Three Ideas for the Next Scooby-Doo Series

It's no secret at this point that Velma has been critically panned. Whether you love it or hate it, the majority of the fandom was not satisfied with this edgy adult reboot of the franchise. Now, Velma has wrapped up airing its first season and the fate of the show remains uncertain. Given I was one of those fans who disliked Velma, this feels like the perfect time to talk about the direction I would like the see the franchise go in the future. In the following article, I outlined three broad ideas I have for the future of the franchise, although I've included some concrete series premises amongst my discussion of these ideas. I organized it this way because I am honestly pretty open to new series ideas; honestly, it's the writing and character development that are most important to me.

1. A reboot that builds on Where Are You, but does not attempt to copy it
One of the biggest complaints about Guess Who is that the show often played it too safe. It tried to replicate the tone of Where Are You exactly, but it couldn't quite capture that original magic. While Guess Who isn't my favorite series, I do kind of appreciate what it tried to do by bringing things back to the original tone. Guess Who's biggest fault for me was trying to force that tone to the point where many episodes were a bit stale. Although they are very different series, one way to interpret some people's dissatisfaction with the franchise as of late, is that the common theme betweenVelma  and Guess Who is that both of them tried too hard to force a tone that didn't work. Expanding or taking inspiration from something is different than trying to force it. As amazing as Where Are You is, I don't think anybody would want 49 straight seasons of the exact same thing, because it would get old if there was no variety after a while. I think a reboot of Where Are You could work if it were done in a way that used the original tone, but created something new in the process of doing that. I thought Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! did a great job of using the same classic formula, and by adding a more humorous twist and developing the characters in interesting ways, the writers were able to create something engaging and different. Something like this that builds on an aspect of an old series, (whether it be Where Are You or not)  but doesn't attempt to directly copy it, could be a good direction to go. For example, perhaps they create settings with a similarly dark feel to Where Are You, but show the gang members each developing as characters in different ways. There needs to be a unique defining characteristic of each series, otherwise there is no point in creating a new series if you are going to try to match the tone of a previous series exactly.

2. A mature show that does not overuse adult themes
This is a broad umbrella, and I'll elaborate with some ideas for this later. One of my biggest issues with Velma is how overly try-hard the writers are about the humor. Although it is becoming more common in sitcoms for people to think of "mature" and "adult themes" as the same thing, I firmly believe that they do not have to be. I have never felt that a series needs to be super raunchy in order to for me to think of it as mature. "Adult themes" typically refers to sexual jokes, drug references, intense gore and violence, whereas mature shows can simply mean that a show is too dark for kids, or the themes might be too frightening for a younger audience.

It's always been a bit perplexing to me that WB-Discovery has never looked at the overwhelming success of Zombie Island as something that would work consistently for the franchise. In my 15 years in the fandom, I've met very few fans who have a single bad thing to say about Zombie Island, and it's critically acclaimed even by folks who do not frequently watch the franchise. They could make another show with the mature tone of the Zombie Island era movies, and I think everybody would love it. Even if they made something dark not quite to that level of glory - take the Mystery Incorporated YouTube series from last year for example - I would love to see a show like that. There are clearly plenty of adult fans who still watch the franchise, and WB-Discovery knows this, otherwise they wouldn't keep referencing old stuff from the 1970s and 1980s that no young fans would recognize.

Some specific, concrete ideas that would fit that tone could be a series like Wednesday. Wednesday and Velma are night and days in terms of quality. Wednesday manages to be a great mature reboot of the series that doesn't need to rely on sexual jokes, intense violence, and inappropriate humor as a crutch for bad writing. Simply having the gang solve the mystery of a serial killer in a Halloween costume of some sort could make a really good plot, especially if it was similar in tone to Zombie Island or even Mystery Incorporated (minus the romantic drama). Perhaps you could have it set at a boarding school, much like Wednesday, and have the gang meet each other through solving the mystery together. I would love to see a mature Scooby-Doo show in the vein of Wednesday. 

I also think this would be a great opportunity to create a universe where there is some shared lore from previous Scooby series. For example, recurring characters could show up, or aspects of the main characters from a certain iteration could be developed further. Another thing that I've talked about before on here that I disliked with Guess Who is the overuse of references, where they almost felt gimmicky. The best Easter Eggs for me are the ones that are tied tightly into the plot, rather than just "hey, there's a picture of Redbeard over there!" A mature reboot presents a great opportunity to create franchise lore based upon previous series and characterizations, rather than random references that aren't connected to anything.

3. Spinoff with Side Characters
WB could also do a spin-off of some of the beloved side characters of the franchise. I've mentioned on here that I've written a Ghoul School coming-of-age fanfic for the girls in high school, and a Hex Girls fanfic about how they got started as a band. I think both of these things would make amazing TV shows as long as they stayed at least somewhat true to the original tone (looking at you, Return to Zombie Island). The Hex Girls show is long overdue in my opinion; I think everyone would like that as long as they kept the girls in-character from their previous appearances. Showing how they became a band seems like the most logical series to do, but you could do a number of different plots with the girls, such as getting them involved in some sort of supernatural mystery; the girls going up against a witch as they're exploring Wicca further; or they could even do a high school coming-of-age plot where the girls run into a mystery at their school.

One could even argue that a spin-off featuring a gang member that actually keeps them true to their character would make an enjoyable show. I wrote another fanfic about Velma teaching at her sister Madelyn's school, Whirlen Merlin's, which is the vein of what I'm talking about here. I would like to see a show that actually develops the characters in a natural way that is consistent with what has been established over the past 50 years. Velma missed that mark by making the characters completely different than anything we'd seen before, and Guess Who also missed that mark by making the characters too stale. Especially at the beginning of the show, some of Fred, Daphne, and Velma's lines arguably could have been interchangeable and we probably wouldn't have even noticed.

Another idea in that similar vein is a spinoff involving Scooby, or one of the gang's relatives. I'd especially love to see a show of Scooby solving mysteries with Scooby-Dum; I feel like that would be really wholesome and hilarious.

The ideas are pretty endless for a new Scooby-Doo series, but these are ultimately the elements I most want to see in the next Scooby-Doo series after Mystery Pups. WB has had a history of kind of knee-jerk reactions to previous shows after the fact, and some of them have worked, and some of them haven't. The Be Cool writers have come out and said that WB told them they wanted a funny show after the dark, frightening tone of SDMI, but then they felt Be Cool didn't play it safe enough, so they created Guess Who. The preschool tone of Mystery Pups seems like a direct response to Velma being an adult show. I am pretty open-minded to new ideas; I think the most important aspects are good characterization, compelling mysteries, and an attempt to explore some new aspect of the franchise's formula that has not already been explored.