It's a sad fact that many people reading this will never have heard of 'The Venture Bros.', one of the most affectionate, well written and outright hilarious pieces of animation ever to grace the small screen. Sadder still is that many people WILL have heard of it but never been afforded an opportunity to see it as it's one of THOSE series that never seems to air (whilst the lumbering cash cows that are 'Family Guy' and 'The Simpsons' hog up endless screen time with their never ending repeats, a sad destiny that awaits the once mighty 'Futurama').
Suffice to say, at one moment in Season 1 of 'The Venture Bros.' I realised that I was watching a cartoon featuring the voices of both Patrick Warburton AND Stephen Colbert in the SAME EPISODE..! If you get a moment of slightly less than cool elation at that prospect then you may wish to skip this redundant post and just go right ahead and grab yourself a copy of the show. If you're scratching your head in confusion then you may wish to skip this redundant post and just go right ahead and load up Facebook as you obviously have much better things to do with your time.
A quick look around the internet will give you pretty much all the information you may need on the show (it is, after all, where I first heard about it) and Seasons 1 to 4 are currently available to purchase on both Amazon and iTunes (which is where I first sampled it... To watch on an iPad no less! I know, right? Get me, all 'Mr Hipster Watching Cool Cartoons And Then Blogging About Them On An Oversized Mobile Phone'! No wonder the ladies are all over me, I'm quite the catch!) and Season 5 is just about to air in the States.
There's a pretty rabid fan base out there, so be warned... You may want to try some more 'objective' feedback on the show before you get forever put off by some sycophantic, 'The Venture Bros. Can Do No Wrong' style blog because, as we all know, there's nothing more off putting than a gushing nerd (ahem).*
*I would urge you not to enter 'Gushing Nerd' into your Google search when looking for information on the show.
So, with such an internet presence and obviously devoted following, why is this show such an unknown quantity? Why is it quite likely that YOU have never seen it, even if you've heard about it? I can only really attribute it to three basic things, none of which have anything to do with the fact that your life is probably far too rich a patina of events to warrant the purchase of an oversized mobile phone in order to watch obscure cartoons (unlike my empty husk of an existence):
1: Battlestar Galactica Syndrome?
Did you watch 'Battlestar Galactica'? If so, did you watch it from the first episode and then follow it week by week as it aired? If the answer to this is 'Yes' then you probably had a really good time following one of the more convoluted but well paced and involving science fiction series ever screened on the humble television set. However, if you heard it was good after initially avoiding it (because, hey, what were the actual chances it was going to do anything other than suck? I mean, Starbuck was a girl for the love of God... A GIRL!!!) then you probably dipped in midway through the Season, found yourself baffled and annoyed by how impenetrable the story line was and swiftly gave up.
Now, I'm not saying that 'The Venture Bros.' is a narrative labyrinth but it does have a lot of ongoing story lines and recurring characters that require you to pay a modicum of attention. As with 'Battlestar Galactica' it doesn't really do stand alone stories as such and that makes it a headache for an audience who may want to dip in and out and even more of a problem for a network who may want to show random episodes to fill random time slots. Imagine a world in which 'Family Guy' and 'The Simpsons' had ongoing story lines... They'd be 'The Critic' (another great cartoon that you've probably never seen if you live in the UK) and they'd very rarely, if ever, get a television outing and vanish into obscurity.
Once you get past Season 1, 'The Venture Bros.' quickly evolves into an ongoing saga which neatly develops it's central characters and themes (although it almost dispenses with the titular Brothers entirely for Seasons 2 and 3) and expands beautifully on what could easily have been a tiresome one note joke. This, however, creates the aforementioned problem... Woe betide the man who dips into the show in Season 3 without having seen what came before. If you don't know your Dr. Girlfriend from your Dr. Mrs The Monarch then you are out of your depth and need to double back to Episode 1 of Season 1 and start all over again... You'll be glad you did though, as this is a show that rewards your loyalty with some great payoffs and an absolute dedication to it's own rules, logic and continuity.
How often do you get to say that these days?
2: Where Are The Toys?
We all know that you can't have a legitimate success these days without a series of collectables to accompany your series or film (thank you Mr Lucas), they are the pop culture equivalent of standing atop a building and yelling 'Made it Ma, top of the world!' and validate your product to the public... After all, it can't be worth anyone's time if you can't touch it or OWN it. Transient concepts like stories are just SO last century...
So, five Seasons in, where in the name of collectables are 'The Venture Bros.' toys?!
Nothing ingrains your property into the minds of the masses (and thus ensures it's survival) like a series of products featuring the likeness of your stars and nothing lends itself better to this than animation (especially as you don't have to pay any unbearable child star for the use of their likeness). Now, the ever reliable Sideshow Collectibles have produced a fantastic statuette of Brock Samson and Biff Bang Pow toys are currently struggling to get a line of three and three quarter inch figures to the shelves but... Seriously?! This show has run since 2004 and the world is still waiting for action figures? Not even a crappy Burger King tie in? Even '9' (anyone?) had a series of toys and that was a hideously underwhelming movie that bombed at the box office!
It would seem that licensing really has become key to bringing a show to fore in this day and age... After all, who really wants to watch a show that doesn't warrant a lunchbox or themed board game? But then, who wants a lunchbox or board game based on a show they've never seen or even heard of?
Yeah, have a good old think on that one for a while... It's the old Chicken and Egg spiel, all spruced up for the purposes of making my point seem valid!
3: Is It Just Too Clever (By Which I Mean Affectionate)?
I loved 'Airplane!', it was a great movie made by people who respected the source material that they were lampooning. The tiresome wave of lazy rip offs that ensued (which continued through every 'Scary Movie' sequel right through to the abysmal and worryingly recent 'Stan Helsing') had no love for what they were mocking. They were a series of lifted images and stories with added fart gags and implied nudity that required no knowledge of the source material to make them 'funny'.
You know... For kids.
Sadly for those kids, 'The Venture Bros.' isn't going to let you off so easily.
You won't require an encyclopedic knowledge of Silve Age Marvel comics, late seventies and early eighties cartoons or the spy and science fiction movies of the sixties to fully enjoy this show but it will be a massive boon in catching the rapid fire visual and verbal referencing that pepper the episodes. Even when it is reveling in it's more obvious lampooning, 'The Venture Bros.' works best to an audience that has sat in front of a television on countless Saturday mornings with a minimum of two bowls of sugary cereal and genuinely loved the likes of 'G.I. Joe', 'Scooby Doo' (or any of it's identikit Hanna-Barbera siblings), 'Johnny Quest', 'Spiderman & Friends' and the endless waves of thinly disguised toy commercials that littered the airwaves.
Both visually and in it's writing, this is a show that captures the essence (and inherent ridiculousness) of these narratives and reimagines them from the perspective of their now adult audience. Characters have either never grasped the real world or just grown cynical, unable to recapture the glory of their 'boy adventurer' youth, clinging to their fading fame whilst actually living in a world of giant robots, super villains, magic and an endless stream of impossibly cool technology. Others are more cartoonish and in keeping with the look and themes of the show. Uniquely, all of them are treated as living, breathing characters and afforded opportunities to grow, reveal back story and evolve over the course of the 4 Seasons.
So, start at Episode 1 of Season 1 and enjoy. Work your way through the curiously underproduced but wonderfully written Season 2 and watch the series take flight. Then, sit back and revel in Season's 3 and 4... By the time you've finished, you'll find you genuinely miss Hank, Dean, Brock, Thadius and The Monarch (and every other GREAT character) in the same way that you might miss the narrator of a great book when you finish it.
Then, much as I did, you'll think it's a sad fact that many people reading this will never have heard of 'The Venture Bros.', one of the most affectionate, well written and outright hilarious pieces of animation ever to grace the small screen.
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