Johnny Quest Gets Twisted

After watching season one of the Venture Bros., I was jonesing for another fix. Alas, I had to wait for season two to come out on DVD, since I don’t have Cartoon Network.

Season one left off on a cliffhanger. If you haven’t seen it and you don’t like spoilers, well, read no further!

If you haven’t seen season one and don’t know the show at all, here’s the rundown: It’s an over-the-top cartoon parody of Johnny Quest. Even the opening sequence pays homage to the drum-laden dramatic jazz the Quest series was known for. Sprinkled throughout the cartoon are hundreds of other references to pop-culture and literature. The main characters are Dr. Venture, his barely pubescent sons Hank and Dean, and their bodyguard, Brock Sampson. Also in the mix, Dr. Venture’s nemesis: The Monarch.

Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture is modeled after Dr. Quest, however, in flashbacks we see that Dr. Venture’s father was more like the archetypical adventurer/scientist and the present day Dr. Venture was a sort of boy-adventurer Johnny Quest figure. As others in the series note “he peaked at fifteen.” As a scientist, Rusty Venture coasts on the achievements of his father, occasionally inventing something that never quite works as he’d hoped.

At the end of season one, the naïve and clueless Hank and Dean have died in a horrible accidental death-ray shooting, but we are left to hope that the series will continue under the same name because Dr. Venture discovers that he has a long-lost brother.

Dr. Orpheus (the necromancer that rents the basement in the Venture Compound) feels responsible for the boys deaths because he was supposed to be watching them. Brock Sampson and Dr. Venture are remarkably blasé about their deaths, to much comic effect. Eventually we learn that the boys are so “death-prone” that Dr. Venture has cloned spares of the boys in his lab, with computer data to program the boys with their old personalities.

While the violent bodyguard Brock Sampson was my favorite character in season one, in season two it was the soul-searching, evil-smiting necromancer Dr. Orpheus who made me laugh the most. His earth-shattering supernatural powers are so great that he can, in his words “make you believe that you are a very special episode of Blossom.” In season two one of Dr. Orpheus’s dreams is realized: he gets approval to have his very own arch-nemesis. Orpheus puts together his own super-heroic team and an entire episode, ‘Fallen Arches,’ is dedicated to the screening process, in which he and his team interview super-villainous candidates for the position of nemesis. As in last season’s ‘Tag Sale—You’re It’ episode, this episode will be priceless to anyone who loves comic books. Like ‘Tag Sale,’ the premise gives the writers an excuse to parade hilarious villain types (often spoofs on comic book characters) past the viewer.

Season two is worth it just for the ‘Fallen Arches’ episode, but a close second is ‘¡Viva Los Muertos!’ in which spoofed, twisted versions of the “gang” from Scooby-Doo figure prominently into the story. The Venture Bros. series has the advantage of being owned by Turner Broadcasting and Warner Brothers, which absorbed Hanna-Barbera.

This meant they could raid the Hanna-Barbera vaults for all of the zany sound effects they used to use in the classic Scooby-Doo. As always, this episode has a number of plots which all converge. The first is Dr. Venture’s attempt to make “Venturestein,” a Frankenstein monster made from a re-animated corpse of one of the Monarch’s henchmen. Their bodyguard tends to leave a high body count, so it just makes sense that Dr. Venture, with his access to super-science and a fondness for profit, would put those corpses to work! Meanwhile, Brock seems to be harboring guilt for killing Venturestein (he does it twice) and he joins Dr. Orpheus’ vision quest party, taking what seems to be Peyote. Meanwhile Groovy (Scooby) and the gang have run out of gas in front of the Venture compound. The re-imagined group seems to be in their late 30s or early 40s. Ted (Fred) is the charismatic, psychotic leader of the group, with a firm hold on Patty (Daphne) who seems to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome a la Patty Hearst. Val (Velma) is a militant feminist (modeled after Valerie Solanas) who hits on Patty and talks about the ultimate destruction of all men. Sonny (Shaggy) spends much of his time taking drugs (Groovy Snacks) and wishing everybody else could hear the dog talking. All the plots eventually intertwine nicely, but I won’t spoil the ending.

With the Venture Bros. I don’t feel like I need extra features like a making-of video. While they do have something like that in this DVD set, don’t expect that it will be taken seriously. The DVD set is chock full of commentary, so you can watch your favorite episodes to see what creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick have to say.