The Venture Bros. (television series)

The Venture Bros.: Season One. Dir. Jackson Publick. Perf. James Urbaniak, Patrick Warburton. DVD. Cartoon Network, 2006. ("Adult Swim")

Reviewed by Nathaniel Williams, SFRA Review #286 (Fall 2008): pp. 29-30.[1] Williams finds the show highly intertextual, where much of the fun for adult swimmers, so to speak, is spotting allusions to super-hero comics and to other TV show, e.g."the Six Million Dollar Man, Marvel Comics (particularly Fantastic Four), The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and more."

[...] The Venture Bros. ultimately conjures the same sense of “desiderium” that John Clute finds in Howard Waldrop’s short stories, providing science fiction guided by an “intense longing for something that...should have existed” when the reality of the present is gauged by the wonderful technological promises of the past (863). The creators of the series [...] extend this idea by both giving us a glimpse of that promised future and insinuating that it wouldn’t have been long-lived. The Venture Bros.’s back story posits a recent past where superscientists really existed. [* * *] [A]nd the show’s central conceit becomes clear: in The Venture Bros, the wonderful, streamlined future promised by SF media of the 1950s and 1960s really happened ... then went drastically down-hill to become something more closely mirroring our own world.

The brothers may have antigravity boots, hover bikes, and a robot assistant, but they live in a world where scientific discoveries are often sold to the highest bidder and where research without immediate, lucrative results means losing one’s contracts. Dr. Venture’s scientific expeditions are frequently just salvage jobs, attempts to repair or resell the technogadgets his father created in that earlier golden age. [...] In another attempt to raise funds, Venture rents lab space to Dr. Orpheus, who turns out to be a Dr. Strange–like necromancer rather than a research scientist; their ongoing debate about the relative merits of their chosen careers provides one of the series’s highlights, an amusing take on Arthur C. Clarke’s adage that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. * * *

Dr. Venture embodies the scatterbrained technocrat, forgetting his sons’ names while blithely taking them into dangerous situations. Much of his social awkwardness is attributed to his scientist father’s parenting, and his two boys are even less well adjusted. Many of the series’ sex jokes — and they are numerous — stem from Hank and Dean’s naïveté about any life outside the Venture Industries compound. Science, the show indicates, breeds isolation and ignorance. When Dean’s would-be girlfriend asks why she doesn’t see him in school, he replies cheerfully, “I learn in a box built by my pop!”[2]

RDE, finishing, 19Jan21