TV URBAN LEGEND: Scooby Doo's now-out Velma was based on a sitcom character played by Sheila Kuehl, a noted LGBTQ activist

Recently, Scooby Doo fans finally saw confirmation in a canonical Scooby Doo cartoon that one of its main characters throughout its more than 50 years of existence, Velma Dinkley, was, in fact, a lesbian. It occurred in the most recent Scooby Doo cartoon TV movie, Trick or Treat, Scooby Doo...

CBR's own Joshua Patton reacted to the news in a feature where he explained how this news was important, "While some audience members offer both good and bad faith complaints about this, making a character like Scooby-Doo's Velma gay (or bisexual) is a way to increase representation, which can be a good thing.

Given the long history of oppression the LGBTQIA community has faced in America and in other nations, today's trend towards representation is an important one. Not only do kids get to see characters and old heroes who reflect their lived experiences become pop culture icons, but other kids are also exposed to that culture in ways that create positive feelings about it. Bigotry and prejudice are learned behaviors, and genre stories have always tried to inoculate their audiences from that particular sickness. This has been due to past attitudes about queerness, among the multitudes of decades-old characters in the biggest franchises where there is scant representation."

While Patton noted that there have been some complaints about the canonization of Velma as a lesbian, it is interesting to note how there was an LGBTQ element all the way back to the character who inspired Velma as a character in the 1960s.

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WHAT SITCOM CHARACTER WAS VELMA BASED ON?

It's important to note that the inspirations for cartoon characters is often not necessarily a direct through line, but more of a general sort of thing. That doesn't mean that the inspirations aren't often very much ON point, of course. For instance, The Flintstones was so obviously based on The Honeymooners that Honeymooners star, Jackie Gleason, considered suing Hanna-Barbera over it, telling Playboy magazine in 1986, "We thought of suing them. But I said, 'Oh, shit, let's not go through that.' We've never done anything about it. It's a good show. In fact, that guy who did Fred's voice dubbed in things for me in motion pictures, whenever they were looping and I couldn't make the session. I forget what the hell his name was [Alan Reed]. Nice guy."

However, more often than not, what happens is that a cartoon will take a character as the general concept and then essentially riff on it. In other words, the final character is only tangentially connected to the original character used as the inspiration. For instance, Jerry's three friends on Seinfeld, George, Elaine and Kramer, are all based on real people, but George, Elaine and Kramer are clearly all extremely distinctive characters. There are obvious similarities between George Costantza and Larry David, who George was based on, but there are many differences, as well.

Therefore, when you hear that the characters on a cartoon are based on X characters, do note that we're almost always just talking about a "jumping off" point, and not a specific one-to-one adaptation (although, again, you have things like The Flintstones that get pretty darn close to a one-for-one adaptation).

Long story short, as I've noted in an old TV Legends Revealed, the human cast members on Scooby Doo, Where Are You! were based on the cast of the 1959-1963 sitcom, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.

The series starred Dwayne Hickman as the “every teen” Dobie Gillis (Hickman had to bleach his hair blonde early on in the series, but after a while, they let him go back to his natural hair coloring, as the constant bleaching was destroying his hair)...

dobie-gillis

A pre-Gilligan's Island Bob Denver was Dobie's best friend, the beatnik, Maynard G. Krebs...

maynard-g-krebs-dobie-gillis

A young Warren Beatty was the rich jerk Milton and Tuesday Weld was the rich girl Thalia that Dobie desperately wanted to impress (Beatty left the show before the first season even ended to pursue a film career, and Weld left the show after the first season to also pursue a film career. Milton was replaced by his rich cousin, and Thailia was replaced by "many loves," in other words, a variety of guest star love interests)…

thalia-dobie-gillis

Finally, Sheila James (Sheila Kuehl used her middle name, James, for her stage name) was Dobie’s brainiac friend Zelda who is smitten with Dobie.

zelda-gilroy-dobie-gillis

The new cartoon series that became Scooby Doo, Where Are You! was created by Hanna-Barbera staffers, writers Joe Ruby & Ken Spears and artist Iwao Takamoto. Fred Silverman, then the head of CBS' daytime programming, saw an early version of the show and told them that they should use the cast of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis as a possibility for basing the characters on, so this time around, Ruby, Spears and Takamoto decided to go with that idea.

scooby-doo-gang

Fred was based on Dobie, Daphne on Thailia, Shaggy on Maynard and Velma on Zelda.

Again, though, clearly the characters' personalities all developed on their own beyond their initial inspirations. Interestingly, though, there was another connection between Velma and the actor who played Zelda.

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HOW DID SHEILA KUEHL DEAL WITH BEING PERCEIVED AS A LESBIAN IN THE 1960S?

Sheila Kuehl (then using her stage name, Sheila James), had been acting since she was a kid, and was finding great success as Zelda Gilroy, as there weren't a lot of roles out there for brainy teen girls on TV, so she was certainly distinct. She was so popular that she was even offered the chance to spin off the character of Zelda into her own TV series.

Sadly, it was not picked up, and Zelda barely appeared in the final season of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. The reasons behind these changes sadly had to do with how Kuehl was perceived, as while she was dating a woman at the time, she was deeply in the closet, and yet that didn't matter. I recently wrote about Kuehl's experiences, and the key line was, "Then the pilot was made, and it didn’t sell. We were working late and the director took me for a walk and said the president of CBS thinks you’re a little too butch. (another pause) My partner and I were very young and very, very deeply in the closet. She was 2 ½ to 3 years older. We were very deeply in the closet for obvious reasons, and scared to death because I didn’t know anybody like us at all. You know, I’d heard there were queer people, and that it was a terrible thing to be, so it was a very difficult time. I felt that cold feeling like somebody smashed an ice cap on my head and it all ran down the back of my neck. I thought, now everybody will know."

Many years later, after becoming a successful attorney, Kuehl came out in 1986. She then went on to become a longstanding politician in California state and local politics for almost thirty years, with her retiring this year at the age of 81.

So just like how Kuehl came out decades into her public life, so, too, has Velma come out decades into her public existence, as well.

The legend is...

STATUS: True

Be sure to check out my archive of TV Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of TV. Click here for more legends specifically about animated TV series.

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