We reported earlier this month on Sarah Michelle Gellar’s confirmation that a kiss between Daphne and Velma was filmed for the 2002 live-action Scooby-Doo and subsequently cut before release. The story was received with the appropriate mixture of retrospective exasperation and weary recognition that this was precisely what studios in 2002 did with queer content. However, it now transpires that the Daphne-Velma kiss was not the only casualty.
Gellar, in a follow-up interview, has indicated that the relationship between the two characters was considerably more developed in the filmed version of the movie than what reached theatres. The kiss was the most visible omission, but it was not a standalone scene — it was part of something larger that the studio chose not to include. The relationship between Daphne and Velma, as written and as filmed, was apparently one of the more substantial elements of a movie that was, from the beginning, considerably stranger and more subversive than its family-friendly marketing suggested.
This is, by now, a reasonably well-documented fact about the original Scooby-Doo. James Gunn’s screenplay — yes, that James Gunn, who went on to make Guardians of the Galaxy — was initially written for a much older audience. The film that emerged from the studio system was significantly softened: drug references removed, edges sanded down, the Daphne-Velma material cut. What remained was a film that felt, to many viewers, oddly thin — which now makes considerably more sense in light of what was apparently left on the floor.
Gellar’s willingness to discuss these cuts in 2023 is itself interesting. She played Daphne across both the 2002 film and its 2004 sequel, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, and has generally spoken warmly of the experience even while acknowledging the compromises involved. The fact that she is now detailing those compromises more specifically suggests a comfort with the distance of time, and possibly also a recognition that the conversation around queer representation in early-2000s mainstream cinema is overdue.
The Daphne-Velma relationship, as it apparently existed in the filmed version of Scooby-Doo, would have been significant. Not groundbreaking by the standards of contemporary television — Buffy was already well into the Willow and Tara storyline by 2002 — but meaningful for a mainstream studio release aimed at families. The decision to cut it was a studio decision, made for studio reasons, in a studio environment that has since shifted substantially.
Somewhere there is a version of Scooby-Doo with all of this intact. One does not expect it to surface, but one does not stop hoping either.
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