Everyone is talking about the movie that came out on July 21 and its tender, meta approach to characters who were originally created as a crass action figure tie-in. It has something to say about finding your purpose in life, and how we fill the roles others create for us. That movie is, of course, The Venture Bros: Radiant Is The Blood of the Baboon Heart.
Baboon Heart is a feature-length movie, pitched as the ending of a series that started airing on Adult Swim in 2003. Twenty years later, The Venture Bros is the summer movie with the deftest approach to pop culture brain rot, power, and masculinity.
It’s become almost comically insipid and bland to say a film or TV series is “about trauma.” Partly, that’s because the TV and movies in question often try to “subvert” a genre like space opera, superheroes, or horror, without actually caring about or respecting the genre. Treating capes and monsters as a Trojan Horse for capital-S Serious themes is a recipe for a mediocre story that condescends to its audience. But years before love persevered into grief, The Venture Bros followed characters dealing with their shit in between incompetently piloting mechs and riding demonic robot horses. The emotionally serious character moments thrive alongside some of the dumbest jokes imaginable, rather than overshadowing them. The Venture Bros live at the intersection of pastiche and pathos, which is why the show’s approach to “trauma” will outlive that of its better-funded, more mainstream contemporaries and descendants.
Here are the basics: The Venture Bros began as a riff on Jonny Quest, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon about an 11-year-old boy who is basically Indiana Jones-meets-James Bond. Jonny travels around the world with his genius father, his bodyguard who is also a government agent, and his adoptive brother, an orphaned Indian boy (yes, really). The Venture Bros started by asking, “What would it be like to grow up in a world of super-science and supervillains?”
It turns out: Not good! Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, the son of a famed super-scientist, is dealing with feelings of inadequacy and the psychological scars of a childhood marked by casual violence. Rusty’s sons Hanks and Dean—the titular Venture brothers—start out as carefree idiots who love the idea of solving mysteries and fighting bad guys, until they start experiencing adolescent angst in earnest. And while the Ventures bristle at a life of adventuring, their enemies love it: The Monarch, Doc’s self-appointed archenemy, treats his decades-long vendetta against Rusty as a calling. It’s like being a priest or an artist, but for building elaborate torture contraptions.
Despite 20 years of mythology, the character dynamics in Radiant is the Blood are strikingly simple. Hank has run away from home after learning that Dean slept with his girlfriend, and is experiencing an identity crisis. Dean struggles with guilt over this betrayal, and desperately wants to find his brother. Meanwhile, the Monarch and Rusty try to ignore the revelation that they’re related, all while tangling with a mysterious, Uber-like organization called ARCH that threatens to undermine the carefully-maintained bureaucratic status quo of heroes and villains.
It’s not an accident that these are two pairs of men struggling to understand their identities. The entirety of The Venture Bros was written by co-creators Chris McCullough and Doc Hammer—where even the most singular prestige TV show has a full writers room, Venture Bros has always just been just these two guys and their own idiosyncrasies. And like Ventures themselves, The Venture Bros mixed professional and familial wires. Hammer described the creative process as “Somewhere between one-upmanship and ‘I have the kids this weekend.’”
The Venture Bros is a show where everyone has daddy issues and mommy issues—Hank and Dean never knew their mother growing up, which continues to drive them even in the movie. The way those issues manifest across generations constitute much of the show’s thematic spine, whether it’s Hank and Dean trying to figure themselves out as adults or the decidedly middle-aged Monarch grappling with new information about his own father. As McCulloch put it, “Neither one of us has kids, and I guess that leaves us open to still have thoughts about how we were raised. But we are getting older, and so we go ‘Oh, I get it now. Nobody knows what they’re doing, everybody was faking it. Everybody’s a little bit awful and a little bit awesome at the same time.’”
For example: In one episode, Doc attends a support group for adult boy adventurers and gets caught up in a murder mystery. And amid the jokes about The Hardy Boys and Jonny Quest’s drug problem, Doc realizes something: He’s a failure, but he’s a failure with responsibilities, doing (more or less) the best he can to support his family. He storms out, because he’s not a child in suspended animation—he might be an incompetent adult, but he’s still an adult. Doc’s behavior frequently remains venal and pathetic, but the show has never backed off of this as a sort of capstone statement about him. The Venture Bros may introduce new problems for the characters, but it always takes their moments of growth seriously.
Throw a dart at a Comic-Con schedule and you’ll find something trying to emulate The Venture Bros’ equally heartfelt and chaotic approach to pop culture ephemera. Years before Benedict Cumberbatch donned the Dr. Strange facial hair, the Ventures’ neighbor Dr. Orpheus served as a sincere parody of the operatics of Dr. Strange. MAX’s Harley Quinn is heavily indebted to the show, from its legions of C-tier DC oddballs given serious emotional weight to its protagonist rebuilding their life in response to an abusive relationship (this one romantic rather than paternal) to the way it treats the Legion of Doom as just another office. Even the mash-up of sentimentality and humor in Everything Everywhere All At Once feels like a nephew of The Venture Bros.
And like much of the best humor in Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Venture Bros is committed to being incredibly stupid. Often, background characters get introduced as gags before growing into fleshed-out people. The Monarch’s sidekick Gary started as a nameless henchman doing Kevin Smith-style riffs on the show’s use of tropes, only to go through a period of extended grieving and self-discovery. But for every Gary, there’s someone like fan-favorite Brick Frog, a guy who dresses up like a frog and throws a brick at people.
That’s the product of the Venture Bros creative process, mashing up bizarre comic obsessions with big questions all at the same time. But Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart differs from normal Venture Bros in one important way—rather than incorporating everything the creators were interested in, it had to tie a bow on the series. As Hammer put it, “We were more trying to answer the questions that we as creators and you as fans would have to have answered without going ‘Fuck you! Sorry you had to sit through The Venture Bros.’” It’s true that there are still some loose threads that could get picked up in the future—there’s no way an 84-minute movie could possibly tie a perfect bow on 20 years of storytelling. But for a show that was often about regret, the movie leaves longtime Venture Bros fans remarkably satisfied.