The Venture Bros: “Bot Seeks Bot” part 2
Brock’s mission is now “to save Ghost Robot,” which seems big of him, considering that he doesn’t seem that attached to Ghost Robot, considering that no one seems that attached to Ghost Robot, really. Brock’s passion here is for his work, his job, the job for which he has forsaken his family, the Venture clan, for SPHINX, which has been destroyed by his foster father figure, Hunter Gathers. Brock’s job is his family, and it’s the only thing he’s good at. He can’t win at love, he’s backed away from being a father, he’s distant with his work brothers (he even steals one’s wife), but his job is everything to him, an all-or-nothing proposition, even when “the job” is nothing more than invading a nightclub to rescue a robot from an awkward date.
The Venture Bros: “Bot seeks Bot” part 1
The Clue Clown wields his question mark for good reason. We were only just introduced to his existence, and now he’s gone, leaving nothing but questions. Who was he? What did he stand for? What were his hopes and dreams? Those might be questions too silly to ask of a farcical one-joke supervillain, but the funeral of the Clue Clown is treated with a somberness rare for a Venture Bros death. We barely knew the Clue Clown, the script seems to say, but then, how well do we really know anyone? The death of the Clue Clown sends a whole tributary of minor Venture characters into a whirling tailspin of reflection, sober and otherwise. And, like all funerals, it provokes death’s opposite: lust. What better protest against death could there be than the seeking of carnal fulfillment? In this case, having the lovers seeking their carnalities in bodies of metal.
The Venture Bros “Momma’s Boys” part 2
While Hank, Dermott, Gary and HELPeR act crazy to get themselves committed (what could possibly go wrong?) Rusty and Hatred go searching for By-Golly Gulch, using a hover-tank and a smartphone. A lot of the characters in The Venture Bros are in desperate search of a dream, but Rusty wants to find Teddy with a GPS. And, since By-Golly Gulch is a nonexistent fairyland, he is doomed. The important thing, though, is that Rusty, who’s always found the whole alter-ego thing to be a stone drag, a blight on his life, is so in need of an alter ego that he’s created one – in Teddy, who, for the purposes of Rusty’s narrative, doesn’t exist. Rusty is going to rescue Teddy, who he sees as a version of himself, from the clutches of evil. This, the narrative implies, is what happens when a man doesn’t do the normal thing of dressing up in a costume and affecting a colorful persona: one sees people where there are none, no matter how obvious it is that they are not there. Read more
The Venture Bros: “Momma’s Boys” part 1
When reasonable people gather to discuss Batman, at some point someone clears their throat and says “Well you know, according to some schools of thought, Bruce Wayne died the night his parents died; from that moment on he was Batman, and ‘Bruce Wayne’ became the mask.” This is certainly a compelling argument with a subversive impact, but it only works if we proceed with the supposition that Bruce Wayne is completely insane. A sane man does not assume the personality of a night-time crimefighting vigilante and relegate his “getting by” personality to that of a billionaire businessman.
And, of course, there are people who would argue that, yes, Bruce Wayne is insane, that The Bat has taken over and subsumed his personality like Norman Bates’s mother. After all, Batman has always been a comic about insanity, far more than any other superhero title. The only thing that all Batman’s villains have in common is that they are stark raving mad. As a matter of fact, George Clooney once pitched a Batman movie to Warner Bros where it would be revealed at the end that, a la Sucker Punch, it is Bruce Wayne who has lived in Arkham Asylum all these years, fighting his never-ending war on giggling psychopaths from the confines of a padded cell.
All of which brings us to tonight’s Venture Bros episode, “Momma’s Boys.”
Venture Bros: “O.S. I Love You” part 2
What does Dean Venture, protagonist of this episode’s b-story, want? He’s chafing under the mantle of being a Venture Brother and all that entails (tagging along on life-threatening adventures, being cloned repeatedly, having a negligent father and a child-molesting guardian, etc) and, what’s more, he’s a teen-aged boy going through all the teen-aged-boy things teen-aged boys go through: rebellion against his parents, discovering his own identity, girl problems. Hank, on the other hand, seems to have regressed. His Destiny strength-suit gives him power, but it’s also, as Rusty points out, just another dress-up costume like the Batman getup he had when he was 10. (Note: I’ve had a 10-year-old son, who wouldn’t dream of dressing as Batman. For him it was Gordon Freeman or nothing. He even bought a crowbar. He named it “Whammy.”)
The Venture Bros: “Spanakopita!”
Wikipedia informs us: “On October 20, 1968, Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Socrates Onassis, a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, who was able to provide the privacy and security she sought for herself and her children. The wedding took place on Skorpios, Onassis’s private island in the Ionian Sea, in Greece.” We now know that Jonas Venture, Sr and the rest of the original Team Venture were at the wedding. Jonas had spent the afternoon diving for treasure and then sped off with the boys to get drunk and experience some high society. In other words, “fortune and glory.” Of course, the seeking of fortune and glory necessitates the abandonment of Jonas’s son Rusty, the protagonist of our current narrative. Rusty, playing at being Theseus, “slays the Minotaur” (HELPeR wearing steer horns), and Jonas chides him for not learning “the classics.” The story of Theseus is, of course, about as classic as tales go, indicating that Jonas hasn’t been paying attention to Rusty on a couple of different levels.
The Venture Bros “SPHINX Rising” part 2
In order to gain access to Rusty’s basement, the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend undergo a transition unlike any other: they become improvisers. The man who dresses as a butterfly says he’ll “just wing it” when they get to the Venture compound. I wonder what their vague, ill-conceived plan was before the Monarch accidentally revealed his “Beaver Inspector” t-shirt? It’s a good measure of how little Rusty thinks of the Monarch that he doesn’t recognize their distinctive high-nasal/low-guttural voices. Improvisation is surprisingly effective, and a stark contrast to the Monarch’s earlier acid-magnet attack, which telegraphed his intent so strongly that Gary could decipher it from a mile away.
The Venture Bros “SPHINX Rising” part 1
“SPHINX Rising” presents a new protagonist for this season, Henchman 21, or “Gary” as he’s more commonly known now. In keeping with The Venture Bros theme of transformation (which is also, of course, the theme of all the fantasy texts The Venture Bros derives from) Gary has transformed from henchman to commander, from butterfly to sphinx. (The Monarch’s choice of identity is not a coincidence – born ungainly as a caterpillar, he soars as a butterfly. So intoxicated is he with the notion of transformation, he overlooks all the inherent contradicitions: butterflies are fragile, delicate creatures, less like the Monarch’s poses of strength, more like his tiny, quailing ego. That’s why his nemesis is Rusty Venture, a man who refuses to transform in any way whatsoever.)
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.”