The Venture Bros S2E4 "Escape to the House of Mummies Part II"

This review was fast lane commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire

Unfortunately, due to the streaming source, I couldn't take screencaps for this review.

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"The Venture Bros" is one of the more enduring of the early 2000's era Adult Swim cartoons, as evidenced by it continuing to come out with new episodes all the way up to 2018. Despite it getting a ton of advertisement and a lot of word of mouth, this show managed to pass me by. I wasn't a huge cartoon watcher in my high school years when The Venture Bros was first coming out, and while I was occasionally curious about it in college and afterward I just never ended up trying it out. I learned a bit about it through cultural osmosis (basically, an Adult Swimified satire of "Jonny Quest." And other boy adventurer series too. But mostly Jonny Quest), but today was my first time actually watching an episode of it.

Before anyone asks, this episode being the "part two" of its series isn't a problem, as the parts 1 and 3 advertised by the faux-intro-recap and faux-ending-teaser don't actually exist. It being the nonsensical middle of an implicitly even more nonsensical saga is just part of the gag. So, there's no reason for this not to be my introduction to the series.

Anyway, "Escape from the House of Mummies pt 2" is an interesting time capsule. As a season two episode, it's from early in the show's run, when most western "adult animation" was just lolrandom nonsense and/or juvenile gross-out humor. There were exceptions, but even some of those exceptions aren't remembered so fondly anymore (for context, "Family Guy" was considered one of the bests of its kind during this period. So were "Futurama" and "South Park" to be fair, but despite mostly standing the test of time I wouldn't say that South Park didn't lean heavily on the lolrandom nonsense or juvenile gross-out humor even if it also had more going on). That's what early Venture Bros was competing against, and that's the milieu it kinda sorta emerged from. On the other hand, unlike most of that milieu, Venture Bros remained popular even through the late 2010's as the medium evolved into the "Archer" period and then onward into the "Bojak Horseman" and "Rick and Morty" era.

Watching this episode, I can see the randumz and the middle schooler transgressiveness of the early aughts, but I also see foreshadowing of the much better western animation era to come. I feel like early Venture Bros, while still possessing the characteristic baggage of its time, might have been one of the things that kicked the medium in the pants and made it realize it could aspire to greater things. An important step. My understanding is that TVB would itself mature considerably over its following seasons, thereby keeping up with its younger competitors, but from the beginning it feels like it was a cut above. Mostly due to the intricacy of the characters and their strained family dynamics.

If I described the web of marital woes, parent-child conflicts, and generational traumas going on between the characters, it would probably sound fairly boilerplate...but that's only because we're used to getting this level of nuance and character complexity from western animation now. Back when this was first airing, virtually no American cartoons - aimed at any age group - were doing this. At least, they weren't doing it as well, or putting it center-stage.

The main cast includes super-inventor Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture, his two longsuffering sons Hank and Dean, and an ersatz Race Bannon named Brock Samson. Since this is an Adult Swim satire, Dr. Venture is a bitter, sarcastic, fourth wall breaking, abusive asshole, his sons both hate going on these adventures with him, and Samson is sort of an Only Sane Man who's constantly on the brink of madness wrangling this dysfunctional family through dangerous situations. However, since this is a forward-thinking Adult Swim satire, it does something a bit more clever and sophisticated than "Jonny Quest, but everyone sucks." You see, Rusty is actually the second Dr. Venture to have globetrotting superscience adventures on behalf of the US government.

Back in the 1960's (not coincidentally the same time when the original Jonny Quest series was running), Rusty was "Jonny," and his own father was "Dr. Quest" (they presumably had their own Bannon/Samson too). They had unironic, patriotic, family-friendly adventures. But then Rusty grew up following in his father's footsteps, only to realize too late that he just isn't as good at this as the senior Doctor Venture. He drags his sons along because that's the only parenting model he knows, and the fact that they're much less enthusiastic about it than he himself was as a boy just makes him feel his own inadequacies even stronger, which then drives him to lash out resentfully at them. There's a whole implied drama about what happened to the mother, but whether she left or died or whatever I get the impression that it was entirely Rusty's fault and he knows it.

The show's title is a misnomer, at least going by the episode I saw. The titular "Venture Brothers" are relatively minor characters in their father's story. Just like Rusty himself is becoming painfully aware that he will never be more than a footnote in his father's legacy. And, even in just the one early episode I saw, I get the sense that these characters and their relationships aren't static. Watching gave me the distinct impression that Rusty and his sons are undergoing longterm character arcs, though whether for the better or the worse I couldn't say.

So, that level of nuance and attention to characterization was a rarity for adult animation back then. The fact that it's also a (very edgy, admittedly, but still earnest) "reality ensues" deconstruction of what a childhood like Jonny Quest's might eventually turn someone into is also a rare point of sophistication in the "black comedy satire" subgenre even today. That character work and long view of relationships is what stands out about The Venture Brothers, and which foreshadows the little golden age of western animation that was soon to come.

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On the topic of later shows that built off of these advances: I already mentioned "Rick & Morty," but I was really blown away by the extent to which Rusty Venture seems like a proto-Rick Sanchez. You hear about Rick being a cynical parody of Doc Brown or The Doctor, but now I'd be very surprised to learn that he wasn't primarily inspired by Rusty.

It's too bad that Rick & Morty didn't commit to the longterm character arcs it seemed like it was leaning toward after the first couple seasons. Bit of a step back, I feel. Ah well.

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Now, since this episode is the middle part of a non-existent trilogy, I'm not entirely sure which whacky side-characters are actually recurring parts of the show and which ones only exist for this episode. So, while I'm tempted to speak at length about Dr. Orpheus - a bombastic Doctor Strange parody who has his own strained family situation and who also mows Rusty's lawn for some reason - I'm not sure how important he actually is. I'm fairly certain that the implied time travel misadventure that saw Edgar Allen Poe, Emperor Caligula, and an ancient Egyptian supersoldier experiment joining the team is just a one-off thing for this episode, but with Dr. Orpheus I'm less sure.

Unfortunately, the early 2000's-isms I mentioned before are also very much present in this episode. Like, sure, "Bojak Horseman" might make a crude joke about a dog-headed entity licking its own balls, but I don't think it would stretch that joke out for a full minute without doing anything more clever with it than "teehee we're saying the naughty words." Or treat the existence of handicapped people as innately comical and hang a lengthy subplot on that. There's crass, and then there's just juvenile and gross, and this episode spends a lot of time just doing that. But, the elements that shine through do so pretty strongly, and I suspect that the later seasons were an improvement.