The Venture Bros. is one of the best shows to come out of Cartoon Network’s iconic late-night Adult Swim lineup. Initially a spoofy send-up of low-budget Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera fare, the show soon grew into a sprawling examination of failure and growth, one of the most brilliant and hilarious shows of its era.

In keeping with this growth, the show quickly moved beyond the boy adventurer micro-genre and began to draw on sources across the spectrum of sci-fi and fantasy. Most interesting among these sources is the popular superhero genre, where The Venture Bros. went beyond parody to become one of the best superhero shows of all time.

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

The Venture Bros. Is a Superhero Show

     Warner Bros.

One of the best aspects of the show early on was how it took existing properties — Johnny Quest, for example — and gave them a whole new spin, taking their original characteristics and giving them a new perspective. The Venture Bros’ take on “Action Johnny,” a legally distinct version of the character Jonny Quest, is a great example. A former drug addict, Action Johnny is forced to reckon with the traumatic “adventures” he endured as a child, searching for a healthy way to engage with his former arch-nemesis, Dr. Z.

Soon, the show would draw largely from superhero properties, with characters like Dr. Orpheus, Phantom Limb, the Blue Morpho, Captain Sunshine, and many, many others carrying the show from super-science to superheroes. These characters didn’t just fill out of the cast, though. They molded the show’s storylines and themes.

Heroes and Villains

The most obvious example of this, and the feature that puts The Venture Bros. in the upper echelons of superhero media, is the ongoing, ever-changing relationship between the show’s protagonist, Dr. Thaddeus Venture, and his archenemy the Monarch, who was based on the obscure Batman villain Killer Moth. Like innumerable other hero-villain pairings, the two characters function as warped reflections of one another.

Haunted and inextricably linked by their personal and familial histories, Dr. Venture and the Monarch circle one another for years. As the series went on, audiences got a glimpse into the highly bureaucratic systems set in place to match heroes and villains, but in spite of this, the rivalry between the Monarch and Dr Venture always goes beyond this. It’s a deeply personal relationship, both antagonistic and co-dependent, with intergenerational roots. When, late in the series, the show reveals the pair to be brothers, it adds an almost mythic dimension to their mediocre, failure-filled conflict.

It’s long been noted that the best hero-villain pairings share this kind of mirroring relationship, from Batman and the Joker to Swamp Thing and the Floronic Man, with innumerable examples in between. The sheer amount of backstory put into the Dr Venture-Monarch feud gives it a level of nuance and strange psychological accuracy that few other superhero shows have approached.

Reinventing the Heroes of the Past

Just as their past failures and adventures shape their identities, the show uses a unique approach to characterization to reinforce the same point. Just as comic book writers take up a character with years or even decades of past exploits and attempt to make it their own, for The Venture Bros., a shared cultural awareness of famous characters, both real and fictional provides a shorthand that the creators use to infuse their fictional world with tremendous depth and complexity.

The best example of this might be the show’s use of David Bowie. Early in the show’s run, the character of the Sovereign was introduced. A high-ranking member of the Guild of Calamitous Intent, the Sovereign was the latest in a long line of shape-shifting villains. Rather than leave it at that, though, Venture Bros. reveals that the Sovereign is, in fact, David Bowie.

Later episodes would cast doubt on whether the Sovereign were the real David Bowie, but the work had already been done. The Sovereign isn’t just a standard-issue shape-shifting bad guy, he’s a shape-shifter in the way Bowie was, constantly reinventing himself throughout his career. The use of Bowie’s well-known persona provides the character with instant familiarity, and the linkage of his creative restlessness with actual supernatural powers provides a new perspective on a common superhero trope.

The Ventrue Bros. Elevates Superheroes in Hindsight

By “casting” iconic figures, from Henry Kissinger to Allan Quatermain, into roles that call for some characteristic that they share, figures that could be forgettable, one-off characters are instead imbued with everything else associated with their celebrity corollary.

Quartermain is a good example of this. The protagonist of H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, Quartermain was a famous fictional character in Victorian times. The character was later taken up by Alan Moore for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and played by Sean Connery in the 2003 film adaptation. When he appears in Venture Bros., as Colonel Horace Gentleman, the history of Quartermain in novels and comics, and the reputation of Connery, especially in his later, more cantankerous years, all serves to give a relatively minor character an immediate, rich, and deeply unique texture.

This freedom to use and reinvent characters with long, well-known histories connects The Venture Bros. to superhero media at a structural level, and the way the show uses this freedom to infuse its characters and their relationships with strange, unexpected details made it a show for the ages, and one that current superhero creators would do well to learn from.