Venture Bros: Now Museum, Now You Don’t!

Spider-Skull Island, of course, has rich associations for Jonas Jr.  It was the Team Venture headquarters (the founding of which we see in the pre-title sequence), and therefore a kind of home for his father.  Many children end up living as men in their father’s house, and it’s an admirable characteristic to honor one’s father (something Rusty simply cannot do).  But most men, I think we would say, would stop short of actually turning their inherited dwelling into a literal museum.  A home is a place to live in, a museum is a place to house the items of the dead — almost a mausoleum.

Why does Jonas Jr. turn his home into a museum dedicated to his father?  I don’t think it’s merely that he worships Jonas Sr (although it’s certainly easier to worship a father who isn’t around — cf Christianity), and I don’t think it’s merely that he wants to stick a knife in Rusty’s side (how appropriate that Jonas Jr lives in the ex-headquarters of the — yikes! — Fraternity of Torment). 

I think Jonas, like many of the characters of the Venture universe, yearns for family.  Up to this point, he’s kind of been tossed on the scrap-heap of “old Venture characters”, making do on Spider-Skull Island with Sally Impossible and Ned and the Ghost-Pirates and so forth.  Having no love toward his brother (whom he tried to kill even before he was born), Jonas reaches out to his missing father to assemble a family from the members of the old Team Venture.  This is the point of the museum, is it not?   To bring together Colonel Gentleman, the Action Man and the rest, to assemble them for that “impromptu” photo-op, with himself at the center?  To, essentially, take his father’s place as the head of the Venture family.

Jonas Jr’s gesture brings up questions the purpose of organizations like Team Venture, organizations like the Fraternity of Torment, and the real-life counterparts of those organizations (the CIA, the Marines, the Navy SEALS, the Mafia — any organization that presents itself, first and foremost, as a “fraternity”).  Jonas Sr has no wife that we’ve seen so far, and is enormously absent with regards to his young son Rusty (his glib, facetious confession to Dick Cavett notwithstanding).  Jonas Sr, no doubt, founded Team Venture precisely to have the family he felt he didn’t have in “real life.”  If he felt Rusty was part of Team Venture, Rusty’s role in the team seems to have been primarily that of “hostage,” the family member who is always in trouble and therefore must always be “rescued.”  Men, it seems to me, leave their “blood” families specifically in order to join an artificial family.  The artificial family a man chooses may be the army, or academia, a street gang or a film crew — or it may be a globe-trotting gang of misfits and psychopaths adventurers.  Jonas Jr, finding his tossed-together set of Venture “remainders” wanting, decides to shoot for the big prize — patriarch.

(Action Man’s murderous rampage in the intro, shouting “Action!  Action!  Action!” as he shoots a helpless man repeatedly in the head, reminds me that shows like Jonny Quest, Scooby Doo and the others cited in this episode were used, in their initial runs anyway, as babysitters for children whose parents wanted to sleep in on Saturday mornings.  They became, in essence, surrogate parents and family members, teaching their lessons of violence, imperialism and incredibly bad parenting to a generation of wide-eyed moppets.  This is, of course, where Billy Quizboy’s fan worship comes in.  No doubt, Team Venture were Billy’s family growing up — as far as I can remember he’s never spoken about having parents or siblings — and his quivering desire to possess the team reflects that.)

(Oh, and how cruel is it that “Now Museum” features Team Venture selling autographs on the same weekend as the San Diego Comic-Con?)

(At first, the Jonas Venture Jr Museum of Jonas Venture seems like one colossal stab in the back to Jonas Jr’s big brother Rusty — but on closer inspection, Jonas’s impulse seems to have little to do with sibling rivalry.  It’s not that Jonas Jr is trying to “steal the spotlight” away from Rusty, Rusty’s whole problem is that he has no spotlight to begin with.  And it’s not that he’s trying to “take Rusty’s Place” as Jonas Sr’s son.  It seems more to me that Jonas Jr wants to take Jonas Sr’s place — consideration of Rusty’s feelings don’t seem to have occurred to him at all.  Rusty may feel slighted or insulted, but, as the old saying goes, you wouldn’t worry so much about what people think of you if you only knew how rarely they do.)

Now let’s look at Richard Impossible.  What did Richard do?  Richard, apparently, left his “blood” family to join Team Venture’s “Boys’ Brigade” as a kind of Snapper Carr figure.  Once he had grown to maturity, Richard married but then tried to combine his “real” family and his artificial family — he took his own blood relatives intothe world of adventure and, in so doing, turned them into hideous freaks and ruined their lives.  Ned, rendered into a drooling, walking callous seems happy enough, but Richard’s wife Sally could not stand Richard’s controlling mania and coldness (who’s the real walking callous?) and left him, ending up with, well, ending up with Jonas Jr, another calculating, controlling superscientist.

So Richard tried to wed his real family to his artificial family and the results were disastrous.  Now that Sally and the rest of the Impossible team have left him, Richard has been reduced to a shell of a man, haggard and unkempt, prone to drunkeness and desperation.  The cold, controlling genius of “Ice Station — Impossible!” is now a shattered wreck — he’s even lost his elasticity, literally his ability to “bounce back” — an apt visual metaphor.

Sally, having left Richard, is now chafing under the smug, condescending personality of Jonas Jr.  She’s chafing, but the Ghost Pirates have had quite enough.  They decide that they would rather live as miserable independent failures than as servants to the presumptuous, ambitious Jonas Jr.  They have taken the blood-family/artificial-family conundrum one step further – they have left their blood families, formed an artificial family, failed in the goals of their artificial family and have now joined a blood family again — only to find themselves, once again, urged to leave their blood family and re-form their artificial family again.

So: Jonas Jr, unhappy with the limits of his “blood” family, tries to re-form his father’s artificial family.  His father’s artificial family, who have apparently been wandering in the animated wilderness since Jonas Sr’s death, are only too happy to oblige (Colonel Gentleman’s off-set adventures are only the most alarming of the group — he may sound like James Bond, but he is apparently possessed of the soul of William S. Burroughs — a potent combination indeed).  Jonas Jr’s brother Rusty is put out, but Jonas doesn’t even seem to notice — he only criticises Rusty’s “Scooby Doo purple” suit (although Colonel Gentleman’s even more behind-the-times purple suit elicits no comment).  His gesture of reunion (with himself as patriarch) even includes the ex-tenants of the island, the Fraternity of Torment.

The Fraternity of Torment have had their artificial family destroyed (by Jonas Sr and Team Venture) but they, too, are more than eager to participate in Jonas Jr’s self-designed coronation.  Everyone is grasping for one last glimmer of that golden time that Jonas Sr represents, and Jonas Jr exploits that desire for all it’s worth.

The spoiler, of course, is Brainulo, who pretends to be the “doddering old man” at the reunion but is secretly its cunning usurper (how dispiriting it must be for Brainulo, a man from the distant future, to find himself elderly before he has ever been born).  Brainulo uses his massive mental powers not to start his robot Futuro but to cause the hidden fears and desires of the party guests to bubble to the surface.  It is perfectly in keeping with the Venture Bros universe that most of the guests have fears and desires wholly unsuitable to the task of wreaking havoc, and the one guest who does was ready to wreak havoc when he walked in the door anyway.

Jonas grasps for his moment, the Ghost Pirates rebel, the buried resentments of a generation boil to the surface in the shape of an Italian self-destruct mechanism (deus ex machina indeed!) and only Richard’s self-loathing, his despair at having been foolish enough to combine his real and artificial family and his inability to rebuild his life, “saves” the day.