If you’re reading this, there’s a better than 50/50 chance that you’ve never heard of The Venture Bros. Created by Christopher McCulloch and Eric Hammer, The Venture Bros. is an Adult Swim cartoon created and aired beginning wayyyyyy back in 2003. Adult Swim is of course known for releasing some of the most niche cartoon content on the planet courtesy of Cartoon Network and it probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that The Venture Bros. is about as niche as you can get.
But why a cartoon from 2003? And why on DVD? Great questions. First off, while it started in 2003, the series itself only ended in 2018, finishing up a run of almost a decade and a half with gaps of up to three years between seasons, making the shows most recent entry only about 5 years old. And if you’ve been paying attention, there’s a Venture Bros. Movie releasing next month as well, The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart which ties up the series. Long awaited by fans who thought it would never come, the release of the movie makes for the perfect time to release the series as a collection. As for DVD? The original two seasons were never remastered onto bluray, which is wildly unfortunate. Seasons 3-7 were, and they look fantastic, but when you’re making a set, it’s likely that you’ll have to keep it consistent for buyers and the cost of remastering things is probably pretty high, so here we are with the DVD set. It’s unfortunate, but the blurays are out there if that’s your thing. Many are out of print though, so it’ll cost you a pretty penny to get that HD. The Venture Bros.: The Complete Series however is right here and available right now thanks to Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment!
Let’s take a quick look at what exactly The Venture Bros. is though if you’re not in the know. Many of the Adult Swim cartoons of the early 2000s were spectacularly weird and strangely insightful as well. Stuff like Space Ghost Coast To Coast and Robot Chicken were cutting edge at the time and while they often seemed silly and irreverent, there was always a thread (or several) of social commentary and deeper insight. Nowhere else was that more apparent than in The Venture Bros. The first season of the series serves as an introduction to the characters and a fair amount of setup which only paves the way for the real series itself. We meet Hank and Dean Venture, the sons of Doctor Venture. Hank and Dean are essentially parodies of mainstream and pop culture characters from the last 50 years or so including the Hardy Boys, Scooby Doo, Tom Swift, Jonny Quest and many more.
The show takes a mix of the heroes and villains from all of those shows and mixes them with a dash of ‘50s-‘70s super heroes, some spy fiction and thrillers, and a bit more and then turns the whole thing onto its head by injecting a healthy dose of vice, violence, and sex. Part of that is to ground the show, and part of that is just for the juvenile humor that naturally comes alongside. If that was the whole show though, it wouldn’t have lasted anywhere near as long as it has. What’s interesting about The Venture Bros. is that the show evolves in a way that almost no other show does. Instead of simple, self-contained stories, the real focus is on character development of the entire ensemble cast at every level, incrementally growing from season to season. Continuity, satire, and parody are the name of the game when it comes to the Venture Bros.
Dr. Venture, Hank and Dean’s dad, is a failed scientist living in the shadow of his larger-than-life father who established Venture Industries and his constant grifting to try and get by on his father’s legacy at any cost. He’s amoral, ruthless, and entirely untrustworthy and it’s fascinating. Toss in Brock Sampson, the quintessential muscle man as Venture’s bodyguard (as well as a ruthless killer and a lot more) and you’ve got the core crew. That’s not where things stop however as the show covers the lives and backstories of all of the villains as well. They’re actually surprisingly important as things move on and it’s a unique twist to often see as character development out of characters like Monarch and Dr. Orpheus as we do for some of the main characters.
You see, The Venture Bros. is really about more than just a bunch of action. It’s a deep dive into the way characters are motivated, their emotional states, and what happens to them when they inevitably fail. Hank and Dean die…and they die often. And those deaths have consequences (it would be a shame to explain more). Everything has consequences in The Venture Bros. and it makes the show magical in a way you wouldn’t expect. The tiniest element from Season 1 or 2 ends up having huge consequences in later seasons even though the entire premise around it makes no sense.
Everything ties together and refers back to previous episodes, forcing you to not only pay attention but appreciate the artistry with which the show has been woven over the course of almost two decades. It’s honestly astonishing how far-reaching plot points can be and no other show is really like it. This is one of the only cartoons around which you can’t just sit down and watch random episodes of because, well, you simply won’t get it. The entire series is designed solely to be watched in order as a constantly evolving work of art and somehow, even though the seasons were spread out over huge gaps, it all just works.
Now, let’s get to the technical bits. The upside here is that the entire series is in one easy-to-store case. Instead of wasting a whole stack of cases inside cases, The Venture Bros.: The Complete Series comes in a cardboard slipcase and uses a large vertical double disc orientation in a single huge disc tray that sits loose inside the plastic case. Within that tray, 14 discs comprise the entirety of the series. Each layer has two discs on each side of the fold with the front and back also containing two discs. The hinges of the individual ‘pages’ of the tray just lock into tabs on the sides and so unless you’re careful, you can pop out the tabs and accidentally disassembling the tray. The tray is easily lifted out of the clamshell to remove individual discs if you wish and an insert lists all the episodes in each season.
The DVD set itself is encoded in MPEG-2 and the output is in 480i. That’s a far cry from the 1080p on the bluray sets of the individual seasons, but surprisingly, it doesn’t really matter. One of the weirder things about The Venture Bros. is that because it’s a parody of vintage cartoons as well as other types of pop culture fiction, the look of a 480i DVD on a modern 1080p TV is actually surprisingly vintage, lending even more credence to the parody. In short, the Complete Series set looks more like a vintage cartoon than it does a modern one, actually improving the impact of the show’s pedigree. The lines are heavy and blurred slightly and the whole thing feels like the modern version of watching an old cartoon over broadcast TV.
Now, that’s not to say it looks bad either. For DVD, this is top tier stuff and the transfers are vibrant with no noticeable artifacting or other issues. The menus are clever and vary from season to season and the extras that were on the original releases of the seasons (commentaries, deleted scenes, and a bit more) are included too. With 82 episodes to watch, that’s a lot of content and you’ll rapidly find yourself forgetting that this is DVD as you get sucked into the world of The Venture Bros. Aspect ratios vary from season to season and the originals are preserved here, so get used to some bars on the screen, but it doesn’t really matter. There are also subtitles if you need them, but only English is present in some seasons. Dolby 5.1 is still included so even if you’re a bit miffed this isn’t bluray, at least everything sounds great!
Ultimately, this is currently the only way to get the complete Venture Bros. series and you’re not going to regret buying it. With a two decade pedigree and some of the most innovative approaches to cartoon plots that have ever been broadcast, The Venture Bros.: The Complete Series is a must have for serious fans of the series and newcomers alike. At $130 for the set, it isn’t incredibly cheap, but it does go on sale (as of this article, it’s $96.50 on Amazon) and honestly, even at full price, it’s worth every penny.
This review is based on a DVD copy of The Venture Bros.: The Complete Series provided by the publisher. The Venture Bros.: The Complete Series is available at fine retailers everywhere…and it’s awesome so go buy it! Doctor Venture needs your cash!
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
