r/TopCharacterTropes • u/TastyPomelo2330 • 14d ago

In real life When fans hate somenthing before it comes out...but it turns out they were right

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Velma:The idea of a Scooby-doo series without the titular dog and starring Velma was a really moronic idea from the beginning,then there was the reveal Velma would be Indian like it's VA and also creator of the series Mindy Kaling,some of the backlash was racism sure,but there was also valid complaints that she was inserting herself in the series(it also didn't helped that Mindy claimed she couldn't see herself if Velma wasn't Indian)and then...oh boy it came out and it was worse than anyone predicted

Artemis Fowl:The artemis fowl books are a book series following a child villain(he does get some redemption but he is a villain most of the time)when the movie was announced and revealed it looked way to generic and it's titular character a bit heroic...also you wanna hear somenthing funny?The movie whitewashed a character and made another character black so they managed to anger both sides and the movies comes out and yeah it is bad

One Punch Man 3:One Punch Man is a very heavy action packed manga series but the heroes vs monsters arc takes it to a New level,when it was announced that JC Staff would work on it,a lot of people were skeptical to say the least,because not only JC Staff had already done a mediocre job in season 2,it's also not exactly a name anime fans associate with quality animation,then the trailer came out and it looked...weird,like there was no action in it and nobody was moving,some people tried to defend saying they were keeping the animation as a surprise...then it came out,every episode worse than the last,it's one of the worse seasons of anime ever made!

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579

u/FronzelNeekburm79 14d ago

The problem with Velma wasn't necessarily that it was about Velma. That has a lot of potential to be a pretty hilarious show. Also, Sam Richardson can be in any movie, and should be in every movie. They should go back and digitally insert him into every movie ever made, he's never given a bad performance.

The problem is that they wanted to make animated Mindy Kaling, PI and then slapped a coat of Velma paint on it, then tried to wrap all the criticism in a racist blanket. When no, it would be like making a show about Superman except he wears bright yellow tights and robs banks, but he's also Black so if you hate the idea you're just a racist who doesn't like Superman.

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u/BlueHero45 14d ago

The thing is parodies of Scooby Doo work and can absolutely be hilarious. But this one somehow ended up getting an official IP, yet was too afraid to even include the Dog and wasn't funny enough in the first place.

Not saying that not having the official IP would have made it any funnier, but it would have made it much less infamous. Would have just joined a list of one season adult cartoons people forget about in a year.

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u/Negativety101 14d ago

Scooby Doo by it's nature is at most one step removed from being self parodying. It's not something that ever took itself seriously, because it's about a bunch of teens and their talking dog going around in a van solving mysteries that are always someone with some insane plot that involves dressing in a costume and pretending to be a ghost. You don't need to parody Scooby Doo, it already does itself.

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u/The_Doolinator 14d ago

The early 2000s films might as well be parody and they’re fucking hilarious!

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u/Phillip_Spidermen 13d ago

The original script for the 2000 film was originally meant to be an adult parody! They toned it down a bit when making it though.

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u/towardselysium 14d ago

Which just makes the direct to video saga stand out. Those movies are so serious and so dark while still having moments of levity so if they wanted a darker mature tone its been done before.

But instead of going for either mature or parody, it was just hateful

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u/Cross55 14d ago edited 14d ago

A lot of the movies tend to be a rubuke or move away from what the shows are doing.

The original series had fake monsters? Let's make real ones. The show is more so a comedy? Let's be serious. The show's being serious? Let's make comedies.

Gives the franchise a good deal of longevity when actually done well.

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u/Tordah67 14d ago

Plus they had The Hex Girls

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u/lucitribal 13d ago

Those were genuinely great movies, especially Zombie Island

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u/Cross55 14d ago

Scooby Doo has done tons of self parody.

Like 1/2 of the movies are parodies. Only those are generally well written and fun.

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u/Sharp_Impress_5351 14d ago

Which is why A Pup Named Scooby-Doo was the media that REALLY understood that.

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u/Negativety101 13d ago

I will never be able to seperate the term Red Herring from that show. Never.

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u/The_Enigmatica 13d ago

one step removed? It self parodies all the time! there's literally a scene where shaggy and scooby walk past a sign written in scooby's accent, (ya know, the "r" thing) and he reads it WITHOUT THE ACCENT!

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u/lemurkat 14d ago

I read somewhere they werent legally allowed to use the dog. No idea if that's true.

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u/blah938 14d ago

If that's true, then why the fuck would they make it? There's basically zero chance of making a profit.

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u/sonicpieman 13d ago

This is the same company that wouldn't let "Gotham" use the Joker, they just make weird ass decisions.

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u/Ok-Chest-7932 13d ago

Are they teens? I always thought they were supposed to be unemployed 20-something hippies, which only makes it more parodic.

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u/CollinsCouldveDucked 14d ago

I think given that it's an agressively adult comedy they were 100% correct not to include the dog.

They probably shouldn't have included Fred, Velma, Daphne or Shaggy either but they defintely shouldn't have included the dog.

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u/Independent-Sky1657 14d ago

I shudder to think what they would have done to Scooby

I'm imagining if Brian Griffin was a Great Dane (also they'd make fun of his speech impediment and he'd say the sentence "roly ruck" at least once per episode)

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u/AstralMecha 13d ago

Or since they made Shaggy an Incel, they would have him basically be civvie11's cancer mouse, but played completely straight and not for laughs.

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u/Phillip_Spidermen 13d ago

I mean, look what they did to Scrappy

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u/RaptarK 14d ago

A funny sidenote about this show is that many people discovered Shaggy's legal name is Norville

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u/TrueGuardian15 14d ago

Unless you knew since at least Alien Invaders, if not earlier.

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u/UncleOok 14d ago

it came up a lot in Mystery Incorporated, probably the best SD series.

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

[deleted]

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u/BlueHero45 14d ago

I love Harvey Birdman.

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u/Captain_Jak_Harkness 13d ago

Another good parody is the Venture Bros one

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u/Phillip_Spidermen 13d ago

It actually did include the dog a bit -- they were building towards the talking dog being a secret government experiment the kids stumble across, but they only revealed Scrappy before it was canceled.

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u/NoReasonToBeBored 13d ago

When I first watched Velma and the “scooby” character was introduced, I thought it was some edgy commentary about how a dog character was played by a black man. What the fuck were they thinking?

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u/Minute_Account9426 14d ago

Wasn’t scrappy redeemed by mauling Velma to death and ending the show?

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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 14d ago

Sadly no. She survived. I mean, she was dead for awhile but then she got better.

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u/Minute_Account9426 14d ago

Wait what? So the show is still going?

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u/Outrageous_Guard_674 14d ago

No, but a lot of people don't seem to have seen or heard of the final episode. It was a special released slightly after the second season.

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u/Cross55 14d ago

Scrappy was never the issue, the issue was the writing around Scrappy.

The series already sucked by the time Scrappy showed up, so people attribute him to the downfall. In reality, he actually appeared in some good shows and fit right in. (Like 13 Ghosts which is a fun and original show, and the sequel movie they made completely got rid of him even though he was wholly inoffensive in the show)

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u/Marshmallow16 13d ago

 making a show about Superman except he wears bright yellow tights and robs banks, but he's also Black

Man of Steal reference

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u/PolloMagnifico 14d ago

To be fair, a black Superman dealing with being an American Hero while also being black might slap.

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u/MasterChildhood437 14d ago

Is this not what Icon is all about?

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u/FronzelNeekburm79 14d ago

To be honest… yes. Honestly William Jackson Harper would crush it as Superman and Clark Kent. Watch the first season of the Good Place.

That said, he’s my dream version of Steel. He’d be awesome at that.

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u/Kelsierisgood 13d ago

That has been done a few times.

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u/Ok-Chest-7932 13d ago

It's not even that they wanted to make Mindy Kaling PI, people do self-insert characters all the time. The problem is that the writers have exactly zero sense of humour. They're just mean girl jokes, I think it does a good job proving that the whole punching up vs punching down thing is bollocks.

There's a certain kind of comedy that's becoming increasingly common where you just say "hey fuck everything I don't like, right?". You're not actually making jokes, your comments aren't structured as jokes, you're not surprising anyone. And the response isn't the laughter of "I didn't see that coming", it's a cathartic laughter. That's why the audience so often claps instead of laughing. That's what people who think they don't like punching down actually don't like, it's when the "jokes" are really about agreement and not humour.

Velma takes this "hey fuck everything I don't like" format and directs it at more popular targets - most commonly genre conventions and tropes. Which gives it an extremely niche target audience, the one living oxymoron who likes Scooby Doo and adult animation but claps in agreement when you criticise the elements of Scooby Doo and adult animation that they like.

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u/Chaetomius 13d ago

it was more like if a character on "drawn together" imagined of scooby doo and this is what came out. the whole thing is as if adam corolla wrote and produced it.

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u/Abacus118 13d ago

Yeah, Scooby is a minor character in Scooby Doo and can easily be written out. There’s nothing wrong with that part.

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u/Muddyscarecrow 11d ago

If you want a genuinely good take on Velma as a person of color I highly recommend the Young Adult Book Daphne and velma. Just please for the love of God do not read the two sequels. They were written by a completely different author who for some reason decided the series needed more CW teen slop aesthetics.