The Venture Brothers – Get On This Bandwagon
Like a monarch butterfly escaping its chrysalis, spreading its wings in the sky for a few beautiful moments, and then getting sucked into the engine of a passing airplane, the fifth season of The Venture Brothers ended last weekend after only eight episodes. Given the gap between Seasons 4 and 5, viewers should probably expect a return to the adventures of Doc, Hank, Dean, and their cast of thousands sometime in, oh, 2025. Such is the price of a show born entirely from the febrile brains of its co-creators, noted degenerates Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer.* But that level of creative control and involvement is also probably why it’s become one of the best comedies on television, a tumbledown structure of nested references and pop culture gags with a surprisingly big heart.
*Actually Christopher McCulloch and Eric Hammer, but c’mon.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the show, basic rundown: as a boy, Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture was basically Jonny Quest, going on wacky adventures with his heroic 60s super-scientist father Dr. Jonas Venture. That was a long time ago, and now a grown-up Rusty has a set of neuroses, an amphetamine habit, and a fortune based entirely on his dad’s “old super-science crap.” He lives with his twin teenage sons Hank (idiot) & Dean (nerdy idiot), their Swedish murder machine of a bodyguard Brock Fucking Samson (the “Fucking” is silent), and a beeping robot named H.E.L.P.E.R. They don’t so much go on adventures as stumble into them and drag themselves kicking and screaming back out, while trying to dodge the cut-rate villains – such as the mighty Monarch, a psychopath in a butterfly suit – that are the other legacy of Rusty’s father.
At least, that’s how the show started – a crude and clever Jonny Quest parody with plenty of nods to other Hanna-Barbera properties and “kid adventurer” genre stuff. Doc was a slimy loser, his sons were the Hardy Boys with no survival instinct, and Brock was a hulking mass of testosterone, permanently standing atop a pile of dead mooks, his bloody mullet gently wafting in the breeze. But as the show progressed, Messrs. Hammer & Publick inched their way towards a basic truth – their cast, roughly sketched parodies that they were, were also people. While Venture Bros remains in a three-way race with Archer & Community for the obscure-pop-cultural-reference crown, it also shares with those shows a sitcom-y penchant for character-driven comedy.
By the third episode, at least according to DVD commentary, Hammer & Publick had already realized that this was a show “about the beauty of failure. It’s about that failure happens to all of us…Every character is not only flawed, but sucks at what they do.” Hell of a sell for season 1, isn’t it? And that led to the development of the core conceit of Venture Bros – almost all of the characters, are essentially pretty normal people. They just happen to inhabit a crazy-ass universe where “super-scientist” or “arch-villain” or “necromancer” are the sort of jobs people can hold down and be kinda mediocre at. They’re not extraordinary human beings, and often quite the opposite; they’re just obeying the rules of the world around them, which say you go from State College to Conjectural Technologies or the Office of Secret Intelligence.
Maybe the best example of this is the show’s duo of long-running antagonists, The Monarch & Dr. Girlfriend. A bug-eyed, ginger, butterfly-themed supervillain who shrieks and gestures his way through years of inexplicable hatred for an unimpressed Rusty Venture, the Monarch is supported and enabled in equal measure by the gravel-voiced Jackie-O look-alike Dr. Girlfriend, whose femininity and competence alike make her a unique character in Venture Bros’ central cast. The Monarch is flamboyant, petulant, and above all, pathetic, but as the show goes on, his basic gag as the Saddest Supervillain Ever unfolds into a richly developed character without ever losing sight of the fact that he is a grown-ass man in an evil butterfly suit. Dr. Girlfriend, too, passes through half a dozen jobs and identities, but the most interesting thing is never her newest costume but why she’s playing lieutenant to spandex-suited maniacs with poor impulse control.
The secret is that these two “villains” have always been where the rest of their cast-mates were travelling to; they’re a normal couple, who bicker over TV shows, struggle with being simultaneous co-workers and romantic partners, and try to support each other’s weird hobbies. They’re just doing so inside a giant flying cocoon, and those weird hobbies are “psychotropic drug torture” and “freaky three-way sex with manta ray-themed supervillains.” Using their bizarre relationship with its ups, its downs, and its giant explosions as a baseline, it’s easy to see how Venture Bros. found its winning recipe. Weird fucked-up world, totally normal problems. Add a dollop of dick jokes, coat in obscure references and the weirdest possible hero/villain designs (Dr. Dugong will always be my personal favorite, but Truckules and The Intangible Fancy are up there), and serve quickly.
Given the long downtime between seasons, if you aren’t current with Venture Bros, this is a damn good time to start. The animation’s pretty rough early on and the first season doesn’t find its voice right away, but those caveats belie a huge depth of character and some of the funniest, best-constructed episodes of animated television you’ll find out there.
