The Venture Bros.: Thematically Speaking

If I had to sum up the theme of the series in one word, it would be failure. Which is weird because the show succeeds brilliantly at portraying the "beauty" of failure (as the creators like to say). Like real people, the characters on the show all have flaws, but the narrative dwells on the flaws and failures. Even the characters who are halfway competent (few and far between) are defined by what they do wrong, rather than the great things they do. Prof. Impossible is a great scientist, but his inability to love his family defines him. Jonas Venture, Sr. was a great scientist, but he messed up Rusty big time with his devotion to his work and his bizarre partying. And Hank and Dean have such a warped world view that they can barely function in society.

Rusty Venture is the quintessential failure on the show; he comes from a long line of great super-scientists, but he inadvertantly destroys more of his father's inventions than he creates himself. He is a terrible father (though as we eventually learned, neither was his father), and he is pretty much a bad person in general. He is greedy, rude, lazy, and somewhat cocky. Yet we still love watching him because (1) he usually gets his comeuppance tenfold and (2) it's funny to watch such an utter failure act like he's king of the world. Venture's nemesis, the Monarch, can barely run his evil operation. He doesn't command a lot of respect (he dresses like a giant butterly), he equips his lazy henchmen with non-lethal weaponry, and he engages in numerous supervillain cliches, such as giving grand speeches (monologuing to you Incredibles fans), and loves a good (and escapable) death trap. I think that for a while, Dr. Girlfriend was supposed to represent his failure to find a "real" woman because of her very deep voice, but now that she is seen as the hottest woman in the Ventureverse, I guess that has changed. Speaking of Dr. Girlfriend and her power over men, Phantom Limb, one of the series' most dangerous villains, lost everything partly because of her. When the Monarch won D. Girlfriend back (that itself has to be a pretty bad shot to the ego) because Limb was unable to relax, he gambled everything in a Guild coup to get her back, and lost when the Monarch and the Ventures teamed up to defeat him. Brock Samson is obviously a capable fighter, but he has control issues. If anyone attacks him, he goes absolutely ballistic and can't stop fighting until everyone in the room is dead or badly injured. When spooked, he can't distinguish his friends from his enemies, as seen when Hank woke him up during an intense nightmare. Over the course of the series, he has slowly become more sane and collected, making him one of the most balanced and grounded characters on the show.

The show certainly has other themes and motifs. Decades enter the show through various characters; many people in the world of the show seem to be transplanted from various decades in 20th century America. Hank and Dean talk and dress like they're from the 50s, using words and phrases like golly and neato. Brock dresses like the 70s and listens to a lot of 70s era classic rock, whereas Pete White embraces the 80s. Triana Orpheus represents the grunge of the 90s. Speaking of time periods, the space race is parodied in the show and is also pointed to as being a failure. In the 50s and 60s, Americans believed that, by the end of the century, we would have colonies on the moon and everyone would have hoverbikes. In the world of The Venture Bros., a lot of that stuff exists. It is really crappy, though. In an early episode, the Ventures are called up to a space station built by Jonas, Sr. that is malfunctioning. Most of the space-age inventions on the show barely function, and people are completely dependent upon this faulty technology (in a late Season 3 episode, there is a great exchange, wherein one character asks another to get a dictionary, only to be scoffed at because the internet made dictionaries irrelevant, only to discover the answer to what they are looking for was found in the dictionary).

Finally, although this isn't a theme, the show has a very strong continuity and storyline, and I'd like to address where the story may be going for a second. The third season was extremely plot-heavy (strangely, the direction many people thought the show was going to go in after the Sesaon 2 finale didn't actually happen; present-day Phantom Limb only showed up in one episode, and I'm very curious to see what he's been up to and why the Monarch hasn't been hunting him down), and the finale not only changed the status quo, but set up a bunch of new story lines for the next year. I don't want to ruin too much, but it looks like the Guild will have some competition next year. I for one am very excited to see what happens to Team Venture next.

Up next: How we gonna pay...

Dollhouse: Self-Preservation

So Dollhouse keeps getting better, and although I still think that "Man on the Street" is the best episode of the season, "A Spy in the House of Love" was a close second. In addition to presenting various revelations, the episode moves two characters in new directions. The structure of the episode was very interesting, as the first act showed Topher discovering the existence of the mole and followed Echo as she saw pieces of various events which led her to ask Topher to imprint her with a personality that will allow her to help find the leak. The next four acts each started with one of the four main dolls getting imprinted with a personality, and followed them through their engagement.

November had the Mellie imprint uploaded again, and she was sent back to Ballard's building. Ballard discovered the Dollhouse's surveillance equipment in his appartment and got paranoid, so now Mellie will be the Dollhouse's last remaining way to monitor his activities. (Un)fortunately, the mole chose to make contact with Ballard again, but this time through November. Ballard got (minimal) new information about the Dollhouse, but the price was learning that the girl he was starting to fall for didn't really exist.

Sierra was imprinted to be a spy with a mission to infiltrate the NSA, who we learned employed the mole. Echo was also imprinted with a personality to catch the mole, but she became an interrogator. Victor was out on a routine engagement, but it turned out to not be so routine after all. It turns out that Adelle is lonley (as is Dr. Saunders, but her refusal to leave the Dollhouse may also be based on fear as well as her supposed lack of friends), and she has been engaging Victor to satisfy her in the way that only a perfect doll can. Victor is sent to some random woman's house so that his handler won't know who the real client is, then he takes off in a little sports car and provides Adelle with everything she needs.

I said a few weeks ago that having Ivy, Topher's assistant, be the mole would be the obvious choice (though because the "obvious" choice is rarely the actual culprit, she was the seemingly obvious choice), and it looks like Whedon and company agreed. When she was "revealed" as the mole, I was a tad disappointed, but when the real mole was uncovered, I was certainly surprised, and a little sad that a certain character likely won't be coming back any time soon (looks like I was right about something else I said a while back, and although he/she is out of play for now, I do think that the writers left a small door open to allow for his/her return). But Echo's ability to request to help out while in a wiped state has finally proven to Adelle that she is special and definitely worth keeping around. She has plans for Echo, and I am very excited to learn what they are. Also, Langdon is moving up in the hierarchy in spite of his hatred of the Dollhouse, which may allow him to take the place down some day...

I also have a new crazy theory about the goings-on in the Dollhouse. When Topher discovered the mole, Dominic told the imprinted Sierra that Topher was able to decrypt part of the chip, but not all of it. I realized that they would need to imprint her with the ability to have the skill to decrpyt the remaining part, and if that was true, why couldn't they imprint a programmer for the dolls themselves. What if Topher is a doll?! How would they know who to trust when recruiting "geniuses" to act as programmer? I'm sure they could lure people in with the promise of such astounding technology, but what guarantee would they have that somone with loose morals like Topher wouldn't sell them out?! How many of the janitors and security people can be trusted? What if the Dollhouse is staffed by dolls?

Up next: The art of failure...

The Venture Bros.: The Way of the World

In the world of The Venture Bros., things like supervillains, secret agents, and the undead are so commonplace that they have their own unions, in a sense. The world is divided into heroes and villains for the purposes of knowing who should be fighting against who, but this delineation failed to take morality into account. There are "heroes" who are just as immoral as the villains, and many of the villains are only villainous because that is their job.

Perhaps the most ingenious creation of Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer is the Guild of Calamitous Intent (which came four years before Joss Whedon's Evil League of Evil in Dr. Horrible), which serves as the supervillain bureaucracy. The Guild trains and assigns "arches" (short for archenemy) to heroes. The purpose? I'm not quite sure, but it is probably to (1) give villains a legitimate job and (2) to give heroes someone to be heroic against. The Guild specializes in appropriately tailoring arches to heroes in order to avoid mismatched level of aggression/intelligence and making sure that the hero-arch relationship remains in a stalemate. The purpose isn't for one to kill the other, but for the hero and villain to continue fighting in an endless game of sorts. This situation doesn't really work with the Monarch, though, because he truly hates Dr. Venture, or at least he convinces himself that he does. His failure to kill Venture isn't based on Guild rules; rather, it is incompetence that prevents him from reaching his goal (once again, more on that in the Themes post). During Season 3, when The Monarch is reassigned to other heroes, he kills them because he wants to work his way back to Venture.

The Guild functions like most real-world bureaucracies: there are extensive rules and by-laws that members must follow, it provides its members with healthcare and dental (the only reason The Monarch joined), and it sends form letters to heroes when the hero is to be assigned a new arch. It even has a town for its members to live in if they don't have their own bases (I think that is a parody of Mark Millar's comic book Wanted, not to be confused with the film adaptation). I'm unclear as to whether or not the Office of Secret Intelligence (O.S.I.) is aware of the Guild's presence (in a flashback to Brock's early days in O.S.I., they were still trying to gather proof of its existence), but I'm pretty sure that they do. However, the Guild has become such an ingrained part of society that O.S.I. cannot take it down without causing serious chaos as a result.

Speaking of which, O.S.I. is a G.I.Joe parody. Their purpose is to act as a protective force in the world, but they are just as violent and crazy as the people they fight. Most agents aren't particularly bright, and they aren't honest either. In the same episode as referenced above, they sent Billy Quizboy on a mission to discover whether a certain person was a Guild member (as we all knew, the target, Phantom Limb, was a high-ranking member). They sent Billy in on a mission he wasn't prepared for and lied about putting a wire on him. Furthermore, they basically kidnapped and conscripted him into service.

There are also other teams that run around the Venture-verse with their own motives. Once again, most of these organizations fall on one side of the spectrum or the other (in the abstract at least; both the original and current Team Venture are supposed to be heores, but both are certainly less than heroic). Molotov Cocktease is a mercenary who claims to have no affiliation (and a late-third season twist will probably elaborate on her motives in Season 4), but these neutral people are few and far between. There are other organizatons like the Guild, but they have been basically muscled out by the Guild and/or destroyed by the efforts of O.S.I. and the original Team Venture. The original Team Venture was an organization devoted to protecting people and furthering scientific endeavors. In addition to the superscientist Dr. Jonas Venture, the team is composed of numerous superhero archetypes/parodies, such as the Action Man (Captain America), Otto Aquarius (Aquaman), Humongaloid (Ant-Man/Giant-Man), and Col. Horace Gentleman (Allen Quartermain). The current Team Venture, led by Rusty Venture, is more concerned with making money and adventuring that protecting anyone, but I don't think viewers would have it any other way. After all, much of the humor is derived from watching Rusty's moral bankruptcy, Brock's brawls, and Hank and Dean's absolute cluelessness. Finally, Dr. Orpheus heads the Order of the Triad, a magical trio devoted to upholding the integrity of reality and protecting people. However, the three members are middle-aged and cannot always make it to practice, which leads to poor performance in the field.

Up next: Interlude...

The Venture Bros.: Go Team Venture!

One of the best things about The Venture Bros. is the impressive cast of characters. Creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer increase the world of the Ventures every season, and yet they are still able to, for the most part, keep the main characters in focus (in the third season, the focus shifted somewhat from the Venture family to the world itself, but more on that in a later post), and although not every minor character is fully developed, most of the principals are developed well beyond the initial jokes that introduced them.

In the first season, most of the characters were defined by comic book and/or Saturday morning serial stereotypes. Hank and Dean Venture, the titular brothers, are extremely naive and innocent, and they speak with a 1950s sitcom vocabulary (gee whiz). Their father, Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture (though he doesn't actually have a doctorate degree) is a "super-scientist" who is following in the footsteps of his great father, Dr. Jonas Venture. The Drs. Venture invent things like robots, death rays, hover bikes, shrink rays, and experimental supersonic jets. Or at least, Jonas invented them and Rusty sells them to stave off bankruptcy. Rusty tries to pass himself off as a great scientist and humanitarian, but he is really a heartless bastard who will do pretty much anything to make a buck. He once held a yard sale for supervillains where he sold a lot of his dad's old inventions. Their bodyguard Brock Samsom is an invincible muscleman who always finds a way to save his "family" from impossible odds. Brock can singlehandedly take down an entire room of people trying to kill him without getting a scratch. He cares for the Venture boys, but when enraged, he can't control who gets the brunt of his anger, and his friends know to steer clear. On the other side of the law, The Monarch, the archnemesis (in his eyes) of Dr. Venture, has a rather silly origin story that is (somewhat) familiar to comic book readers. As a child, his parents were killed in a horrible accident, and he was subsequently raised by monarch butterflies. He honors his adoptive family by dressing as a giant butterfly. He hates Dr. Venture with a passion, but can't really explain why. His parents were rich, and he inherited a huge trust fund, so he doesn't have to work, so half the reason he acts as a villain (I will get into the show's hilarious construction of villains in the post about organizations) is because he has nothing else to do. He is dating a (very deep-voiced) woman known as Dr. Girlfriend, and has an inexhaustible supply of incompetent henchmen.

There are numerous supporting characters on both sides of the "fight" (though very few are exactly good or evil). Dr. Orpheus is a necromancer who lives with the Ventures, and he has a penchant for being overly dramatic. In the second season, he forms a group called the Order of the Triad with a Blade-like character who refers to himself as a blacula hunter and an alchemist (known as The Alchemist) who is researching an AIDS cure. Peter White and Billy Quizboy are old friend of Rusty who tried to start a technology business, but ended up living together in a trailer in the desert. White is an albino who is obsessed with the 80s, and Billy is a man who never hit a growth spurt and has a giant head. The two of them often show up to try and make some money off of the Ventures' predicaments. Two of the Monarch's henchmen form a bit of a comedy team; they tend to comment on stuff going on around them (and they become self-aware of their near-invincibility in the third season) and engage in nonsensical debates (such as arguing over whether Lizzie Borden or Anne Frank would win in a fight, or whether smurfs are mammals or egg-laying creatures). Molotov Cocktease combines elements of Marvel's Black Widow and inappropriately named Bond villains. She and Brock have an intense love-hate relationship that involves them trying to simultaneously fuck and kill each other.

This will be extended upon in the themes post, but while the various characters have their different motives, they are all united by one thing: failure.

Up next: The bureaucracy of good and evil...

Two Rather Unrelated Worlds

I had planned to just do a series on Adult Swim's The Venture Bros. because it tied in with the comic book posts I just did (which had a lot of TV posts interspersed). Venture is a show that parodies things like Johnny Quest, Marvel and DC comics, music, and pulp novels. I still plan on doing a post series on Venture next, but I saw the play RENT for the first time this weekend, and I really enjoyed it. I then realized that it is, in some ways, the opposite side of the coin occupied by Avenue Q (or really, Avenue Q is the opposite side of RENT because RENT came first), and I thought of my comparison of Runaways and Young Avengers. I thought that I had as good an opening as any to talk about the play.

Up next: Go Team Venture!...