Go, Team Venture!
05.31.06 By Collin David
Yesterday saw the much-anticipated DVD release of the first season of Cartoon Network’s ‘The Venture Brothers’. I gotta tell you, it was one of those mornings where I woke up super-early in anticipation, like the excitement of Christmas but without your grandma telling you to open your presents slower and save the paper while the dog chokes on tinsel behind the tree and someone knocks the antique ornament that’s been in the family for 75 years onto the mantelpiece.
The Venture Brothers was 2003’s addition to Cartoon Network’s late night block of adult-themed cartoons that are aired under the banner of ‘Adult Swim’, which is an entity that forever changed my life. Coming together in a small dorm room, crowding around a TV to watch cartoon characters curse and engage in adult situations, all done smartly, is part of my better college memories. It almost drowns out the memories of that roommate who left actual, mysterious slime trails all over the floor and gave me fake phone messages, and even my questionable relationship with that girl with the speech impediment and aversion to showering. The Adult Swim block of ‘toons saw its infancy back in my high school days when ‘Space Ghost : Coast to Coast’ was born, taking recycled animation from the 60s (which was now owned by Time-Warner) and repurposing it, making intergalactic hero Space Ghost a horribly inept and inattentive talk show host with live-action, bewildered guests. Cartoon Network has expanded upon the elder crowd’s appreciation of animation ever since.
For those of you who’ve not seen The Venture Brothers, it’s ostensibly a parody of the old Hanna-Barbera Jonny Quest cartoon. You have a scientist, his strapping manservant and a couple of kids going on adventures. Beyond that superficial understanding are many hilarious strata of parody, referencing everything from The Fantastic Four to Hajime Sorayama’s explicitly sexual fem-bots, and it’s genius. I said it. It blows my mind for 15 stellar episodes with rarely a mis-step.
So, why does one bother to go out and tightly clasp a DVD set of things that one can easily turn on the TV and see on any given night? That’s a question that I often ask myself when I’m purchasing TV shows on DVD, and I think that the answer is that I collect these Adult Swim DVDs (eighteen sets so far) so that I might share them with people, bring a little hilarious light into their lives that they might not have otherwise had the time to pick up on. And not have to wait until 11 PM on weeknights (and 10 PM on Sundays for new episodes) to show the stuff off, too. I want to take this DVD set, sit on a couch for hours on end and see someone else laugh with me.
But I guess that’s not entirely true. Many of these TV shows on DVD come with a plethora of extras, from bonus episodes to deleted scenes and making-of featurettes, and the Venture Brothers DVD is no exception. While hardcore fans might be disappointed with the fact that the DVD doesn’t contain any actual behind-the-scenes stuff besides six creator commentary tracks, it actually does contain a ton of great misinformation. Voice actors performing live-action mockumentary style interviews, in costume, was certainly a highlight of the extras, plus the pilot episode and a rarely-shown Christmas episode top it off. The ‘deleted scenes’ are all sketchy animatics, and usually aren’t entire scenes at all, disappointingly - just an extra line of dialogue in the middle of a scene that leaves it pretty much unaffected. What the DVD set does come with, though, is internal box art by legendary illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz, and that in itself with worth the $20 to $30 dollar price.
You can tell that the show is a labor of loving geeks, who both produce and act within the shows. Venture Brothers stands out from the general Adult Swim lineup in that it uses high-quality animation, while most of the AS shows rely on minimal animation and clever dialogue and absurdity. It also is a sequential show, situations in one episode reflecting upon future episodes, which is another thing that not many cartoons address. Not knowing if they were going to be picked up for a second season (as really intelligent shows are often canceled while shows like ‘Will and Grace’ are virtually and painfully interminable), the final episode of season can be seen as pretty darned final, but after a struggle, the show will begin airing season 2’s episodes in late June of this year, still on Cartoon Network.
So far, anything with the [Adult Swim] logo comes bearing my approval, which is probably a gleeful approval given in a fit of wet-myself laughter.
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Article Tags: Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, DVD, Hanna-Barbera, Jonny Quest, repurpose, Venture Brothers================
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