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...