Product Description

Once a child prodigy, Dr. Venture now fails as both a scientist and father. Luckily, his twins, Hank and Dean are too stupid to care. And they've got their vicious, macho bodyguard, Brock, looking out for them. Together they'll get in all sorts of situations involving wild alligators, street ruffians, and booby traps. Brock really likes the booby traps.

DVD Features:
Audio Commentary:On 3 episodes: "EENEY, MEENEY, MINEY...MAGIC!", "TAG SALE--YOU'RE IT!" and "GHOSTS OF THE SARGASSO".
Audio Commentary:On "RETURN TO SPIDER-SKULL ISLAND" and bonus pilot episode, "THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF TURTLE BAY".
Deleted Scenes
Documentary:Behind the scenes of the Venture Bros. live-action movie (a Mockumentary).
TV Special:Bonus Episode - "A VERY VENTURE CHRISTMAS" and the pilot episode "THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF TURLE BAY".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2316 in DVD
• Brand: Turner
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Animated, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: .40 pounds
• Running time: 291 minutes

Amazon.com
If Jonny, Haji, Race Bannon, and the rest of the Jonny Quest gang were idiots, their animated adventures might play out like The Venture Bros., a consistently funny spoof on '60s adventure cartoons from the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming. The premise should be immediately familiar and nostalgic for any Saturday morning TV aficionado who grew up in the '60s and '70s: Dr. Venture (James Urbaniak from Henry Fool) is an inventor, while sons Hank and Dean's insatiably curiosity lands them in hot water with supervillains, robots, magicians, and the like. Brock Sampson (voiced by the very funny Patrick Warburton of The Tick) is the good doctor's right-hand man, who rescues the boys with good old-fashioned manpower. The twist in The Venture Bros. is that every single character, down to the supervillains' henchmen, are complete and utter dolts, and their adventures are inspired more by foolishness, personal obsessions (for Brock, it's sex and violence, and for Dr. V, it's diet pills and a daddy fixation), or just plain cosmic weirdness than any sense of post-Kennedy-era adventure and derring-do. The result is subversive and occasionally shocking insanity (Dr. V loses his kidneys in the series opener "Dia de Los Dangerous"; Dean suffers an unmentionable personal injury in "Are You There, God? It's Me, Dean"; the boys believe that Dr. Venture's stomach tumor is actually a pregnancy in "Return to Spider Island"), but with enough flashes of surreal brilliance to make this a must-have for modern animation fans. The Season One two-disc set contains all 13 episodes, as well as two bonus episodes--the show's original pilot, "The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay" (for Hank and Dean, the secret is something decidedly salacious), and "A Very Venture Christmas," as well as a handful of deleted scenes. Commentary by the show's creators and cast can be heard on five episodes, including "Turtle Bay," and the extras are rounded out by "Behind the Scenes of the Live-Action Movie," a 20-minute mockumentary that features much of the voice-over talent dressed in some ridiculous costumes. --Paul Gaita

Customer Reviews

It does NOT get better than this.
This warped take on the old Jonny Quest adventures features some of the best comic book/sci fi/action adventure hilarity you can imagine. I've been waiting a year for this DVD set to finally come out and it's finally arriving. Sit back, keep the kids away and enjoy. For Adult swim fun, you seriously can't beat the Venture Bros. The voice acting, animation, music, stories, you name it, all 5 stars.

Cockpits! Booby Traps! Hilarity!
The first thing I'm going to say is this: although this is a cartoon, it is most definitely not for kids! The Venture Bros. deals with a lot of adult situations, and it can get very vulgar and graphic at times. Having said that, this may be one of the best new cartoons I've seen in a long time.
I was never really a big fan of Adult Swim; until I got to college, the only show on the block I had seen was Futurama, which debuted on FOX. While I still don't like overall, it does have its gems, such as Cowboy Bebop (best anime ever!), Aqua Teen Hunger Force (when it was in its prime), and The Venture Bros. The Venture Bros. is a show that most heavily parodies Johnny Quest, though it also draws from Star Wars, DC and Marvel Comics, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and even Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
The plot is as follows; Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture is the son of Dr. Jonas Venture, one of history's greatest inventors and adventurers. Jonas built up a successful science industry and led a team of heroes known as Team Venture. Unfortunately, Rusty was never able to live up to his father's image. He never completed college (thus the fact that he calls himself a doctor is called into question a couple times), and he is pretty incompetant at most everything he does. Most of his inventions don't even work, and when they do, they always malfunction. He is also a pill-popper who suffers from dreams involving his dead father and a weird flashback to his mother's womb. However, he is a genius compared to his two sons. Hank and Dean Venture redefine naive. Even though they see themselves as cool and brave, they are anything but. They get squeamish around violence and are easily scared, yet they are always clamoring to go on new adventures, in which something always inevitably goes wrong. Fortunately, the three Venture men are protected by CIA agent Brock Sampson (voiced wonderfully by Patrick Warburton, who played David Puddy in Seinfeld and was The Tick in the live action series). Brock is basically an unstoppable man-beast who defies the laws of physics and biology to keep Dr. Venture and his sons safe. Other Venture allies include Dr. Byron Orpheus, a sorceror who tends to speak in an overly dramatic voice (even when warning others not to use a bathroom due to his choice to have Taco Bell for lunch) and his daughter Triana, who is kind of a goth/punk and is embarassed by her dad very often. Dean has a crush on her, but she finds the Ventures pretty silly. Dr. White and Master Billy Quizboy are two other allies who help out Dr. Venture from time to time. Dr. White is an albino while Billy is a vertically challenged genius with an oversized head.
On the villains side, Dr. Venture's archnemesis is The Monarch, a man who was raised by monarch butterflies after his parents died in an accident. He too is incompetant (seems to be a running theme in this show); he doesn't really have any "powers" per se, besides his weak weapons he built into his suit, and his henchmen are morons. The best twist though is that while The Monarch considers himself to be Dr. Venture's greatest nemesis, he has no reason to (Dr. Venture barely realizes that he exists). In this sense, I like to attribute The Monarch to The Joker; in a sense one can't exist without the other, or at least, that's how things would be if Venture actually paid attention to what was going on around him. The Monarch is dating Dr. Girlfriend, a woman who dresses like Jackie O. and probably has the deepest voice on the show. The other main villains include Baron Werner Underbeit, a Dr. Doom-esque villan who blames Venture for a lab explosion that blew off his jaw, as well as Phantom Limb, a man whose arms and legs are invisible.
Most of the episodes involve the family, Brock, and H.E.L.P.eR (the Venture's robot) going on some sort of misadventure, where Brock basically has to bail everyone out by the end. That's not to say that the episodes are formulaic; each one is very unique and very hilarious. For example, in one of them, Dr. Venture holds a yard sale in order to raise money, only to have a bunch of villains show up and create havoc. In another, the family goes to a theme park run by a Walt Disney lookalike who tries to get Venture to clone him. And in one of my favorite episodes, The Monarch is put on trial, and the opening scene is priceless (MECHA SHIVA!).
A lot of the show's humor is derived from the sheer bizarrness of the situation; most of the adventures are beyond impractical, and knowing how limited the abilities of the Venture family are, one has to wonder why they don't just give up. There is a good amount of parody, but the show doesn't overdo it (the way too many shows and movies are doing nowadays). And there are some very dirty jokes thrown in for good measure. As I said, this is not for kids. It is somewhere between a PG-13 and an R in terms of rating (they can only go so far because its TV, but there are times when, if it hasn't crossed the line, it is walking it). I think that at times, its even dirtier than Family Guy (and much funnier).
The Venture Bros. is not for everyone; the humor is for a very select group, and there are some scenes that are extremely disturbing and disgusting. However, it is a hilarious show that deserves a look. You're only hurting yourself by not checking it out.

Can't understand why I'm the only one...
I can't figure out why I seem to be one of the few people who thinks the Venture Bros. is one of the funniest cartoons to appear on Cartoon Network.

It is a spoof on the "Superscientist and His Family of Adventuresome Heroes" genre. Instead of being the pre-eminent superscientist, however, Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture has been, in the words of one character, "riding his father's corpses' coattails for 30 years."

Basically, he's not a very successful superscientist. In fact, he's more adept at getting himself kidnapped, which is why he has Brock Samson, his blonde, rage-prone bodyguard.

His kids, Dean and Hank (who I maintain is a spoof on Freddie from Scobby Doo), are more interested in irritating one another than anything their father wants, and the family is completed by H.E.L.P.E.R., a robot who never once lives up to his name.

Aside from Brock, the Venture clan is pretty much a sad lot, which makes it difficult for The Monarch, Dr. Venture's arch-nemesis, to really hate him properly.

"Here I am, in the belly of the beast, and I don't even care," the Monarch says when he sneaks into Venture's laboratory in one episode. "I don't even want to take a whiz on this... I used to DREAM of taking a whiz on this!"

Essentially, the series is about a bunch of marginal superheroes and supervillains with modern concerns and problems.

One of the best episodes involves Dr. Venture's tag sale, where, natch, he is selling used atomic death rays and other assorted superscience weaponry.

There is a lot of low-key, but hilarious humor throughout the whole season. I love it, but judging by the reaction from a lot of my friends, I guess it's not for everyone.