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maxwell-grant · 2 years

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Nice to find another VentureBros fan ! Who are your favorite characters ?

I'm actually gonna rank this as something of a Top 8. Honorable mentions include: Rusty Venture, Dean Venture post Season 4, Shore Leave, The Blue Morpho/Vendata, Hunter Gathers and Professor von Helping.

8: Wide Wale

I think just conceptually the idea of Whale/Shark Kingpin as a major player in a superhero setting is just a very appealing combination to me personally. I'm a sucker for sealife-themed characters, especially if they are shark themed but whales are great too, and Wide Wale's a sealife-themed pastiche of one of my favorite superhero villains with this really great, really distinct voice, and like so many of Venture Bros' best characters, it really doesn't take long before you wind up forgetting what he's meant to be a caricature of and just fully buy the character just as much, if not more, as the thing they're supposed to be making fun of or referencing. I think Wide Wale, even while being a lot more straightforward and simple than so many other characters, is a great example of that. I think even at a really basic level, he's genuinely a cool character and an example of how the show’s approach to it’s characters had matured since the early seasons, and apparently so thought the creators, which is why they didn't kill him off in Season 7.

The episode was born from a single Jaws joke: Wide Wale dying in his pool just like Spielberg's shark. "But when we got around to writing it, we're like, 'Well, we don't want to kill Wide Wale, he's awesome," Hammer said. "But I got it stuck in my head that we had to do a Jaws joke. But instead of doing a Jaws joke, we created a longform love letter to deep-cut Jaws jokes. - Jackson Publick

I like that right from the start he's established as the leading supervillain in NYU, and because this is Venture Bros and there's a lot more supervillains running around than superheroes, to the point it mainly falls to the supervillains to kinda police each other so things don’t get too out of hand, Wide Wale is less the main villain and more this big presence that stuff tends to orbit around, much like The Ventures and The Monarch themselves. I love that he pointedly refuses the seat he’s offered at the highest echelon of villainy, because he’s got business to take care of and because he doesn’t vibe with the idea. I love “This? This isn’t me.” as an explanation for it. I love what it says about him compared to the other villains.

I really like his interactions with other characters like Sheila and his bodyguard Rocco and his daughter, and that he does have a family that ends up humanizing him a lot and even revealing that, keeping with the show's tradition, he is kind of a pathetic fuck-up. All he wanted was to make his brother proud, and despite being really dedicated to his family, he's too blinded and self-centered to notice the ways he ends up smothering them.

Big shot mob boss as a doting yet corny dad to his daughter? Cliche, but cute. Big shot supervillain kingpin who happens to be the younger brother of a one-off gag character, who 100% adores and looks up to his scientist big brother even in their separate ways, to the point that said gag character can show up and pull his ear while he haphazardly tries to hide his gritty mob business from him? It’s pure Venture Bros.

7: Brock Samson

I think it’s kind of a given that, even if Brock isn’t among your favorite VB characters general, he’s definitely most people’s favorite when they start watching the show. Because while it takes for Doc and the boys to really come on their own as characters and The Monarch’s still being ironed out, Brock is a pretty complete character from the get-go. He’s the world’s biggest badass, stuck with the world’s lamest and most self-destructive explorers, a much more dynamic sort than the Ventures who also doesn’t have as much room to grow and change as they do at first. Despite seeming like it, he is not the protagonist, he’s the sidekick holding the whole thing together (a dynamic they would later repurpose for Henchman 21, who grows into a mini-Brock in his own right). By all means, he should be out there saving the world with supermodels hanging onto his biceps, but instead he’s busy slaughtering shmucks in butterfly costumes while babysitting a failed scientist and his idiot sons, and occasionally arguing about the merits of Led Zeppelin with their nanny robot, which goes a long way in helping ground Brock’s over-the-top badassery in just the right amount of indignity so he doesn’t feel out of place in the show and stays more than just a one-note caricature.

Brock carries the show a lot over the first two seasons, which makes his departure and eventual return that much more significant and ends up giving Brock and the show a lot of room to grow, solo and together. The cynical premise behind a lot of what makes Brock funny ends up becoming horrifying as we get more stories from the villain and henchmen point of view and also grows into a series of great dynamics, as Brock The Swedish Murder Machine gives more way to Brock The Murder Dad. A Brock who’s a part of the family, a Brock who Hank looks up to and imitates as an uncle and father and hero, a Brock who’s as great on the lead as he’s in a secondary role. A Brock who’s got friends and partners and enemies and whose interesting life outside of the Ventures actually does feel like a rich inner world for him, a Brock who doesn’t need to carry the show or the Ventures anymore, and ends up growing more as a comfortable presence to the audience, which is a funny word to use for a disemboweling enthusiast who’s single-handedly filled entire graveyards. I know some people miss twitchy-eyed Murder Machine Brock, but I wouldn’t trade Murder Dad Brock for anything, his dynamic with Hank is real special to me.

6: DOCTOR BYROON ORPHEUS *musical sting

The big problem I have with Dr Strange in general is that, despite really loving some of the comics I’ve read of him (particularly Into Shamballa and Triumph and Torment), despite him being conceptually a character I should deeply adore (Vincent Price as the world’s greatest wizard whose niche is combining weird and horrific pulp cosmology with psychedelic superhero visuals), most of the time, Strange as a character bores and annoys me way more often than I’d like him to, especially starting with his 2010s appearences that have modeled him after his teeth-grindingly boring MCU portrayal and made him magic Tony Stark / BBC’s Sherlock. I get that’s like, his deal now, I just find it depressingly basic.

I bring this up because a lot of what I love about Dr Orpheus is that, while he doesn’t have the benefit of starring in his own stories, Orpheus takes everything great and endearing about Dr Strange and cranks it to eleven. His dialogue is completely unmistakable from everyone else’s, even without Stephen Rattazzi’s brilliant voice and that iconic music sting. Dr O gets really, really funny lines despite being ostensibly one of the more serious characters of the show (Do not be too hasty entering that room...I HAD TACO BEEELLLL FOR LUNCH!). Even in episodes where Orpheus only shows up to fix a problem or do a small cameo, he dines on the scenery in a way no other character does, and it’s no small feat in a show full of over-the-top personalities.

I also really like that Orpheus is overall one of the nicest characters of the show. He’s still flawed, he can be pedantic and pathetic and irritable and petty and arrogant, his dedication to his work and know-it-all attitude soured his relationships with his ex-wife and daughter, and he gets dragged for his flaws quite a bit in-universe to the point everyone’s kinda annoyed at him much of the time, but he’s also one of the most unambiguously good characters in-universe, and in a show chock full of some of the worst parents imaginable, it’s definitely nice to have at least one dad who genuinely tries to be the best he can be, even if that involves wiping his daughter’s memories every now and then, and ultimately accepting that his efforts to protect her have only held her back and that she’s really better off doing exactly what he didn’t want for her. I enjoy every scene he’s in and I really enjoy just listening to Orpheus’s dialogue and voice, he’s a very fun character and if nothing else Orpheus is why I wish that Order of the Triad spin-off took off. Even if it sucked, I would gladly watch and listen to Orpheus forever.

5: Dr Girlfriend / Dr Mrs The Monarch / Sheila / Dr Mrs-Whatever-Now

There’s been a lot said about how poorly a lot of jokes made in adult cartoons tend to age, especially those starting in the early 2000s, and likewise a lot of Venture Bros fans who’ve stuck with the show can’t help but admit that the first three seasons have a lot of jokes and moments that have aged poorly (Doc Hammer himself derides the episode “Love Bheits” as homophobic). And on the other hand, Venture Bros has also been praised for it’s willingness to experiment with gender-divergent characters and openly tackle questions about identity and sexuality long before other cartoons picked up the slack, and Dr Girlfriend is one example of that. On any other show, “hot woman with a deep masculine voice” would have been the source of one-off gags and transphobic jokes, jokes that make said woman the target of ridicule. But that’s not what Venture Bros does with Dr Girlfriend:

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch started as a parody of Jackie Kennedy, including her iconic deep, raspy voice that was then elevated (or, in this case, physically lowered) by Doc Hammer for the character. I’ve watched a lot of comedies where trans women or crossdressing cis men are the butt of the joke. It’s kind of my brand to subject myself to such things. So, I can recognize the comedic beats that lead to a punchline or “surprise” reveal of trans characters. In the first three or so seasons of The Venture Bros, it feels like the show is constantly leading up to a similar formula, but that punchline never happens.

The joke of Dr. Mrs. The Monarch is as simple as her having a voice deeper than you’d expect, and you are an asshole for questioning it — just like the cast of jerks in this show’s universe.

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch is my favorite Venture Bros character, one of my favorite women in fiction, and she, no matter what theories people have, is not trans. While the reality of this fictional character is that Dr. Mrs. The Monarch isn’t trans, however, if people think you are trans (or “a man” if you want to subscribe to that small brain energy), then in the court of public opinion…you are. Regardless of the actual circumstances surrounding your identity, you are guilty and it will be used against you.

Dr. Mrs. The Monarch is an example of someone who has risen above and succeeded in spite of that judgement both in The Venture Bros universe and in the evolution of how this show and comedy is written in general. Trans or not, I love that. As this show evolved, the running joke of her gender was phased out entirely and this “masculine” characteristic was just treated as matter of fact. It was just a small part of the most stable, capable, and well rounded character in the entire show.

There is a lot that can be written about gender without sticking to the stringent criteria of trans experiences, because expectations exist in all forms. I came to terms with my insecurities a long time ago and that included my deep voice. Hearing that brassy croon be treated as such a normal thing means more to me than most forms of direct representation ever has - Dr Mrs The Monarch and Being Trans In The Court of Public Opinion, by Harmony M.Colangelo

Even at her earliest appearences, when The Monarch was more of a caricature than ever and the show had yet to really start growing beyond the parody aspect, the consistent joke regarding Dr Girlfriend was that she is this enormously competent genius henchwoman working with pathetic cartoon villains who waste her talents on pointless bickers and capers, and if not that, then frequently ignored and belittled on the basis of her gender. And as the show grew, we got to learn more and more about her relationship with The Monarch and Sheila’s own journey, what is it that drives them to stay together, their separations, their arguments, their roles apart from each other. Dr Girlfriend outgrows her role as The Monarch’s partner and by Season 6, she’s openly acknowledged to be the biggest reason why The Guild’s still running, with all other supervillains in the Guild deferring to her. With the exception of mysteriously supernatural players like Dr Killing and The Master, one could argue that, by the end of the show, Dr Girlfriend is the most powerful character, having finally risen to the position where her skills and talents are not wasted and not without cost, of course, as it’s effectively deprived her of ever getting to meaningfully work with her husband, which was the only real passion she had for this enterprise. Nobody in Venture Bros ever fully gets what they want, after all.

I think there’s an argument to be made that Dr Girlfriend is the most “real” character on the show, in the sense that she lacks the extravagant personalities and gimmicks of the other characters or the life-shattering tragedies that guide much of their conflict, and this in itself makes her an outsider who has to juggle a lot of responsabilities and options to keep things running, who has to play a lot of roles and carry a lot on her back, who sometimes gets bent out of shape and frustrated at the mind-numbing amounts of idiocy she comes across, and who even demonstrates ways in which she herself is not quite above said idiocy. After all, she’s the one ruling said idiocy now.

4: Henchman 21 / Gary

Fucking Gary, man, what an excellent protagonist. There’s plenty of characters that people point to when stating Venture Bros has impressive character development, but one that always stands out is Gary. From one-half of a sidelines comedy duo with Henchman 21, as a geek loser henchman to the geek loser villain, secure in his position as a funny but inconsequential element to this world, Gary gets that safety net brutally ripped away with 21′s explosive death, and instead terraforms himself into a muscular unhinged badass, the Brock Samson of the show’s villain side. And past that, he remains a big time protagonist (even hero) on his own right, concluding in once again becoming the one-half of a comedy duo, but this time one that involves his geek loser boss as the two become partners instead. Gary has been growing and changing with this show from day one, even serving as the show’s recap narrator, his cracked nerd voice never changing even as he becomes more and more impressive. He’s as close to an audience-insert character as it gets, of course he has to be a geek overdosed on pop culture references, but he is more than that.

I love Gary because he’s one of the ONLY characters I’ve ever seen who has a physical and mental transformation whose end result isn’t him acquiring a completely different body type. He didn’t slim up, he didn’t get cut abs, he beefed up and got a weighlifter’s big gut, and the show doesn’t play it as a joke. He’s still pudgy, he’s still got a chubby face, he’s still geek-voiced Gary, and he’s a physical badass almost on par with superhuman demigod Brock Samson. He became this through sheer effort on his end and the help of his friends. He does backflips and spinkicks and fistfights bodybuilders and spits blood dramatically while looking cool and impressive and doing things that society thinks fat people shouldn’t be allowed to do without it being played for irony. I just, you pretty much never see superheroes or superhero-adjacent characters with Gary’s body type without some kind of caveat attached (villain, joke character, fat-based superpower, etc), seeing Gary in action, played like he was, genuinely did mean a lot to me.

He's observant and he's unlucky and he gets made fun of, but he's not cynical, and the show doesn't treat him cynically either, and that's important.

3: Red Death

I don’t think there’s any Venture Bros fan that doesn’t have Red Death on their top favorite characters list, holy shit did that dude arrived to steal the show. Top-notch design, killer concept, perfect voicework by Clancy Brown, most of the best scenes across Seasons 6 and 7 involve this guy in some form. Probably the clearest example you can point to in order to demonstrate how much Venture Bros’s outgrown the parody element of it’s earliest seasons.

I like, everything about this guy. I love how they continuously make efforts to undercut his “retired old champ and nice family man here to help the new kids get their footing” thing by constantly reminding us that he is a bloodthirsty murderer who actively enjoys killing and looks forward to any chances for it, but he’s so damn likeable and charming and cool that we all still default to him first and foremost as the dad in the park who talks Monarch down by showing genuine appreciation for him. I love that this is also followed up on his remarks towards Vendata, how he’s the only character on-screen who ever extended any kind of respect towards him, and how dark this gets later when he brutally murders Blind Rage for being a disrespectful punk. He’s brutally efficient at everything, including compartmentalizing his life and personality to an extent that it doesn’t ring as hypocritical to us when he sits down to give helpful advice to Monarch, and said advice includes him mentioning how he was able to turn his life for the better after slaughtering his arch-nemesis’s entire family with his bare hands. He’s a horrible, horrible villain, and a wonderful dad and mentor and, honestly? Talk about a character who plays perfectly, perfectly into his voice actor’s strengths. Clancy Brown as Red Death is nothing short of magic.

He’s interesting as a Venture Bros character because, as far as we know, he’s completely bereft of the usual petty shortcomings or tragic flaws or pathetic obsessions that define most of them. He is, for all intents and purposes, a genuinely good husband and father devoted to his family, an utmost professional dedicated to the art of villainy and those he respects, and a brutal serial killer with virtually zero hesitations or doubts whatsoever about what he does and likes doing, with a hideous past we know only the barest glimpses of. He coins the term Gentleman Villain because he too, is as perfect an embodiment of those terms as it gets in this world, and he’s fascinating because of it. He works brilliantly at surface-level and whatever little we know about his connection to the historical underbelly of this world is all the more fascinating. He is a wonderful take on a modern version of a Gentleman Villain and everything noble and horrible that this implies. I resent not getting another season or several with this guy.

2: Hank Venture

Probably the character I’ve always found most relatable in the show even before I discovered that, oh yeah, I do have ADHD too, it was a given I was gonna relate to the hyperactive Venture kid known for jumping off the roof in a Batman costume (I mean, my window had bars, and I still swear that I wasn‘t actually gonna jump and my family totally misread what was really just me trying to get on the gargoyle brooding action). As much as I like Gary, Hank is the one that comes to mind when I think of impressive character development in Venture Bros. Hank is interesting because in many ways he just doesn’t change, nowhere near as much as Dean does, Dean’s the one who's matured and is trying to leave all this nonsense behind while Hank’s still actively pursuing the dream of being a boy adventurer. Hank still talks in weird stilted speech, he’s deeply ignorant of a lot of basic things, he still almost gets himself killed pursuing flights of fancy. To say that he has a hard time telling fantasy from reality implies that this is something Hank struggles with, when it’s more accurate to say he just doesn’t care that much about said distinction, and the consequences of his abysmal upbringing, reckless antics, and undiagnosed ADHD as of Season 7, do catch up to him.

But the thing is, all of this is also part of what makes Hank the only character in the show who occasionally gets to thrive. As the seasons passed, he came to display a lot of genuinely inspired moments of competence and skill, not to mention bravery. Hank perseveres so strongly in his stupidity and headstrongness that he’s the only one who’s able to meet the dumb, violent and deluded world of Venture Bros on it’s own terms and come out on top. He’s unique in that he doesn’t outsmart the madness, he out-dumbs the madness. His victories and adventures tend to be more enjoyable to watch than Dean’s or Doc’s or the others as a result (I suspect the creators agree, given Hank is the kind of character that lets them get away with whatever dumb ideas they feel like experimenting with). He’s got a real Lupin III charm to him mixed with a carefree hyperimagination that calls to mind much of what I enjoy about Calvin and Hobbes. He’s a perfect protagonist.

In a world so fraught with failures and miseries and bitterness, and coming off a background just as deeply unfortunate as everyone else’s, Hank perseveres, growing into a genuinely cool kid. He’s made for this life in a way that Doc and Dean never were, and in the absence of a father who cared for him, Hank found role models in Brock and Batman and others, and emulated those until he could be himself the kind of person he’d always wanted to be, an insane hero for an insane world to such an extent that they kind of end up canceling each other out.

I just, I just hope he’s okay, please, please give us the movie already goddamnit

1: THE MONARCH

The perfect Never-Was to Rusty Venture’s Has-Been, pretty much the main reason I stuck with the show for so long even before it got really good, I think The Monarch is just an idea I always, always wanted to see explored in fiction, which is that deeper exploration of a Dick Dastardly-esque type of villain, what does their life look like and so forth. You might be able to tell, given also that my most popular post in this site is about them (and the protagonist of my current project is meant to be that kind of character), that this is an archetype very close to my heart. In truth, Monarch had me won pretty instantly when I first got into Venture Bros as a kid (...in hindsight a pretty terrible era to get into Venture Bros), given all the similarities between him and Waluigi (at the time my favorite character in general). Here’s a character functionally identical to Waluigi, except allowed to actually play a big role in his franchise and have stories told about him and his funny antics and his petty, dastardly dreams and his ridiculous grudge against a nobody hero who couldn’t care less about him. It was like catnip to me at the time.

Monarch carried the show pretty hard in the early seasons along with Brock, as a perfect foil to the hapless and pathetic ventures: An even more hapless and pathetic villain, a dumb goober plucked straight out of a shoddily-made 60s superhero cartoon, all sneers and cackles and nasally-voiced threats of conquest. The kind of parody villain that’s dated even by their time, let alone the modern times the story takes place, the kind of guy that only really gets brought up to get his ass kicked and pushed aside by the real villains (the inclusion of Baron Underbheit in the S1 intro even helps cement the idea that Monarch’s not supposed to be the real villain). A failure in a show about failures, right?

But, see, the thing about Venture Bros is that it isn’t really a show about failure, or at least, just about failure. Even the creators pushed back against this notion back in 2013

Publick: I think you and I are both sick of every interview mentioning the “It’s a show about failure” from five years ago. I don’t think we made a conscious effort to fight that or anything, but every year, we push what we do as writers a little more. An area we hadn’t gone into very much was positivity. I mean, all our victories are still satiric, but there are definitely places where we said, “I want to see these guys do something. I don’t want to just have everything fall on its face all the time.

I don’t think Venture Bros is about failure, as much as it is about “what comes next”, following either failure or victory. It’s a show that’s big on exploring consequences and fallout, part of why every season took so long to air, a show that doesn’t just have the characters fail and that’s that, or has the characters exist in a fixed state as winners or losers, but instead as people who have to carry on living with the accumulating shit that gets thrown at them. What does it take, for these people to carry on, or even succeed. And this is where I think The Monarch’s continued role as protagonist comes into play, because everything about him is in service of that next step, from day one he’s been the character who’s pushed this show forward into the future, opposite the Ventures and Brock who are either trapped in the past or complacent in the present. He’s introduced to us in a mold we all understand from childhood: he’s a dastardly supervillain with a dumb gimmick and enough resources to pester the heroes on a weekly basis, but never enough competence to actually win over them. Okay, and then what? Well, that’s where the ensuing 7 seasons come in.

What happens when he gets what he wants? Does he even know what do with it? What is the source of his immortal hatred? Is there even one? If there isn’t, what else do we know that motivates him? What’s his relation with his henchmen? His partner in crime? His wife? His wife turned partner in crime? What do his enemies look like? What does the rest of the supervillain community think of him? Does he have beef with other heroes? Does he even want to fight other heroes? Just how competent is he outside of that saturday morning cartoon mold where he’s perpetually doomed to fail? If he is, what’s stopping him? How low is he willing to go morally? What disgusts him? What happens when he has to play the hero? And from The Monarch all these rich worldbuilding questions expanded that soon blossomed into many if not most of the best parts of Venture Bros’s worldbuilding.

The show’s not preocuppied with explaining “why” there is a Monarch in practical or psychological real-world terms, so much as it’s interested in the “how” does a character like Monarch function, what does it take for The Monarch to be, and it’s through taking this archetype seriously and exploring him and the world around him that the character grows into a complex and interesting protagonist while remaining, fundamentally, the same saturday-morning-cartoon villain with an inexplicable grudge that he always was. The Monarch was gonna be my favorite from the start anyway but it was his continued presence that really impressed me for the long haul. Not even the only character to experience this, but my favorite to do so.

#replies tag #venture bros #adult swim #hank venture #brock samson #the monarch #dr girlfriend #red death #henchman 21 #sitting here chewing my fingers off waiting for that movie #it's nothing but it's something at least

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