Fred and Loathing on The Internet

If you touch something that melts your fingers off, tell your buddy!

2024-Jul-29

Although the burst of steam I had for The Venture Brothers tapered off enough to cause an almost month-long gulf since the last blog post about the show, the sting of the show’s ending still lingers in the flavors of my thoughts. The television show (essentially about growing out of youthful obsessions) that I watched while growing up out of my own youthful obsessions has ended! I have to face the world more as Dr. Venture rather than Rusty Venture.

Obsessions is a word too strong in my case. Perfect for The Venture Brothers. The absurd stakes involved among seemingly mature adults in the cast of The Venture Brothers is best described as obsession. After all, it's a television show satirizing the television shows on Saturday mornings from the 1970s through 90s. The antagonists were obviously seizing their goals with mania. Implicitly the heroes of each show are themselves engaging in obsession by letting the antagonist somehow get away to repeat the process every week. Surely both of them would wisen up and see the error of their dramatically craftedways?

By the time of the release of season three for The Venture Bros in 2008, the audience has already got a hint laden glimpse into The Venture Brother’s literary universe made from melding all those Saturday morning cartoons together; always with a marvelous new hero/villain name (ex. Truckules, Haranguetang, Holy Diver) more amusing than the next.

Aside from the clearly made for jokes names, season one dropped stories of unseen characters doing stuff that sounded so cool, dozens of times. Season two sometimes brought forth these cool names on screen, while still dropping references to back story between existing and new characters. A rich universe was springing forth gracefully between the same pace of jokes about hipster bands and eviscerating the inherent embarrassment of enlisting one’s services to a costumed villain paymaster. Season three continued the same pace sailing into deep cuts into the past of the heroes, villains, and anybody in between in the Venture world.

The end of season three was the end of the first era of the show. I am rather sure the creators had more faith than hope on the certainty that there would be a next season. Had this show ended on the third season, it would have done so well enough. The fact that all the lasting changes the end of this season brought to the status quo continued into season four was stupefying. It was more dramatic than the death of the boys at the end of season one! Nothing was going to be the same. People died! The clones died! The Venture Brothers were now mortal! Brock is gone!

On the personal side, I was going into my own era of change. This season premiered when I had to resort to illegal means of watching the show. Adultswim.com did not allow for viewership in Mexico, and this season started when I had taken a post-graduation gamble on working in Mexico City. I had made some effort to find episodes as soon as they were available. This approach did not give me the in-the-moment feel I had with season one and two, where I kept pace with the release of new episodes.

I suppose if I kept the exuberance I had for the show into the third season I would have found new episodes even sooner, but I was getting older. The idea of waiting for a premiere was starting to sound ludicrous. Why not wait a bit and watch them at your leisure? The Venture Brothers weren’t going anywhere. There were plenty of youthful obsessions to go around at this time. Staying abreast of the cartoons I like was no longer one of them. That feeling only grew. I recall not getting the same ‘whoosh’ from seeing the premier of season five. Even though season 5 was just as unlikely to happen as any other season for The Venture Brothers, it was just a TV show by then. Not an expression of my desires.

Season Three was great. Just as excellent as the previous two. It moved directly into the world spoken of in the prior two seasons, and ended with a revolution in how that world would behave, if there were to be another season. (There was, and it was longer than usual and might be the best one!)