Featured TV on DVD Review: The Venture Bros.: Season Seven
June 3, 2019
The Venture Bros.: Season Seven - Buy from Amazon: DVD or Blu-ray
The Venture Bros. reminds me of Archer, a show I recently reviewed. I watched both shows from the beginning, but both shows fell off my list of shows I watch every week. It wasn’t due to the quality of the show, I simply stopped subscribing to the channel it aired on. So this is the first time that I’ve gotten the chance to see the show in many years. Is it as good as I remember it? Or has it aged poorly over the past few seasons?
In previous reviews, I simply looked at each episode in the order they were on the DVD / Blu-ray. That’s not possible here, as the stories are a lot more interconnected. In fact, the first three episodes tell the same story, at times from different perspectives, and not in an entirely chronological order. You can’t talk about the first episode without spoiling the others. The entire season isn’t that interconnected, but there are more continuing storylines than I remember there being during the first several seasons I watched. Because of this, I’ll give a summary of how the show started and where the main characters are at the beginning of the season.
The titular Venture Bros. of the show are Hank and Dean. They start out as young teens, but this season, they are entering college. Well, Dean is entering college. Hank’s decided he’s not interested in further education and would rather work as a pizza delivery boy and hang out with his girlfriend, Sirena, who happens to be the daughter of a mob boss. Their father, Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, was the son of a world famous scientist, Jonas Venture, and the inspiration for a cartoon called Rusty Venture. (Think Johnny Quest.) He is also a scientist, but he could never live up to his father and is now pressuring Dean into becoming a scientist as well. (In fact, he signed Dean up to number of science classes without Dean’s knowledge.) The other main member of the “good guys” cast of characters is Brock Samson, a member of the O.S.I., the secret agency in charge of combating The Guild of Calamitous Intent.
Speaking of The Guild of Calamitous Intent, it is the source of most of the world’s arch villains, including the main one we follow. The Monarch, was the long-time arch enemy of The Ventures, but he’s fallen on hard times and was kicked out of the The Guild of Calamitous Intent. At the same time, his girlfriend, Dr. Girlfriend (voiced by co-writer Doc Hammer) has risen to become one of the highest-ranking members of The Guild of Calamitous Intent. He’s actually supportive of her success, for the most part, but still wants to be Ventures archnemesis again, and get a little revenge on The Guild of Calamitous Intent in the process. So he has become a vigilante along with the only person, besides Dr. Girlfriend, to stick with him, Henchman 21 (also voiced by co-writer Doc Hammer). They are using the name and gear of an old costumed super hero, Blue Morpho, to kill off whatever super villain gets to be the Ventures nemesis in the hopes to eventually get that honor again. Partway through this season, he at least gets reinstated by The Guild of Calamitous Intent, but it will take a while before he returns to his former glory.
The Venture Bros. is actually better than I remember. I was worried season seven wouldn’t live up to my memories of the show, but that wasn’t a problem. Part of the show’s strength is also what makes it frustrating for fans. This is only the seventh season in the show’s 15-year run. It takes a long time to write and make the show, but in the end, it is worth the wait.
It’s rare for a cartoon to be able to mix the humor, the immature humor, and the heart-wrenching emotional parts of the series. As the two writers, Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, it’s a show about failure, not just failing at you day-to-day goals, but how the failings of one generation are passed onto the next. We are first given an impression that Jonas Venture was the perfect man: strong, smart, sexy. However, the more we learn about the man, the worse he looks. We learn a lot about him this season. He was such a bad father that the failings of Dr. Rusty Venture actually looks like success by comparison. He’s a terrible father, but he’s much better than his father was and you can see he’s trying his best and he does care about the people around him. It’s just he’s starting from such a disadvantage, when it comes to being able to outwardly show positive emotions to his son or friends. We see Hank and Dean have some real character growth, which was mostly absent the first few seasons. Even The Monarch shows some personal growth to the point where you are cheering for him to get a few wins under his belt.
Every single episode has an audio commentary track. This would actually be enough to be worth picking up on its own, but it is not the only extras on the DVD / Blu-ray. Disc one also has six-minutes of deleted scenes and the full Ghost in the Pro-BLEM video that we see snippets of throughout the first episode. Finally, there’s Sirena Goes Off..., which has a shot at what Sirena was supposed to say and then a much longer clip of Cristin Milioti just going off.
I really hope we get a season eight of
The Venture Bros., but if we do, we will likely have to wait a couple of years. Season Seven is fantastic and the DVD or Blu-ray has more than enough extras to be worth picking up.
Video on Demand
The Show
Review
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Filed under: Video Review, James Urbaniak, Patrick Warburton, Cristin Milioti, Michael Sinterniklaas, Christopher McCulloch