Kefky
08-21-2007, 06:36 AM
Yea, it's a bit old, but I did a search and it hasn't been posted here before, so I thought some of you guys might find it interesting. It's about the more serious themes underlining the show:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/119655.html
The Venture Brothers is a different beast. It flaunts all of the elements of the series on the adult/hipster animated landscape: irony, satire, uncomfortable pauses, outright parody. But as creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer frequently explain, the show is about failure. It's about the vision that inspired the science fiction wave of the 1950s and 1960s, the optimism of the space race, and the baby boomers' beloved, indulged idea that they could achieve anything they wanted.
These were ideas that satirized themselves. Awarding its 1966 "Man of the Year" award to the "Young Generation," Time magazine's editors saluted the boomers as the folks "who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war." Forty years later the boomers have disappointed no one as much as they've disappointed themselves, buckling in to watch movies about how great their parents were as they pop pills and build their Dennis Hopper-endorsed "Dream Books."
This explains why Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture, the failed boy genius and father of the series' eponymous brothers Hank and Dean, is such a screw-up. As we learn in flashbacks across the series 27 episodes (so far), Venture pere was a Jonny Quest figure himself who solved mysteries under the wing of his brilliant father, his friend Hector, and their bodyguard Swifty. The 1960s were an era of superhero teams, super-science, space stations, and helpful robots. And as Rusty grows up, all of that peters out. He drops out of college (after palling around with two other super-scientists and a Doctor Doom analogue named Baron Underbheit), loses portions of the family business, and enters middle-age trading off his family's successes and reluctantly fathering his two boys. When Venture's lab is broken into by The Monarch, his butterfly-fetishizing archfoe can't find anything worth defiling or smashing. "What can I do to this guy that life hasn't already?" he sulks. "I almost feel sorry for him."
Hank and Dean don't know all of this. They believe their father is a genius and the adventures they stumble into are legendary. They think nothing odd of the fact that he wears a one-piece "speed suit" and they dress, respectively, like the Scooby Gang's Freddy and like Buddy Holly. They don't seem to notice that the villains they battle are poseurs or trust-fund kids who usually belong to a hamstrung, bureaucratic supervillain union called the Guild of Calamitous Intent. They're blissfully unaware that nothing important has been invented for a long, long time. But when they inevitably screw something up or get targeted by one of their wannabe archenemies, their heroic, nigh-invulnerable bodyguard Brock Samson steps in to save them with palpable boredom and a heavy sigh.
It's pretty impressive that Pulick and Hammer managed to make such a hilarious show out of horribly depressing stuff like this. They're raping our childhoods, but we enjoy it, and ask for more.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/119655.html
The Venture Brothers is a different beast. It flaunts all of the elements of the series on the adult/hipster animated landscape: irony, satire, uncomfortable pauses, outright parody. But as creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer frequently explain, the show is about failure. It's about the vision that inspired the science fiction wave of the 1950s and 1960s, the optimism of the space race, and the baby boomers' beloved, indulged idea that they could achieve anything they wanted.
These were ideas that satirized themselves. Awarding its 1966 "Man of the Year" award to the "Young Generation," Time magazine's editors saluted the boomers as the folks "who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war." Forty years later the boomers have disappointed no one as much as they've disappointed themselves, buckling in to watch movies about how great their parents were as they pop pills and build their Dennis Hopper-endorsed "Dream Books."
This explains why Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture, the failed boy genius and father of the series' eponymous brothers Hank and Dean, is such a screw-up. As we learn in flashbacks across the series 27 episodes (so far), Venture pere was a Jonny Quest figure himself who solved mysteries under the wing of his brilliant father, his friend Hector, and their bodyguard Swifty. The 1960s were an era of superhero teams, super-science, space stations, and helpful robots. And as Rusty grows up, all of that peters out. He drops out of college (after palling around with two other super-scientists and a Doctor Doom analogue named Baron Underbheit), loses portions of the family business, and enters middle-age trading off his family's successes and reluctantly fathering his two boys. When Venture's lab is broken into by The Monarch, his butterfly-fetishizing archfoe can't find anything worth defiling or smashing. "What can I do to this guy that life hasn't already?" he sulks. "I almost feel sorry for him."
Hank and Dean don't know all of this. They believe their father is a genius and the adventures they stumble into are legendary. They think nothing odd of the fact that he wears a one-piece "speed suit" and they dress, respectively, like the Scooby Gang's Freddy and like Buddy Holly. They don't seem to notice that the villains they battle are poseurs or trust-fund kids who usually belong to a hamstrung, bureaucratic supervillain union called the Guild of Calamitous Intent. They're blissfully unaware that nothing important has been invented for a long, long time. But when they inevitably screw something up or get targeted by one of their wannabe archenemies, their heroic, nigh-invulnerable bodyguard Brock Samson steps in to save them with palpable boredom and a heavy sigh.
It's pretty impressive that Pulick and Hammer managed to make such a hilarious show out of horribly depressing stuff like this. They're raping our childhoods, but we enjoy it, and ask for more.