Fred and Loathing on The Internet

These kids wanna see Rusty Venture. Maybe when there's a cartoon called 'The Venture Brothers' it'll be different.

2024-Jun-21

For the past dozen blog posts, the precedent has been set that the graphic material for each blog post is representative of the blog post content. Given that precedent, there will be an abundance of written material to go along with the nine or so Venture Brothers pictures I’ve made over the last few days. The production of Venture Brothers pictures started up after I had finally bought myself to watching the very last produced episode of the series: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart. A wealth of emotions came over me, so I channeled what I could into creative pursuits.

This is not the first appearance of The Venture Brothers on the blog. Back in September of 2023 I had written a very brief missive within a blog post, where I had mentioned seeing that the final episode was available, yet I did not actually want to watch it. The thought of ending my time with those characters was too much to bear at the time. Something I could delay, even if it was a frivolous waste. After revisiting the last two seasons, I knew I was ready to take my final outing into the Venture Brothers universe.

My time with the Venture Brothers ended on a streaming service piped into a web device attached to my affordable flat fifty inch LCD TV in my living room, through a 2.4 GHZ wireless signal transmitted across the room from a wireless router. My first brush with this series was in 2004, watched on a screen close to fifty inches. On a very fancy ‘modern for its time’ TV. Fat and heavy from the cathode ray tube shooting the image onto the screen. The video signal was piped in from video and audio cables coming from a cable box that demodulated the mess of frequencies signal on the cable into something a human could enjoy on the screen. I watched it on good ol’ fashioned cable TV! Good ol’ fashioned relative to me. To the generations after me ‘cable TV” is already a grandpa technology.

I was watching Adult Swim on this fancy TV in the wee hours of Sunday before dawn. (Adult Swim itself will have its own blog post. Especially Adult Swim in the early 2000s) This fancy TV was housed in a fancy (to me) McMansion in Katy, TX. I found myself in this embarrassment of floorspace type house after a night of drinking in the spring of my freshman year of college, sleeping one off on a leather couch in front of that massive TV screen in the living room of a friend of a friend I had met in my college dorm.

During my freshman year I was easily lured by the promise of cheap beer. That evening delivered on those easy expectations. Enough cheap beer was had that all the participants had gone to their homes and the more regular guests in the house I was at found guest bedrooms.

Adult Swim was just about the only expectation I had for finding something I might enjoy on TV at 3 AM on a weekend night. If not that, maybe reruns of a bygone sitcom. I had known about the block of animated television for a year or so, enjoying the repeats from Fox shows and more curiously, the more crudely developed original stuff. It had become the only bastion of television I had any remaining interest in. My grades did not reflect it, but my freshman year was spent living life to the fullest, with watching new television shows being a laughable idea to spend an evening.

Sunday night Adult Swim became something I looked forward to. The predictability of catching Futurama and Family Guy at 10 and 1030pm marked the difference between my evening and night plans. The programming block functioned somewhat how I imagine a radio station would have for a younger generation. College radio type programming.

On that night, sleeping off Keystone Light in the decadent west Houston suburbs, I caught the pilot episode of The Venture Brothers around the 8 minute mark, giving me an almost full view of the show, yet not the wherewithal to find the title of the show in the end credits. I loved every minute of what I saw, or what I could remember, but I woke up with only the idea of the perversion of the Johnny Quest idea in a 30 minute adult animated comedy. None of my friends from that time enjoyed Adult Swim more than the name attached to some funny shows, rather than the creative team that made ‘Adult Swim’ the late night half of the Cartoon Network cable TV channel.

For months the idea of two very sheltered boy adventurers being the burdensome children of a short-sighted pill popping super scientist protected by a violent but highly effective bodyguard remained an inchoate idea floating in my head. I saw no mention of something like it on the text bumpers between episodes on Adult Swim. The show eventually materialized sometime in the fall of sophomore year, with a whole twelve episode season that already felt like it was part of a grander universe of fictional history.

I figure that’s enough for now. I’ll keep the posts tagged chronologically for at least 4 more posts. I watched the show in about that many eras. Season 1-2: College, S3-4: Post-College, S5-7 Adult Life. When I first saw this show, I was about four years older than the boys. By the time the closing movie for Venture Bros was released I was four years younger than Dr. Venture. I grew up with this show, and watched one of the few examples on television of seeing real growth in animated characters.