tuesday. In the clip, the gang encounter supervillain and super-cool costume designer Coco Diablo, and Velma (voiced here by Kate Micucci) is instantly crushing. Glasses fogged up, power of speech vanquished, pink-cheeked crushing.
Fans rejoiced, and musician and actor Hayley Kiyoko — who played Velma in the 2009 Cartoon Network live-action prequel Scooby-Doo: The Mystery Begins — marked the moment by noting that technically, there had already been a lesbian Velma. Sort of.
Google also got into the spirit, putting a WLW twist on their Pride Month confetti Easter egg. If you search Velma’s name on Google, you’ll be greeted by a shower of lesbian Pride flags and Progress flags on the results page.
While Google’s been criticised in the past over its perceived failures to mitigate homophobia and harassment on YouTube, the company regularly celebrates Pride and LGBTQ history in Google Doodles and other Easter eggs.
The knee sock queen is also getting her own, darker-and-edgier animated prequel series on HBO Max, Velma, created by Mindy Kaling (who also voices the young Velma, who’s of South Asian descent in the series). The network is unveiling a first look at the series at New York Comic-Con this week. Hopefully Kaling had a heads up about Ms. Dinkley’s big news, because she’ll definitely be asked about it.
