The conceited, pill-popping Dr Thaddeus Venture, his casually lethal bodyguard Brock Samson, and his two not-playing-with-a-full-deck sons seem pretty much incapable of not stumbling into trouble. Whether it's the mad schemes of butterly-themed supervillain The Monarch, the cloning and kidnapping antics of theme park mogul Roy Brisby (and his trained attack panda), or just the dangers inherit in holding a yard sale when you're a mad scientist, there's pretty much always something going on at the Venture Compound. And that "something" usually involves bodily fluids of some kind getting smeared all over places they shouldn't be.
"What happens when Jonny Quest hits middle age and it turns out he's basically a failure?" is probably not a pitch that would occur to most people, but I'm certainly glad it occurred to someone. The Venture Bros. won't be to everyone's tastes, with its generally mean-spirited humour, scattergun pop culture references, and complete lack of delicacy regarding bodily functions, but as someone who enjoys the zany antics of Robot Chicken, it's more or less right up my alley. It's juvenile and dumb in a decidedly smart kind of way, and I like that it generally (though by no means always) punches up, not down, targeting the wealthy and powerful to lampoon in various nasty ways.
And hey, now that I've suffered through Easy Rider, the season finale is at least 20% funnier than the first time I saw it.
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