Fred and Loathing on The Internet

If you have death-prone children, you keep a few clones of them in your lab.

2024-Jun-27

There are still plenty of Venture Brothers graphics to go around, so there are plenty more blog posts to come pontificating on the graces of super science, calamitous intent, and brotherly love. Maybe eight posts will be the goal. There were about eight seasons of the show.

The second season began in the summer of 2006. A few years after the first season ended at the end of 2004; with some -what could be!-huge sweeping changes for the show, despite only being the second season! The last episode of the first season ended with the number one villain thrown in jail, seemingly crippled in his powerbase for menacing Dr. Venture. Not only that, the show ended with the two titular characters murdered and Dr. Venture discovers he has a long lost twin brother! Could this mean a completely new tangent for the show, with a whole new set of brothers with the goofy Buddy Holly and Fred from Scooby Doo teenagers laid to waste?

Only a little bit. What is wonderful about this show is that continuity is respected. Sometimes some very minute hints become multi-episode plot movements in later seasons. In this case, there is no big switch. Just a minor adjustment. Although the opening credits changed to use the silhouettes of Dr. Venture and his newly born mini-Jonas Venture brother instead of Hank and Dean, this was a twist to tease fans wanting resolution that seemed lacking in the curiously flippant reaction Dr. Venture had when seeing his son’s mangled corpses at the end of the season.

The secret to the boys being so foolish yet still surviving their father’s encounters with organized villainy and super science was the army of clones they had. Ready to replace them one death at a time. It was and still is a clever writing device to account for such foolish boys blundering around death rays, assassins, and mummies. It was the first foundational answer about where the Venture Brothers come from.

I myself did not have cable TV or an internet connection in my home that could handle video streaming in the summer of 2006. Each Sunday night in that twelve week span after the first episode was a quest to find somebody who did have cable and wanted to watch the new episodes that premiered on Sundays on Adult Swim. Usually I could sweet talk my way in with the normal refreshment that comes with watching Adult Swim.

Were that not possible, I would use adultswim.com on an on-campus PC. My poverty level at college makes the technology at the time sound more rudimentary than it was. Although streaming video from an official channel like Adult Swim was something new at the time. Most broadcast or cable shows would not have an online release the day after their normal TV premiere.

It would be another two years before the third season was released. That was the tightest release schedule the show would have for the rest of its lifespan. We didn’t know how good we had it!

The second season was even better than the first. The stories moved boldly in new directions that were hard to predict. New trajectories for characters were couched with the introduction of so much backstory. The Venture Brothers was getting bigger and deeper while still having small intimate episodes that let the main characters be normal people in between the wacky stuff.

The episode I remember being my white whale to watch was the one that spoofed the Scooby Doo characters with a real-life psycho veneered over the recognizable Fred, Velma, Daphne, and Shaggy. For one reason or the other I did not watch it in the window Adultswim.com offered for watching new episodes. It was still a time when you had to wait for a ‘rerun’ to watch your favorite TV shows, despite the beginnings of on-demand streaming.

What drew me to that episode was the writing credit for Ben Edlund, the creator of The Tick. That is one of the first stories I can remember that examined the ludicrousness of comic book character’s lives through dialogue heavy scenes that I used to imagine happened off-camera from the action. Diner moments over coffee talking about the minutiae of living the whole lifestyle that would come from being a super hero, villain, scientist, or whatever.

The Venture Brothers followed this vein outside the city protector story of super heroes. It more or less took this behind-the-action view of any commercial property that was directed to children, or man-children that can’t grow out of idolizing costumed characters. The show pulled in a satirical shared universe where almost anything that was on Saturday morning cartoons or comic books in the late 80s. That’s what gave me love at first sight. Seeing everything on this show grow in one way or the other is what makes it different from most any other show. Each season is a glimpse in a big universe with stuff changing, away from the audience.