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Comment by species9606 | Hacker News Reader

Not to worry, HBO Max has replaced all that with “Velma.”

I am getting a ton of adverts for "Velma" when watching YouTube. My YouTube habit is exclusively mountain biking, woodworking and home improvement. I am not sure how targeted YouTube's advertising is but have come up with three theories:

1) Data sharing with Netflix (I do love Big Mouth)

2) Using the content I watch as a correlation for my age, and therefore susceptibility to Scooby-Doo nostalgia.

3) Wide net, no targeting. YouTube is just blasting these ads to everyone.

Nothing in the advertisements has piqued my interest in the show either. It looks uninspired.

I had never heard of it, but with an imdb rating of 1.7 for 10k votes [1], it makes it to the top 20 worst shows/movies (with over 10k votes) in history.

The worst movie in that category seems to be a biography of Erdogan [2].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14153790/

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5988370/

At least some of that (maybe a lot of it) is just reflexive hate-voting... but by all accounts the show is also just genuinely bad. Probably not all-time bad, but bad.

I haven’t watched it yet, but it’s been out for less than a week, so I suspect that rating may change going forward. (Or maybe it really is awful? Feels like brigading to me, though.)

It's a Scooby-Doo property...without Scooby-Doo (think the explanation for that is it's meant to be a "Velma origin story").

This is the kindof remake/re-imagining that gets made ostensibly for a different audience...but in the process alienates the traditional audience...which makes it end up with no audience.

Mindy Kaling was a big part of the success of the American Office and has other successes in a relatively short career, so it's not hard to see why it was green-lit...but frankly it's rating is probably about what it should expected to be.

It seems like the kind of show where they wrote a script first and then turned it into Scooby Doo later.

From what I've heard, it is unlikely to go up much. Absolute mess of a show that seems to go out of its way to insult any audience likely to watch it and who's only redeeming feature is that when the animators are trying they're doing a really good job.

For what I've seen it is a show is actually about the author as the main character and used only tScooby-Doo as a theme to be sold

In my experience, after 1000 votes, the rating has converged to its final value.

That has to be the result of a coordinated down-voting campaign.

the first episode is full of swearing and cartoon nudity of ~16 year old girls in the showers in their high school.

the second episode has Velma and Daphne making out.

I don't think it's a brigade, I think it's a serious reaction to a very different version of Scooby doo.

I was actually jaw-dropped at how terrible the first episode was.

HBO is normally known for high-quality content (even if I don't like it, it's not for me).

HBO Max isn’t HBO—it’s HBO plus other Warner bros stuff. Velma was made by the non-HBO side.

There has not been an HBO side for a few years now. ATT fired the HBO executives that made HBO HBO when ATT bought it.

Velma, I believe, is a holdover from the previous regime. The current one is more likely to replace it with some sort of trashy reality TV.

Which would likely be a massive step up from Velma.

I have no take on Velma, but “Be Cool, Scooby Doo” is perhaps the best of all the more recent iterations of the show. Good writing.

What part of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is so hard to get? This isn't bloody reddit.

You seem to breaking multiple of those rules with your comment.

I have a hard time shaking the feeling that this was unironically the pitch for the show.

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