The MultiVersus Velma police car special move has been changed in the latest patch 1.02 of the popular fighting game, putting memes of cops arresting LeBron James to an end. Before the update, Velma would hail a police car to take an opponent away after gathering enough evidence through her attacks, with some fans creating memes about how uncomfortable it is to call the cops on basketball superstar LeBron James. As of MultiVersus update 1.02 the police car has now been replaced by The Mystery Machine instead.
Was Velma’s police car changed due to memes?
It’s unclear whether Player First Games took the memes into consideration when altering Velma’s passive skill. Specifically in the patch notes, Velma now “calls the Mystery Inc. gang and the Mystery Machine to take the bad guys away.” This might seem like a sudden change, but a broken-window version of the classic Mystery Machine from the Scooby-Doo cartoons were in the files for Velma in the past according to dataminer AisulMV. Either way, some fans have never felt comfortable summoning Velma’s police car along with her “Get ’em sheriff!” voice line against LeBron, with Twitter user @NgObscure saying in July that it “don’t sit right with me as a black man lol.”
The context of the original police car move is that Velma is collecting evidence that an opposing character is actually Old Man Jenkins in disguise, otherwise known as Mr. Jenkins from the cartoons. But it’s still not great optics as many have no idea about the reference.
At any rate, fans reacting to the change on Reddit have been positive for the most part. Many think that the generic police car isn’t as interesting or flavorful as The Mystery Machine anyway, though some think that the LeBron memes will only be replaced by memes of the van kidnapping children characters like Steven, Arya, and Finn instead. Try to stop a meme and three more spring up in its place.
In other news, the next Xbox Fall Showcase will feature multiple Game Pass titles, and a new Battlefield narrative campaign has been assigned to a developer led by a Halo co-creator.
