Woke Reboot Bombs: Now the 3rd Worst TV Show on IMDB

It doesn’t often happen that material is so pathetic, offensive, and tasteless that it would seem that everyone—far left or far right, male or female, old or young—ends up uniting in their collective disdain for it. .

In today’s hyper-fractured climate, it seems almost impossible to create such a product, but that seems to be exactly what HBO Max’s touted reimagining of Scooby-Doo, Velma, is all about.

For those blissfully unaware, Velma was promoted and promoted as an adult cartoon reimagining a beloved 1969 children’s cartoon.

While I haven’t personally watched the show itself, I’ve seen enough clips and clips to tell you that in this “adult cartoon” HBO Max stripped the original cartoon of the campy and silly jokes it was so famous for and replaced them. is a high school murder mystery drama centered on a reimagined cast of members of Mystery Inc.

The talking dog is gone, so Scooby is gone. This time, Shaggy goes by his real name (Norville) and has been remade into a young black teenager. Daphne is now Asian. Fred is presented as an offensively stupid white man. And Velma is Indian now. And bisexual. Why not.

Given the enduring success of adult cartoons like South Park or Rick and Morty, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which Velma is a roaring success that devours all sorts of awards.

But that will not happen in this world.

Velma holds the infamous title of one of the lowest-rated shows on the IMDb movie database, and a quick look at the numbers paints a grim picture of a beleaguered show.

According to this IMDb data filter, Velma is officially the third lowest rated series of any TV show with at least 5,000 reviews on IMDb, with only 1.3 out of 10 possible stars.

This 5,000 review benchmark is actually important because looking at the lowest rated shows in IMDb history, they all typically get between 5,000 and 15,000 reviews.

In fact, the two shows currently ranked worse than Velma have 13,681 and 9,541 reviews, respectively.

(For those who are especially curious, two lower-rated shows than Velma are Pogomentary, which is a biographical look at football star Paul Pogba, and Iste bu benim masalim, which is a foreign television series about the singer. )

Velma, meanwhile, generated such a rabid response that it racked up 41,955 reviews. That’s almost double the number of reviews as the two “before” shows combined.

Watch just a couple of Velma clips and you’ll realize that the series is eminently unfunny in almost every conceivable sense:

WARNING. The following clips contain language and imagery that may disturb the reader, especially the third clip, which actually shows a cartoon leg being cut off with a paper cutter.

pic.twitter.com/rEUyd3BR2V

— Screenshots of Hanna-BarberaCap (@HannaBarberaCap) January 16, 2023

Literally, why did Velma have to do this to Fred after wrongly accusing him??? Who thought it was funny or cool? pic.twitter.com/QLz8dSAj6p

— BLISS FWA’23 (@BurrfullyThicc) January 13, 2023

Velma’s show is wild tf continues pic.twitter.com/DVXejIsr7r

— Jen (@jiulr) January 12, 2023

Looking at IMDb’s 20 worst shows, only one other bad show (ironically also another Warner Bros. property) received more overall reviews than Velma – and that was another mess, Batwoman. This CW superhero series has garnered 44,515 reviews.

Even then, “Batwoman” received at least an average score of 3.4 stars. It’s still putrid, but more than twice as much as Velma’s.

And yet, looking at the reviews, the picture becomes even more bleak.

“Worse than people say,” one review begins. “Should be in the top 10 worst TV shows of all time,” another review captioned. “Comedy tag should be removed”, “Zoinks” and “You can tell the makers think it’s hysterical” are just some of the damn review headlines.

Unfortunately for Warner Bros. and HBO, even a closer look at these IMDb reviews shows that this problem does not affect any particular subgroup of people. Almost universal contempt for “Velma”.

Of the 41,955 votes cast for Velma, the vast majority of those votes were cast for one lone star out of a possible 10; 37,462 votes were cast, giving the show only 1 star. Interestingly, the next highest voter turnout came from those who gave Velma 10 stars out of 10: 1,521 votes scored perfect. The next largest number of voters are those who voted for just two stars, amounting to 1,074.

Looking at the demographics, things aren’t much better for Velma.

The 18 to 29 age group, which is supposedly the ideal target audience for adult cartoons, actually rated this show the lowest.

Interestingly, women tended to view “Velma” more favorably than men, but only up to a rating of around 2.7, which by and large is still pretty bad (by comparison, “The Look” has a rating of 2.5 stars on IMDb.)

In the end, the argument may vary depending on why people are so furiously pissed at “Velma” (“This is nonsense, LGBT propaganda,” a conservative might say. “This is not a funny psychological operation designed to discredit the left,” a leftist might say. ), but there seems to be an underlying theme – why did this project get the green light at all?

If you’re going to do such a show, why ruin the good name of Scooby-Doo for this? An exactly the same adult cartoon based on the original characters rather than the Mystery Inc. gang would probably still be ridiculed, but not to the same extent.

In any case, what’s done is done. Velma creator Mindy Kaling will have to deal with these consequences, and it’s entirely her own problem.

Jeepers.

This article originally appeared in The Western Journal.

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