Warner Bros. Can’t Stop Making ‘Scooby-Doo’ Series

Warner Bros. Discovery has announced its first-ever Scooby-Doo preschool series, Scooby-Doo! And the Mystery Pups.

And that news came only days after Mindy Kaling gave an in-person first look at her upcoming HBO Max animated series Velma, the first adult series in the Scoobiverse.

The two series extend the reach of the Scooby franchise in either direction of its traditional placement as a children’s and family franchise.

Here’s what we know about the two new Scooby shows:

Velma

• The series was ordered by HBO Max for its growing adult animation catalog, and strays far from Scooby-Doo’s family-friendly origins.
• Velma proposes to tell the origin story of Velma Dinkley, the brains of the Mystery Inc. bunch. Based on early images and descriptions, it will do so in a more gory and violent way than has previously seen in the franchise.
• Kaling is executive producing the series along with Charlie Grandy, Howard Klein, and Sam Register.
• The show’s titular protagonist is now of South Asian descent. “Hopefully you noticed my Velma is South Asian,” Kaling told the audience at the upfront. “If people freak out about that, I don’t care.”
• Kaling, who also voices the titular character, shared a photo (pictured top, right) of Velma in a locker room overseeing a grisly murder scene, providing incontrovertible proof that this prequel series will be more adult than anything in franchise history.

Scooby-Doo! And the Mystery Pups

• This will be the first-ever Scooby-Doo series for preschoolers, and was commissioned for the 2024 Cartoonito block on HBO Max Cartoon Network.
• Produced by Warner Bros. Animation, the cgi-animated series will feature stories that are “more kooky than spooky,” according to the company. In the show, Scooby and Shaggy are counselors at a lakeside sleepaway camp where they will work to solve mysteries alongside three young camper pups which WB says are, “destined to become their own preschool version of Mystery Incorporated.”
• The show is being developed within Cartoonito’s Humancentric Learning Framework, a philosophy that the network says “helps children develop their unique potential by inspiring preschoolers to greet every mystery they encounter with wonder, confidence, and cooperation.”
• Mark Palmer (Hello Ninja, Treehouse Detectives) is co-executive producer and showrunner with Erik Knutsen as supervising producer. Sam Register also serves as EP.
• Scooby-Doo! And the Mystery Pups will feature the voices of franchise vets Matthew Lillard as Shaggy and Frank Welker as Scooby.