The Venture Bros “Venture Libre” part 2
Hopped up on coffee beans, suffering from intense delusions of gradeur and, most important, without a brother to stabilize him, Hank contracts jungle fever and becomes the man he’s always wanted to be: Batman. Or, at least, his own version of Batman. His origin differs from Bruce Wayne’s, because his father is still alive and he never knew his mother (he adopts “the jungle” as his mother), so his Batman is correspondingly different – a hand-made Batman, a very Venture Batman, one who has to take frequent diarrhea breaks.
The Venture Bros: “Venture Libre” part 1
A few years back, I was talking to a woman from Pixar, who explained to me the logic of Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo, she said, is about, and only about, a father’s relationship with his son. The problem presented by the narrative is that, at the end of Act I, the son is abducted. How could they make a movie about a father’s relationship with his son if the son vanishes at the end of Act I? The answer, they found, was to replace the son with another child, the forgetful fish Dory. The father then plays out the conflict with his son with this surrogate. It’s a simple yet brilliant device, and if you remove the forgetful fish and put in a reanimated corpse, it’s the same device that fuels “Venture Libre.”