Meet Velma. The oft unsung hero of the Scooby gang. The one who was there for either a: Exposition or b:....well more exposition. That was it. That was her role. She was the dowdy little nerd. You had the dead from the neck up Jock (Mainly because I suspect Freddy tied his cravat too tight), the pretty girl/damsel Daphne (AKA Slutgirl) and then you had every one's favourite stoner Shaggy who was smoking so much dope he practically bootstrapped Amsterdam's trade deficit throughout the last 30 years and who was left with a crippling case of the munchies and hallucinated conversations with the gang's great dane. All this meant that there needed to be one figure who did all the real work. Enter Velma.
Now this posed a problem for the group dynamic. She had to be female or else Daphne would be even more a token than she turned out to be but you couldn't have two prototype Paris Hilton's so what to do...make her a nerd. So, cursed with the kind of NHS glasses that even Michael Caine would turn his nose up at, an pudding bowl haircut, sensible shoes and a shapeless and engulfing orange sweater.
So she began her thankless chore. Providing the only working brain in the team short of the dog's, never to be kidnapped or use her wiles like Daphne. But...but...
Watching these cartoons at university where, surprise surprise, such things as Cartoon Network become essential viewing for minds fried by involving lectures or herbal cigarettes I noticed that Velma was a lot more attractive than Daphne. And I wasn't alone. Online it seemed the Gay community adopted her as one of their own. At this, the later cartoons and the (reprehensible) movies went out of their way to make up for lost time and present her as 100% heterosexual. We weren't fooled for a second! Methinks...so the saying goes...that the studio doth protest too much!
Leaving aside idle fantasies about orange sweaters and glasses, Velma deserves respect for nothing else than pure, unadulterated Nerd Pride!
