The Venture Bros S01E01: Dia de los Dangerous! Review

The Venture Bros S01E01: Dia de los Dangerous! Review

Medium: Television

Release date: 8/7/2004

Review date: 6/30/2024

Score: 7/10

In recent years I have had a rather unusual relationship with “The Venture Bros” in the sense that, after I watched through all six seasons that were available when I first started the series years ago, I really enjoyed it and would recommend the show freely as a production that "subverted genre expectations" in often interesting and enjoyable ways. But as more time passed, I became a little more uneasy with that recommendation. Not because I'd started to believe “The Venture Bros” wasn't good in the time since watching it - just the opposite in fact, as in the years following me watching the series I kept stumbling repeatedly upon articles and videos going on about how clever and interesting of a show “The Venture Bros” was. In fact, it became apparent to me that “‘The Venture Bros’ is actually very good and interesting” is a pretty widely held opinion. And so with the show's cancellation and the release of the subsequent movie finale, and then the subsequent removing from streaming services of that subsequent movie finale for subsequent tax write-off purposes, if felt only right to finally rewatch “The Venture Bros” and put those personal hesitations to rest, because most of my recommendation reticence about the series are about the beginning of “The Venture Bros,” particularly the first season. I hate recommending a show and having to say something along the lines of "once you make it past X # of episodes or get X # of hours in, it gets good," and in the years after watching “The Venture Bros” that's how I started to feel about its earlier episodes. "Yeah, ‘The Venture Bros’ is good but it takes a while to get going, maybe you can just start with Season Three if you're not liking the early stuff haha" was my go to preemptive apologia I'd throw in whenever recommending the show to anybody. I personally remembered the early episodes of the show being particularly unusual and unpleasant to an extent that might ward off people who really would like the show’s core concepts "once it got going."

However, to my surprise, I did not find that to be the case for this premiere episode, happily. Casually offensive to Mexico?

Yes.

Weirdly off-putting?

Not really.

You get the main gist off the personalities of the cast established pretty well too: Brock's a feared and renowned one man killing machine, Doc Venture is a selfish and emasculated narcissist and failure, Dean and Hank are his clueless teenage boy assistants, and the Monarch is a super villain who thinks of himself as Doc Venture's nemesis and rival. It's all right here in the premiere: the violence, the dark humor, the fun animation, the occasional vulgarity, and the parody and emulation of adventure and superhero cartoons like Johnny Quest and Spider-Man.

This episode's alright.