Review: “The Venture Bros. & The Curse of the Haunted Problem”

For over a decade now, The Venture Bros. has been one of the best shows no one is watching. It started as a gonzo parody of 1960s serial Johnny Quest, exploring what would happen if the titular wide-eyed boy adventurer grew up and developed crippling adult neurosis. That may not have ben a question anyone needed answering, but Venture Bros. was never interested in playing to the masses. Over the course of six-and-a-half seasons (plus four specials), it evolved into a dense knot of pop culture references, sympathetic characters and complex world-building, with episodes routinely making all kinds of callbacks to earlier points in the timeline and expecting the audience to keep up. The barrier to entry can be high, but this is a weird, wonderful show that deserves to be at least as celebrated as fellow Adult Swim series Rick and Morty. The seventh season premiere — “The Venture Bros. & The Curse of the Haunted Problem” — finds it in peak form.

The Venture Bros. has had a turbulent history on Adult Swim. Fans have generally had to wait at least a year between seasons, and sometimes longer. The sixth season, which found the embittered Dr. Rusty Venture (James Urbaniak) and his family move into opulent new digs in Manhattan, ended in the middle of an ongoing story, with butterfly-themed supervillain the Monarch (creator Jackson Publick) picking off Rusty’s guild-appointed arch-nemeses one by one, so that he could hate Rusty full-time. Back in 2016, fans were left without a conclusion to this story, but it looks like “The Curse of the Haunted Problem” is going to give them one.

But not quite yet. The Venture Bros. has become more serialized as it’s gone on, and there are a least a couple more episodes in this arc before it wraps up. Sometimes, when shows become more serialized, they do themselves harm; plots fall apart and characters become unrecognizable. But Venture Bros. wears it perfectly, in large part because writers Public and Doc Hammer are meticulous with their mythology. That’s almost a joke in itself, because the mythology is off-the-wall bonkers ridiculous, but in this premiere, the “I”s are all dotted and the “T”s crossed. There’s Sergeant Hatred (Public), the supervillain-turned-bodyguard-turned-tour-guide, a blue “V” — for Venture — now tattooed across his face where there used to be an “H,” for hatred. There’s Dr. Orpheus (Steven Rattazzi), the bloviating necromancer summoned to the Venture building to exercise a new and very disruptive haunting, and it just goes on like that.

At this point, the cast of The Venture Bros. has inflated beyond those of some heavy-hitting dramas, and “Problem” finds a way to draw most of them effortlessly into the story, with more surely to come — we didn’t even get to what Doctor Girlfriend (Hammer) and the other members of the Guild of Calamitous Intent are up to.

So The Venture Bros. has a textual richness to it that a lot of other shows, animated or otherwise, lack. But that alone doesn’t make it worth watching. I also respect Publick and Hammer’s bottomless well of pop culture references, despite or maybe because I don’t get all of them. In this episode, I spotted references to The Da Vinci Code, 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade, The Walking Dead, to The Godfather Part II, Hackers, the Microsoft Office Assistant and I’m guessing several horror movies I’ve never seen. Also, when a malevolent force possesses the Venture building, it announces itself with a few bars from The Crusaders’ 1979 song “Street Life.” The references are delightfully esoteric; just sitting back and seeing which ones you catch is fun.

As far-flung are they are, the pop culture references aren’t there just to be there; they fit into the wider story about a group of wayward people stuck playing games they should have long grown out of. “Street Life” is a perfect example. Although the show’s cast has ballooned to include people of all generations, at its heart it’s still about Rusty Venture, a wounded adult who never got over his traumatic childhood, which he spent criss-crossing the globe in the ’60s and ’70s with his father Jonas, who put him in all manner of perilous situations without much care for his well-being, physical and otherwise. The show’s aesthetic has always been inspired by the ’70s, when the space-age dreams of the ’60s were dying out and gathering dust, like Rusty is now. A jazz fusion hit from the Crusaders fits right in.

“Problem” brings it back it Rusty at episode’s end, when we find out that the haunting is caused by Jonas, who’s brain was reanimated years ago without Rusty’s knowledge and has now been hooked up to the Venture building through a “synthetic nervous system.” Now that is solid sci-fi nonsense with a dramatic hook. I’m looking forward to seeing Hammer and Publick spin gold from it, and if they can get a full-throated show of support from Adult Swim, that would be good too.

Nothing but Bullet Points:

• I love all the persistent little details in this show, like how Dean Venture always flails his arms above his head whenever he’s running away scared, which is often.
• Hank Venture’s romance with Sirena, the daughter of crime boss and supervillain Wide Whale, is sweet and engaging. Sirena, Wide Whale and family bodyguard Rocco are yet more solid additions to the show’s ever-expanding bench of reliably entertaining characters.
• “You just kept mansplaining it away!” “I was science-splaining.”
• “Real life hacking is just… typing.”
• “Rodney, fetch us an Uber!”
• “Lost abord the Venstar 1 Lunar Probe in 1966, Scamp 1 was the first dog to die on the moon.”
• The specifics of the P.R.O.B.L.E.M. machine are fun, if geeky in the extreme. So the machine in the Venture building is the same one on board the Gargantua-1; Rusty went into space to fix the place in the third episode of the series, after the “Problem Light” turned on. Then, in season 2’s “Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner,” Gargantua-1 crashed to Earth, and Jonas Venture Jr. excavated the wreckage and brought the P.R.O.B.L.E.M. box back to Manhattan. This whole time, Jonas Sr. has been inside.
• The second episode of the season — “The Rorqual Affair” is out there to watch if you look hard enough, not that we would ever do that.

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