Getting Jinky with It: How 2002’s ‘Scooby-Doo’ Raised an Entire Generation of Bisexuals

This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more.

Did Pete Docter's Pixar Gems Help You Face Your Fears? They Did the Same for the Filmmaker

Contrary to what conversion therapy might have you believe, it’s impossible to turn someone gay or bisexual. That is, unless you watched the first “ Scooby-Doo ” movie at a young, formative age. If that’s the case, then you’re almost definitely bisexual now , even if you don’t know it yet. Sorry you had to find out this way.

Despite giving us this great gift, critics at the time were still pretty harsh on cinema’s first-ever live-action portrayal of Scooby-Doo. “Get out your pooper-scoopers,” warned Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers. “It’s like an amalgam of ‘Ghostbusters,’ ‘Alien’ and the ‘Pokemon’ movies — minus all the good parts,” added Michael O’Sullivan at The Washington Post . I, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of this film and the DVD I would eventually wear out in the years that followed, even if I didn’t yet understand why I loved the film so much at that point.

At the time, there was a case to be made for the “Scooby-Doo” being terrible, just as its (outrageously unfair) Rotten Tomatoes score of 32 percent might suggest. But that only applies if you’re straight. If you identify as queer, and especially if you’re one of the bisexual generation that “Scooby-Doo” raised, then these bad reviews — and not one, but two Razzie nominations — are meaningless. If anything, they make us love Raja Gosnell’s film even more. The gays do love an underdog, after all, even if said underdog is a CGI dog who already looked dated back in 2002.

Gays also love hot people, another clear draw when it comes to the “Scooby-Doo” movie. From Linda Cardellini and (a blonde) Isla Fisher to Matthew Lillard and Miguel A. Núñez Jr., any one member of the principal cast could have easily been your bisexual awakening. Except Scrappy-Doo. Probably. For me, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Daphne was particularly confusing at the time. Did I want to be her, did I want to be with her, or did I just want to wear those purple gogo boots? Fifteen-year-old me didn’t have the answers back then, but what the film did confirm for me was my lifelong love of himbos like Fred, aka Freddie Prinze Jr., with that full-blown gay-crisis bleached blonde hair.

Still, there’s much more to the film’s queer appeal than that. To better understand the mysterious pull of Mystery, Inc., we must venture back even further, beyond the noughties, to a time when criminals didn’t get away with much of anything thanks to those meddling kids. The kids in question arrived fully formed on TV in 1969 with no real backstory to speak of. Creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears simply wanted us to accept that Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Norville “Shaggy” Rogers (yes, really) are friends despite having absolutely nothing in common. In truth, it’s almost easier to accept that a Great Dane with a love for snacks somehow named after him can talk rather than believe that a jock, a popular girl, a nerd, and a hippie could get along so well.

Yet that’s exactly what they do because the Scooby gang are family. A chosen family, if you will. And not just because Gellar and Prinze actually got married after filming. The whole gang ride-or-die for each other quite literally, traveling around America in the Mystery Machine to unmask Snow Ghosts, Space Kooks, and everything in between.

Away from family and other friends, Mystery Inc. only has each other, a concept which rings true for the vast majority of alphabet people, if we’re being brutally honest. Something about this appealed to me even before I realized I might be into guys, back when I first watched the cartoons as a kid, because I always knew there was something different about me, something that set me apart from my friends at school and other people in my small-ish town. It was lonely, not being able to pin down what it was that made me seem strange and “too feminine” or “too faggy” for others.

Concerns like that never troubled the Scooby gang though. They never needed anyone else, even when faced with what seems like supernatural horror, week in, week out. Or in the case of “Scooby-Doo: The Movie,” actual supernatural horror, like the island demons and ‘roided-out Scrappy. That irritating munchkin aside, it’s no secret that horror has long appealed to queer people in particular. In fact, much has been written on how that feeling of being othered, of being treated as monstrous resonates with a community that’s more used to the real horrors of the world than most. What “Scooby-Doo” has always done with that notion, something the first film does especially well, is filter the scares through an extremely camp, silly lens that channels the Universal horror movies of old for new, younger audiences.

There’s no better gateway into horror, and gay horror especially than these meddling kids. Because no matter where the gang ends up, whether they’re in a spooky carnival or an abandoned mining town, they love to trespass where they’re not supposed to, freely moving through spaces where they don’t belong. Metaphorically speaking, the Scooby gang were being gay and doing crime long before “Be Gay, Do Crime” became words to live by. Except, they are gay and always have been. Velma, especially.

Back when I was a kid, Velma always stood out to me for reasons that became abundantly clear in hindsight. Remember how Velma struggled to maintain a male love interest for all those years? Or that time she happened to know exactly what Daphne sounds like when she moans ? Now that was a mystery worth solving, which is exactly what James Gunn, yes, that James Gunn, of “Guardians and the Galaxy” fame, set out to do with his script for “Scooby-Doo: The Movie.” Long before Marvel came knocking, Gunn wrote Velma as “explicitly gay” in his original draft, tapping into decades of sapphic coding that queer women especially had long picked up on. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for that meddling studio.

The 2000s Were the Pinnacle of Mean Girl Cinema

According to a now-deleted thread of his on the site formerly known as Twitter, Warner Bros kept watering down Velma’s queer arc, “becoming ambiguous (the version shot), then nothing (the released version), and finally having a boyfriend (the sequel).” Jinkies, indeed.

But as Gunn himself also pointed out, traces of that original thread can still be deduced in some of the DVD’s deleted scenes (remember those?). One in particular featured a “drunk” Velma singing the song “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” as Daphne appeared walking down the stairs before her. Sure, Fred was there too, and Velma could very well be bisexual, but given Gunn’s intent with the script, it’s more likely that Velma was just pining for Daphne. And honestly, there’s nothing gayer than blaring out ill-timed karaoke feels at the object of your desire. Even when the sequel cast Seth Green as Velma’s love interest, there was still far more chemistry between her and Daphne. Even young, confused, closeted me could see that. And in a children’s blockbuster, no less.

That makes extra sense now in light of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s interview with Andy Cohen last year (via Collider ) where she revealed that a “steamy kiss” between Daphne and Velma got cut. Yep, vindication finally for everyone who dared dream of a world where the Scooby gals got it on. But even without Velma and Daphne’s kiss — hell, even without Fred’s ascot — “Scooby-Doo: The Movie” was still the kind of film Republican parents lived in fear of (complimentary). The opening scene alone gave us Fred tied up, Velma suspended mid-air, and copious shots of Daphne’s ass before Pamela Anderson, of all people, stepped in for a cameo. It’s enough to confuse even the most experienced bisexual, let alone a young baby queer still trying to figure out who they are. How Gunn knew to tap into all that so well, I’ll never know. Throw in Gellar’s purple ensemble — not to mention Scooby for the Furries — and what you’ve got is a film specifically engineered in a lab to create queer people. Proof that The Gay Agenda exists, at last.

Gunn’s script knowingly leans into this through a few more scenes that tip-toed past the censors. Remember when Shaggy describes Fred as the “big banana” in his “banana split”? I sure as hell do. And no, you don’t need any context for that one. Then there’s the legendary body swap where Fred, in Daphne’s body, using Daphne’s voice, realizes, “Hey, I can look at myself naaaked.” Nevermind the science behind those soul-swapped vocal chords. This might be the most obvious example of how “Scooby-Doo” defied binary notions of gender, but in truth, nothing captures that interplay between masculinity and femininity in the film quite like Daphne.

“I’m so over this damsel in distress nonsense,” says Daphne at the start of the film, but little did we know just how far she’d go to prove it. And neither did the wrestler she seemingly kills with gravity-defying moves that put Neo to shame. It’s no surprise to see Sarah Michelle Gellar take on a scene like this after she’d already established her gay icon credentials in “Buffy,” aka The Best Show Of All Time™.

Still, we’d never seen a Daphne quite like this before. And crucially, this kickass version of Daphne didn’t forego her femininity or treat it as something that might hold her back, either. Fashion-forward yet still savvy, Daphne even uses her makeup to take a fingerprint and free the gang from a cage at one point, reminding baby queers that they don’t need to conform either way when it comes to stereotypical gender traits. There’s strength in both.

Of course, much of this flew by me at the time, like Daphne herself delivering that signature jump kick. How could I, a baby queer, fully grasp just how queer this movie was at a time when queer characters still weren’t allowed to be themselves on screen, especially in kids’ and teen fare like this? It would be years until I understood exactly what Gunn’s script was aiming for — and years more until confirmation of those extremely gay deleted scenes would validate what I had intuitively resonated with all those years ago, even if not always on a conscious level.

Twenty years later, that queer subtext embedded throughout “Scooby-Doo: The Movie” finally became a reality when the “Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo Halloween Special” confirmed what every queer person has known for decades; that Velma is a big ol’ lesbian. This legacy continues now in the HBO Max series simply titled “ Velma “, although it’s questionable just how well the show handles this, not to mention the legacy of Scooby-Doo in general.

Perhaps things would have been different if “Scooby-Doo: The Movie” could have more freely tapped into the queer foundations of this franchise earlier on, especially when it comes to Velma’s identity. If that had been the case, Mindy Kaling’s show might not feel the need to try so hard and the pushback could have been more focused on the quality of the writing itself rather than its foray into queerness. But more importantly than that, baby queers back in the early noughties could have finally found some respite from always being forced to read between the lines for representation of any kind. And in turn, that could have inspired other queer stories to venture more boldly into teen and family fare at an earlier time, ahead of pioneers like “Steven Universe” and “The Owl House.”

Unfortunately, we’ll never know how things could have been different because they weren’t. It’s a mystery that can never be solved, not even by the Scooby gang themselves. But even without tangible queer representation, and even with all the bad reviews, “Scooby-Doo: The Movie” still remains a pillar of queer culture, a gift that changed the lives of every baby queer who caught it at the right moment in time (myself included). Because even subtext is better than no text at all, especially back then. The only thing that could have made it even better, queer stuff aside, is if “Scooby-Doo” had nabbed two Oscars instead of those two Razzie nominations, one for each of Daphne’s purple gogo boots.