Venture Bros: Hate Floats

1.  Great title, and illustrative.  The characters are separated and teamed with enemies and strangers, and find unlikely alliances due to the only thing they share: a desire to destroy their enemies.

2.  High level of carnage.  Could be the bloodiest so far.  Last week’s episode with the fourteen deaths was hysterical, but this was almost like real violence.  Truly disturbing.  I’ve never seen an eyeball out of its socket, animated, much less see a “point-of-view” shot of the same thing.

3.  Any TV show that includes perverse references to Superman, Turk 182 and “Winged Victory” can’t be all bad.

4.  Rusty buys Dean a speed-suit.  It’s red.  And it didn’t occur to me until they were half-way through their purchase that Dr. Venture’s suit was once red too, but he’s worn it every day of his life since he bought it as a teenager.  Now it’s faded to what my old apartment building decorator called “Desert Rose.”

5.  Terrific episode-long piece of sustained action.  Really, everything cuts together beautifully.  It’s not just funny, it’s also genuinely exciting.

6.  The most important thing, the show is completely transforming itself.  Last season, a good deal of the humor was the humor of disappointment, where they set up the action cliche and then deflate it by having something mundane happen.  Here, they set up the action cliche and then turn it on its head, pump it up, twist it inside out, increase the tempo and turn it into something that manages to be both parody and the real thing at the same time.

7.  The sustained narrative.  I cannot stress how different it makes everything.

Venture Bros: Season 2, Episode 1

Maybe I’m just buzzed, but that didn’t feel like a new episode of The Venture Bros.  That felt like a completely different show.  The pacing, the complexity, the multiple layers of action and interaction, all with the typically dense saturation of pop-culture references from Batman to Poltergeist. 

It’s like the concepts from Season One have been folded up, crushed into a forge and pounded with a pneumatic press to form just the bones of the new season, and then there’s actually another show on top of it.

Far too much information to take in in one viewing.

It feels like the gloves have come off.  The subtext has become the text.  It’s no longer hinting at ideas or alluding to them, it’s coming right out and saying “This show is about ideas, and then it has to be funny, and then there has to be some kind of adventure plot.”

Startling to see a half-hour comedy, especially an irreverent, scatological half-hour comedy supposedly produced for an audience of teenage stoners, suddenly go from episodic television to mega-narrative.  The mega-narrative was always there, but it felt like if the Sopranos had started out like, say, Law and Order and then suddenly turned into the soap opera that it is.

The science/religion argument that goes by in an instant, a dozen multiple deaths in ten seconds, a prison break, introspection, a drug-laced pacifier, a jungle babe, zombies,  the monarch’s makeshift costume, the look on Dr. Girlfriend’s face as she gazes longingly out the window, and that covers maybe a sixteenth of the moments that make this dizzying, electrifying television.

Special kudos to the voice work, specifically Mr. Urbaniak’s newly confident reading of Jonas Venture.  It’s great to see a show not sit still but rather unfold in a dozen delightful, unpredictable ways.

Venture Bros. miscellaneous

In the pilot, I love how The Monarch has, in addition to his antennae-like eyebrows, another pair of pretend antennae on his crown.  As though to say, “Look how evil I am!  TWO PAIRS OF ANTENNAE!”

In the Christmas episode, it’s a true pleasure to hear James Urbaniak recite the most faithful, and yet most demented, version I’ve ever encountered of the climactic scene from A Christmas Carol.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the key pleasures of this show is how it is incredibly faithful, even fannish, about its source material, while simultaneously gutting it in the most disrespectful ways.

The pilot is interesting mostly to see how the characters aren’t quite there yet, how the timing and feel of the show, its balance of elements, developed and matured over time.  Given the rapid rise in quality from the pilot to the first episode, I can’t wait to see what happens in Season 2.

The Christmas episode is so packed with incident and ideas, presented at such a breathless pace, it almost makes me wish more shows were done in 11-minute segments, like Spongebob is.  Maybe there could be more 11-minute Venture Bros. pieces, ideas that are funny but won’t sustain a 23-minute narrative.

Worth it for the “Tiny Joseph” character, and the moment when Hank says “Uh-oh, baby Jesus is out of the manger!” and Brock habitually checks his fly.

I was sad to see Baron Unterbheit kill off his henchmen with the Tiger Bombs.  I really wanted to see the further adventures of Cat Cyclops, Girl Hitler and Manic 8-Ball.

Venture Bros: Ghosts of the Sargasso

Hands down, my favorite episode.

Why?  Starting with the head-spinning Bowie intro (what is it with these guys and Bowie?  Except that Bowie always had the air of a Bondian super-villain about him) (seriously, why hasn’t Bowie been made a Bond villain yet?  Chris Walken has, Jonathan Pryce has, why not Bowie?), then moving from 1969’s “Space Oddity” across the pond to 1969’s “Scooby Doo” and the ghost pirates.  Having young children, I’ve seen the ghost pirate episode of “Scooby Doo” several times now, so this parody has especially sharp teeth for me.

Then there’s things like the treatment of the colors in the “1969” footage, and the quite-subtle dirt and scratches on the film, not over-played, not drawing attention to itself, beautifully done.

But mostly, it’s the script, or rather, the plotting.  I think this is the most tightly-plotted of all the episodes.  All of the episodes use the collision of “exciting adventure” and “prosaic real-life” to produce laughs, but usually they do it in terms of “adventure that doesn’t happen.”  The assassination attempt fails, so the henchmen have to wait around in the yard.  The torture victim has a medical condition, so the torture has to be put on hold.  It’s about dashing expectations.

But here, there’s an actual adventure.  Rusty is actually going to try to do something (retrieve his father’s spaceship), and his actions have consequences (unleashing the ghost of Major Tom).  Meanwhile up above, the ship is taken over by “ghost pirates,” who turn out to be real pirates. 

Now there’s a twist!  Ghost pirates that turn out to be not part of a real-estate scam, but REAL PIRATES!  Even if they’re lame pirates, they are actually still real pirates, and they even manage to get the better of Brock.

And then there’s Brock.  Brock, who specializes in getting out of impossible situations, gets out of a doozy here.  I’d like to think that the actual fight with him and the pirate henchmen, where he clubs one to death with the body of the other, while the other’s arm is still up his ass, was filmed but cut, and exists somewhere in a vault.  But that’s probably only a dream.

Two actual exciting events going on, Rusty stuck at the bottom of the sea, slowly dying, and Brock turning the tables on the pirates above, PLUS Hank actually turning into a capable action hero (with coaching, of course), all played out in an exciting, albeit highly comic cutting style.

Then the REAL GHOST shows up, and by this time we’re so off-balance, we’re ready for anything.  So when it turns out that the ghost isn’t interested in killing anyone, hurting anyone, or really doing anything but re-living its dying scream over and over again, PLUS there’s the great bring-back of “The Action Man” from the pre-credit sequence, it’s just too laugh-out-loud, alone-in-your-living-room funny.

The ending, where Brock simply tears the ghost limb from limb and tosses it overboard, reminds me of the old Jack Handey “Deep Thought:”

“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?  We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”

This is, of course, the casual cruelty that I’ve mentioned before that gives the show its misanthropic bent.  We start the show with a real (if comic) tragedy, we produce the screaming ghost of that tragic figure, and there’s that moment of actual pain and anxiety where we feel that ghost’s pain.  The tragedy of the past is literally brought to the surface and shoved in our faces.  And how shall we deal with it?  Dr. Orpheus’s plan doesn’t work.  And the ghost doesn’t want to hurt anyone.  But it won’t stop SCREAMING.  So let’s let Brock tear its head off and throw it overboard.  Good riddance.

Pirate Captain: “Well, we could have done that.”

Question: They call Dr. Orpheus for help, but then in the episode where they first meet Dr. Orpheus, Hank (or Dean, I can’t remembe their names) says to Punkin that they’ve recently battled ghost pirates.  Did they battle ghost pirates twice, and why were we denied that episode?

Venture Bros: Tag Sale — You’re It!

Why is Dr. Girlfriend with The Monarch? She’s smart and attractive, snappy dresser. Why does she hang out with (and fornicate) with that whining, petulant, impotent fraud?

Some of my favorite Brock moments are when he just doesn’t want to deal with the drama of a situation. When the secret service head asks him if he wants to see the chatting Misters in pretty pink dresses, he stares straight ahead and, voice thick with disinterest, says “No, I don’t want to see ’em in dresses.” The difference between Brock and a lot of other characters Patrick Warburton plays is that Brock seems to always have too much on his mind; his halting speech isn’t dim-wittedness but a reluctance to waste his breath on the unimportant, which is a great concept for an animated character.

Venture Bros: The Incredible Mr. Brisby

In a cartoon, or a movie, or a TV show, anything in popular culture really, when the creators want to point out that a character is lame, they name him Todd.

This is why I hate the name Todd.

Venture Bros: Eenie, Meeney, Miney…Magic!

Ah, yes.  The appearance of Dr. Orpheus.  My first time seeing this.

As someone who has worked closely with Mr. Steven Rattazzi over a few million shows, Dr. Orpheus is especially funny, as his declamatory style is only a slight exaggeration of what Steven is capable of once he gets a good heat under him.  But without the spittle.

Dr. Orpheus makes a terrific counterpart to Rusty, in that they are both single parents stuck between a real and an imaginary world, but that Orpheus has somehow figured out a way to live the dream (much to his daughter’s mortification) and Rusty just feels tied down and constricted by his parental duties (which he tends to utterly ignore).

I love Hank and Dean’s pajamas, for two reasons.

1. Hank is nominally the more “grown up” twin, but he’s the one in the Aquaman jammies, whereas Dean gets the way-cooler Spider-Man jammies (which exactly match a set that my 5-year-old son has).

2. They don’t change out of them until way past noon.

In a way, the whole show is about this clash between the real world and the imaginary world we were promised as children by these fantasy shows.  Every ten-year-old boy wants to be James Bond at some point, thinking that that’s what a “real man” must be like, and we continue to carry these fantasies around our in heads at some level even as adults, but Venture Bros. actually addresses the question of “well, what if James Bond (or Johnny Quest, or what have you) really existed?”

There was one single, solitary moment in Goldeneye that addressed this, and for a brief instant James Bond became an interesting person.  Somebody says to Bond, in effect, “Look at you, you’re a miserable human being.  You kill people for a living and you can’t sustain a relationship.  The only things you know how to do is destroy things and fuck,” and you realize that Bond really is the sick fantasy of an adolescent mind.  He feels no love and no compassion.  He’s a monster.  Whereas the most indelible moments of The Venture Bros. are those when real emotions and responsibilities intrude on the absurd adventures, whether it’s Brock Samson taking time to help Hank with his coin-catching game or Dr. Orpheus leaving a message for his daughter to not eat more than one pudding cup.  The Bond fantasy of constant movement and no responsibilities (I can’t think of a better example of “no responsibilities” than a literal “license to kill”) butts up against the common, everyday ties to those we care about.

Venture Bros: Mid-life Chrysalis

My research is not complete, but I think this episode contains more disturbing images than any other.

1. Rusty in his toupee. Usually I’m struck by how much Dr. Venture resembles James Urbaniak, but with the wig on it’s truly alarming.
2. Brock losing his nerve. It’s so bizarre to see him at loose ends, without purpose, robbed of his spontaneity.
3. The Monarch masturbating to the image of his girlfriend making out with his arch-enemy. Oh. My. God. Perhaps the single most disturbing image in the history of animation.*
4. Rusty, without preamble, vomiting up reams of mucus to encase himself in.

That’s not even getting into the old, skanky and overweight strippers, the crumbling condom or the ugly pink tumor taking over Rusty’s head.

*Perhaps, even, the most disturbing image in the history of fantasy filmmaking. I don’t know why, but the mere idea of fantasy characters masturbating seems revolutionary and deeply subversive. Imagine Blofeld masturbating. Or Goldfinger. Or Darth Vader. Or even James Bond or Luke Skywalker or Gandalf the Great. Human nature insists that they all do, but, but —

— and then there’s the all-too realistic way that the Monarch goes about it. His hand idly tracing patterns on his chest, then slipping down to his abs, then — I can’t go on. It’s too disturbing.

Venture Bros: Careers in Science

A triumph.

Is it my imagination, or is the female astronaut with the big, bushy red hair but no face supposed to be a reference to the mayor’s assistant in Powerpuff Girls, who has the same haircut and the same unshowable face?

I’m curious if there was a number of character designs developed and rejected, or was the character faceless to begin with?

In general, the sweetest of the Venture Bros. episodes and the most generous in spirit. Rusty almost comes close to being likable.

It’s bizarre how the show walks this line between total parody and genuine drama. For instance, we are clearly not meant to take any of these characters as human beings, and yet they have all been given real backgrounds and personalities. They don’t just do whatever’s funny for a given situation, they react in character and without reliance on catchphrases or punchlines.

J.G. Thirwell’s music is overwhelming. Try watching the show on a home theater system with 5.1 surround sound.

Venture Bros: Are You There God? It’s Me, Dean

I seem to have missed something. What prompts Brock’s massacre of the Monarch’s henchmen? Is that Brock’s gift to the Monarch, lest the Monarch feel bored and disappointed on his birthday?