The Matt Signal Advent Calendar 2015 Day 6: The Venture Bros. "Hate Floats"

The Venture Bros.

Season 2, Episode 2: “Hate Floats,” 2006

Dan Says:

I shout my out my love for this show – about middle-aged super-scientists, supervillains and superheroes living in denial of their constant failure – on a fairly regular basis. Season 2 cemented it firmly in the pantheon of my all-time favorite series, and this episode was the mixer.

All parties and plot points converge on the local mall. Doc Rusty Venture, boy adventurer turned scientist living off the estate of his dead father, has come to buy his younger son, Dean, a speed-suit, aka a hideous jumpsuit he sees as the uniform of a proper super-scientist. His longtime archnemesis, the Monarch, has come to stalk his ex-girlfriend, the aptly named Dr. Girlfriend, who is currently dating another supervillain, Phantom Limb, who’s come seeking supplies for a dinner party.

The Monarch’s henchmen, freshly recruited from the inner city, shoot up the place, kidnap Dr. Venture and overthrow the Monarch and his two remaining original Henchmen, 21 and 24. The Ventures’ bodyguard, Brock Samson, gets shot but is rescued by Phantom Limb, who tends to Brock’s injuries and suggests a team-up to retrieve the Ventures and Dr. Girlfriend, whom they believe to be kidnapped. Dr. Girlfriend, however, has escaped the melee with the Venture boys and are figuring out their own plan to save the others. There’s a lot of people believing the wrong people have been kidnapped, and in the end all parties reconvene at the Monarch’s flying cocoon base, Brock and Phantom Limb kill a bunch of goons and everyone turns out fine.

In between, though, there is a lecture about the proper heft and serration of kitchen knives that will be referenced again nearly 10 years later in the Gargantua II special, the Venture boys wonder whether Dr. Girlfriend is their mommy (Spoiler: She’s not), and Henchmen 21 and 24 become two of my favorite characters on the show with their bickering beta-bros schtick.

Animated Discussions: Tom & Jerry: Spy Quest

Comics and animation fans love odd mash-ups; Dark Horse's current mash-up of Archie Vs. Predator attests to that. So when I got a preview copy of a direct-to-DVD feature from Warner Home Video called Tom and Jerry: Spy Quest, that teams animation's original cat and mouse duo, Tom and Jerry, with Jonny Quest and his family, I was both curious and a bit dubious, as these crossovers can go horribly wrong. Fortunately, this one works pretty well.

What starts out as a normal Tom and Jerry cartoon with Tom and Jerry on the beach quickly turns into something more as Tom's hijinks makes the pair bump into Jonny Quest, his best friend Hadji, and his dog Bandit. Robots attack, and Jonny takes in Tom and Jerry. Quickly it's revealed that the robots are actually cats in armor working for Dr. Zin, arch foe of the Quest family, and when Zin's cats are able to infiltrate the Quest's home (thanks to Tom turning off the security systems to get a snack) and kidnap Dr. Quest, Jonny's father, and their bodyguard Race Bannon, along with Quest's new invention, the Q-Sphere, it's up to Jonny, Hadji, Tom, Jerry, and Bandit to save the day.

The movie does a good job of balancing the tropes of both of its characters. While many scenes are high action, with Jonny and Hadji in real peril, or Race fighting actual robots, and an elaborate evil plan by Dr. Zin, this is balanced by typical Tom and Jerry antics. One particular bit of shtick has Tom completely panic and freak out at the sound of any dog barking, usually to some catastrophic consequence that coincidentally interferes with Dr. Zin's machinations. This leads to a sort of classic spy comedy trope, that the cowardly Tom is thought of as a deadly threat by the villains, despite never intentionally doing anything.

The movie does embrace fully the Jonny Quest world of mysterious spies and foreign countries, so there are a couple of moments that seem out of another era. The country of Moldovistan, where Dr. Zin has his base, has snake charmers, evil spies in fezzes, belly dancers, and bazaars, seeming like something out of the less enlightened moments of the old cartoon. It does avoid most of the worst of this though, meaning that the principal characters of color aren't straight up stereotypes. While Hadji usually was presented as well rounded, even in the older episodes, the classic Dr. Zin was a typical Yellow Peril character. Here, his posture and manner is not stereotypical, and legendary character actor James Hong provides my favorite performance in the movie. A very funny exchange between Zin and Dr. Quest is steps away from being one between The Venture Bros. Dr. Venture and his nemesis, The Monarch, and while Zin's origin as he tells it melds that of Dr. Doom and Lex Luthor (a great bit for the in the know comic geek), his monologuing and back story spouting more resembles Dr. Doofenschmirts of Phineas & Ferb.

There are also tons of nods to both of the classic shows. Tom's dog nemesis, Spike, and his son pop up the opening scene. And when Jonny and Hadji need help in Moldovistan, they go to Jezebel Jade, Race's old flame, and a minor recurring character from the classic show, who happens to own a club right out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  Jade's right hand man... er dog id Droopy, the melancholy sounding Basset Hound from classic Hanna Barbera cartoons, who I've always had a soft spot for. It's things like this, along with a retro opening that adds Tom and Jerry into the classic Jonny Quest opening sequence, that stirs my geek heart.

But let's be honest, here: for all my analysis, this movie is geared towards kids, and that's who will enjoy it. There's tons of laughs and action. There are cool robots. For all of the thoughtful stuff, it's really just a fun action cartoon that you'll be able to sit and enjoy for 75 minutes with your kids. Tom and Jerry and The Adventures of Jonny Quest both have places in my childhood, and it's nice to know that this generation will have an in to enjoy them as well in Tom and Jerry: Spy Quest.

Oh, and as one final geek history p.s., the president of the United States is voiced by Tim Matheson, who says that Jonny reminds him of himself when he was that age. Matheson was the original Jonny Quest. I love that kind of stuff.

TV Review: Dan Grote on Marvel's Agent Carter

Two of the unlikeliest success stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been SHIELD Agent (now Director) Phil Coulson and pre-SHIELD Agent Peggy Carter, two people with absolutely no superpowers but, at their best, tons of personality.

Both got their own One-Shot short films – Coulson got two, actually. And now, both have their own TV shows and comics series.

Agent Carter, a seven-part miniseries, premiered last week on ABC. Meanwhile, at your local comics shop, Marvel dropped the first issue of Operation S.I.N., a five-issue series by Kathryn Immomen and Rich Ellis starring Carter and O.G. genius sass-mouth Howard Stark. The mini serves as both a stinger to last year’s Original Sin crossover and cross-platform marketing for Carter, a character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966.

Carter the TV series picks up in 1946 with Peggy (Hayley Atwell) in pretty much the exact same spot she was in at the beginning of the Agent Carter One-Shot: Working at the SSR, relegated to secretarial work by a second-rate Mad Men cast of chauvinists who came home from World War II and took all the jobs they felt themselves entitled to as conquering heroes. To help refresh people’s memories as to why this show exists, the opening of the pilot splices in the scene from Captain America: The First Avenger in which Chris Evans crashes the Red Skull’s plane into the Northern Atlantic. Boom, instant pathos.

Then Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) comes calling a with problem only a Stark could have: Someone is selling Howard’s “bad babies” – a creepy-uncle term for some of his deadlier inventions – on the black market, he’s being persecuted by the government for it, and he needs Carter to go on a secret MacGuffin Quest to set things right. The first weapon is a chemical explosive (more of an implosive, really) called nitramene packaged in containment units that look like perfume bottles.

Aiding Carter in her quest is Jarvis – the human being, not the O.S. voiced by Paul Bettany. James D’Arcy’s Edwin Jarvis, not at all trained in the ways of espionage, helps Carter track down strange weapons while fretting about his domestic duties and the hell he’ll catch from his as-yet-unseen wife. There’s definitely shades of Niles and Maris from Frasier here (kids, ask your parents about Frasier). So far, Jarvis is the show’s breakout character, so I look forward to the 7-part miniseries next winter in which Jarvis raises a young Tony Stark and Mr. Belvedere-style antics ensue.

Oh, and Stark and Jarvis have some kind of hidden agenda in employing Carter, but that was probably obvious.

The main villain of the series is either a person or an organization called Leviathan. Which immediately begs the question: Are World War II-era evil organizations only allowed to be named after mythical sea beasts? Either way, Leviathan likes to employ people whose larynxes have been removed, which makes for some fun conversation scenes. Also, this person/thing communicates with his larynx-less henchmen via a self-typing typewriter, which makes me want to play Ouija and watch shows produced by Stephen J. Cannell at the same time (kids, ask your grandparents who Stephen J. Cannell is).

The men of the SSR are written to give the folks at Sterling Draper Cooper Pryce a run for their money, but of course those guys are on AMC and able to get away with far more. Shea Whigham is the chief who constantly looks like he smelled a fart, Chad Michael Murray is the alpha douche, Kyle Bornheimer is the fat slob, and Enver Gjokaj is the sympathetic one, on account of his bum leg. The one-dimensionality of their characters can best be summed up by a scene in which they use a literal carrot and stick in an interrogation scene that ends in a brutal beating administered by Murray.

Meanwhile, Carter gets to dress up in costumes and use fake accents as she goes about her business, which I suppose harkens to the Jennifer Garner Alias series, but for some reason I’m reminded more of Jim Varney dressing up as his own mother in the Ernest movies. Don’t get me wrong, Atwell’s a knockout, fun to watch, and even funny at times. It just may be because I watched Ernest Saves Christmas only a few weeks ago.

The second hour works in a Captain America radio play that Carter justifiably finds anathema. The program – which regularly pops up at inopportune times – features Cap, the Red Skull, and Army Nurse Betty Carver, Cap’s frail love interest who regularly gets herself kidnapped by the Skull. In other words, the anti-Peggy.

The first two hours feature some fun casting choices for bit players, including James Urbaniak (Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture himself) as a Roxxon scientist, Kevin Heffernan from the Broken Lizard troupe (Super Troopers, Beer Fest) as a rude diner patron, Ray Wise (Twin Peaks) as the head of the Roxxon oil company, and Lynsy Fonseca (Kick-Ass, Hot Tub Time Machine) as a waitress who finds Peggy a place to stay after her previous roommate a) contracts tuberculosis and b) is killed by one of the no-larynx guys.

The pilot also features an appearance by a young Dr. Anton Vanko, father of Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash from Iron Man 2. A teaser for future episodes includes shots of the Howling Commandos, which I’m definitely looking forward to as a fan of Neal McDonough’s Dum Dum Dugan.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. set the bar low for how an MCU TV show should start, but Agent Carter has a lot going for it. It’s built off established characters, it’s only seven episodes so there’s no time for wheel-spinning, and it doesn’t have to tie itself to whatever’s coming to the theaters. So what you get is a fun, pulpy, kinda soapy period piece with a heroine who has the honor of being Marvel Studios’ first female lead and isn’t entirely out of place on a network with shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder.

Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.

Animated Discussions: The Venture Bros.

I was the right age for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming when it started in 2001. Sophomoric tomfoolery like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken was perfect programming for drunk twentysomethings. But only one show from the programming block remains one of my all-time favorites. It comes about once every other year, like the Olympics, and it stars a bunch of middle-aged has-beens and never-wuzzes.

The Venture Bros. started in 2004 and is about to enter its sixth season. The core of the show revolves around Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, a Johnny Quest-type boy adventurer who has slacked into middle age with little to show for it; Hank and Dean Venture, his two inept sons who have a nasty habit of dying; Brock, their blond-mulleted bodyguard; and their archnemesis, a butterfly-themed villain named the Monarch.

More than that, though, the show is about failure. Failed super-scientists, failed super-villains, failed spy agencies, failed sorcerers, failed dictators of small kingdoms outside Michigan, failed marriages, failed tech start-ups, etc.

If the show were just a send-up of Johnny Quest, it would be good, but co-creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick have gradually expanded their world to send up the Fantastic Four, Dr. Strange, Dr. Doom, Ant-Man, Blade, G.I. Joe, David Bowie, Hunter S. Thompson, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Sean Connery, the Walt Disney Co., the Hardy Boys, Chinatown, The Manchurian Candidate, the Batman-Robin dynamic and many other characters and concepts I probably don’t even realize.

A piece in The Atlantic from last year compares the world of the Venture Brothers to Springfield, and rightly so. The Simpsons is another animated show in which its ancillary characters have, over time, come to be as fully realized as the main players, often generating memorable episodes that barely incorporate the main cast.

Keeping in that vein, here are five of the better characters from The Venture Bros.:

Dr. Orpheus: What if Stephen Strange were a middle-aged divorcee raising a teenage daughter and riddled with insecurity despite having the power to communicate with the dead? Enter Byron Orpheus, the Ventures’ tenant who is occasionally called on to watch Hank and Dean, though one time it resulted in their deaths (It’s OK; they have tons of clones). Orpheus is regularly humbled by his mentor, The Master, a shape-shifter who is voiced to caustic perfection by H. Jon Benjamin (Archer, Bob’s Burgers, Home Movies). In Season 2, he forms his own team of magic-themed heroes called the Order of the Triad, whose other two members are the Alchemist, seeker of truth and aging, gay Jimmy Buffett fan, and Jefferson Twilight, Blacula hunter (think Blade, if Blade looked like Richard Roundtree).

Phantom Limb: Next to the Monarch, Limb is the best villain on the show. In fact, if he’s anybody’s archnemesis, it’s Monarch, as Limb steals his girlfriend, lands him in prison and comes far closer than him to killing the Ventures. He also used to be the Monarch’s boss and a professor at the university Dr. Venture attended in the 1980s. Toward the end of Season 2, Limb tries to take down both the Monarch and his boss in the villains union, the Guild of Calamitious Intent, unsuccessfully of course. The defeats drive him mad and lead him to team briefly with inanimate objects, including a toaster, a mug and a woman’s shoe. Eventually, he regroups – literally – forming a team called the Revenge Society with Baron Underbheit, a deposed Dr. Doom-type tyrant, and Professor Impossible, a Mr. Fantastic type super-scientist/stretchy guy who sinks into a deep shame spiral after his wife leaves him for Dr. Venture’s brother, who spent the first four decades of his life as a parasitic growth inside the doctor.

Henchman 21: Gary is Henchman 21 in the Monarch’s hierarchy of butterfly-themed goons. His best friend, Henchman 24 (the one who sounds like Ray Romano), is killed at the end of Season 3, which leads 21 on a between-seasons quest to become a better henchman. By the beginning of Season 4, he’s jacked and has a HENCH4LIFE tattoo on his stomach. Like many other villains, he comes closer than the Monarch to destroying the Ventures, but over the course of the season, and with the help of the ghost of Henchman 24 – and that old, dancing guy from Arrested Development who’s not actually dead – he realizes how much of a jackass both the Monarch and his wife are, and he defects to the upstart spy group Sphinx. At the end of Season 5, he returns to the Monarch’s fold.

Sgt. Hatred/Vatred: Sgt. Hatred is a child-molester whose wife enjoys being bound, gagged and kidnapped, and he becomes Hank and Dean’s bodyguard after Brock leaves to rejoin the super-spy game. He is the epitome of how dark this show could be if it weren’t so funny. Also he was Dr. Venture’s Guild-assigned archenemy for a time, whom he treated more like a friend to spite the Monarch. After top-secret government experiments seek to control his urges (and give him man-breasts), Hatred removes his army togs, puts on a powder-blue speed suit and has the red H tattooed on his face changed to a blue V (the letters ATRED are still tattooed on his chest). Hatred has a mental breakdown at the end of Season 3, in “The Family that Slays Together, Slays Together,” locking himself in the Ventures’ bathroom and demanding someone bring him a “beautiful brown boy.”

David Bowie: Music and music references are a big part of the Ventures’ jokebook, so much so that the Guild of Calamitous Intent is ruled by a being that takes the form of David Bowie, who appears to his subordinates as an Oz-style floating head known as The Sovereign. Bowie’s name is first mentioned in Season 1, Episode 4, in which the mercenary Molotov Cocktease claims to be running a mission for him. He first appears physically in the “Showdown at Cremation Creek” two-parter at the end of Season 2, when he attends the wedding of the Monarch and it is revealed that he is the Sovereign. The Bowie-being’s influence may extend far back in the Ventures’ universe, as in the Season 3 MacGuffin-quest episode called “ORB,” a “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”-style flashback shows a group of old-timey heroes in a dogfight with Nikola Tesla, whom Bowie portrayed in the 2006 Christopher Nolan film “The Prestige.”

Watch a panel discussion on the show from this year’s Comic-Con International here, as part of a con diary recorded by James Urbaniak, who voices Dr. Venture. Don’t worry, there aren’t any spoilers, as Publick and Hammer barely spend any time talking about the show.

Dan Grote has been a Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.