The Venture Bros. has been a bit uneven over its first six episodes, but with the first season’s seventh and eighth episodes, the show starts to crescendo by hitting new highs in both humor and geek fan service.
1. The Real Dr. Venture
Episode six begins with a flashback to an experimental plane test in 1968 that goes horribly wrong. Dr. Jonas Venture and his team watch in horror as the flying saucer plunges into the ocean, killing Major Tom, a member of Dr. Venture’s adventure team. I’m not going to lie. I would watch a full episode with these characters, and I was a little sad that this served as a mere prologue for another scheme by Thaddeus Venture to cash in on his father’s legacy and research by attempting to dredge up the aircraft that has remained undisturbed on the ocean floor and patent it. I trust the series will continue to return to Thaddeus’s father and his adventures in future episodes, but for now it seems that these scenes only exist to serve as a contrast to Thaddeus’s shameless profiteering.
2. Scooby Doo Beginning
When the Venture ocean liner is waylaid by a band of inept marauders while Dr. Venture searches the ocean floor for the downed aircraft, the visitors arrive onboard with a classic glowing Scooby Doo-esque ghost pirate in tow that is immediately killed by Samson and revealed to be just a dude in a glowing suit. The show cleverly turns the classic Scooby Doo-unveiling trope on its head by revealing the threat to be a hoax but then following this reveal up with a genuine poltergeist. Major Tom has awoken, and his presence on the Venture ship has everyone panic stricken until Team Venture and pirate alike realize that the ghost bears no ill intent. He’s just obnoxious and won’t stop screaming. Naturally, Brock arrives to dispatch him too after a failed attempt to calm the specter’s tortured spirit by contacting his surviving wife. It turns out she remarried Major Tom’s best friend. Whoops!
3. Race Freakin’ Bannon
The opening scene of episode eight is a showstopper. Race Bannon of Jonny Quest fame is battling the ingeniously named Nat King Cobra and his henchmen on an airplane, and he coolly dispatches his foes before retrieving a biohazard-containing canister, jumping out of the plane, deploying a parachute, and lighting a cigarette. It’s a giddy joy to see an updated version of the character in action, but in true The Venture Bros. style, the joy is short-lived and Bannon is bludgeoned by the the wing of the plummeting plane and knocked unconscious before lifelessly falling to the ground where, ignominiously, his lifeless body is pillaged by elementary school-aged children. While it’s fun to see these tykes discover Bannon’s arsenal of spy gadgets, it’s also maddening to see Bannon dispatched so quickly. After being given a proper death scene in the presence of Brock Samson, a former associate of Bannon’s, I still gnashed my teeth a bit at being hoodwinked again by the series creator’s penchant for subverting my expectations. But fool me twice, shame on me.
4. The Impossible Four
Perhaps to ease the pain of being given such brief nerd fan service, Professor Impossible (voiced by the then up-and-coming Stephen Colbert) arrives on the scene moments later. It turns out he has recruited Thaddeus and two new characters, Mr. White and Billy Quizboy, for a top secret think tank project at an Arctic ice station. It quickly becomes apparent that Professor Impossible and his current associates are an unabashedly mutated version of Marvel’s first family, The Fantastic Four. This “Impossible Four” features Richard Impossible as a megalomaniacal scientific genius sheltering his associates. Sally, his sequestered wife, can only turn her skin invisible, and great concentration is required to do just that and hide a horrific visage. Cody bursts into flames whenever his skin comes in contact with oxygen, but the process is accompanied by searing pain so he spends most of his time unconscious and in a literal bubble. Ned is the Thing, a “walking calous” who is mentally handicapped, so not the master of the quippy rejoinder we’re used to seeing on the comic pages. We even get a version of the Fantasticar, and in a hilarious bit where Thaddeus is being exiled from the compound, Dr. Venture is unable to hear Professor Impossible’s monologue over the vehicle’s roaring turbines. Of course that would be the case.
5. Quality Control
For as enjoyable as these two episodes are, there was a noticeable variance in animation quality. The opening scenes and much of episode eight are hyper kinetic and stylized, but the seventh episode is stiff by comparison, almost evoking a limited animation model or something more in line with the animation from ’80s Hanna-Barbera cartoons or the other Adult Swim show that mercilessly skewers them, Sealab 2021. There’s also a faster pace to the eighth episode while the seventh episode contains more scenes of characters standing around talking. From the little I’ve seen of the more recent episodes, the animation has improved by leaps and bounds from the series’s humble beginnings. Episode eight offers a glimmer of a quicker and more action-packed brand of storytelling for the nascent series.
That’s it for this week. Join us next time for the next two episodes in The Venture Bros. first season.
