The Venture Brothers
Season 4 Volume 1
DVD/Blu-ray
Created by: Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick
Staring: Patrick Warburton, James Urbaniak, Christopher McCulloch
Cartoon Network/Warner Brothers
Release Date: October 26, 2010

I’ll get the easy part out of the way up front; Yes, The Venture Brothers Season 4, Volume 1 is another great set of episodes from my favorite show on TV, so yes, I’m going to give this a guarded recommendation (I’ll explain the guarded part later). The eight episodes on this disc comprise the first half of season four, and while they may not be the best of the series, they are still very funny, and fans of the show are going to want to pick this up. If you haven’t seen the show before I would recommend starting at the beginning, because these episodes are built on a lot of things that have gone on in the show before.

I don’t know if I love the episodes on this disc as much as some of the other seasons. Certainly the absence of Brock Samson (voiced by Patrick Warburton) is a big reason why I don’t enjoy these as much. There are still a number of good episodes, particularly “Hansom Ransom” which features Kevin Conroy (Batman: The Animated Series) playing a very different kind of super-hero. Other standout episodes include “The Revenge Society” which features the return of Phantom Limb and which may be my favorite episode of the season, and “Self-Medication” which has Doc Venture joining a boy adventurer support group and has guest voices by Seth Green, John Hodgeman, and Patton Oswalt. There are good episodes just not as many as in previous seasons.

The Venture Brothers
Season 3 — Blu-ray Edition
Created by Jackson Publick
Starring James Urbaniak, Patrick Warburton, Christopher McCulloch, Doc Hammer
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Release date: March 24, 2009

It’s easy for me to write about the things that I love. If I’m really passionate about something, I can go on and on about them for some length of time. Well, I love The Venture Brothers. The show is hands down the funniest show currently on TV, and I have never been happier to receive an assignment from my masters of Doom than this one. I have been watching this disc more or less non-stop for the last week, and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. If you read this sight, if you like comics, or sci-fi movies, or music, or old cartoons, or laughing in general, you should be watching this show.

To give a basic premise of the show is to do it discredit, since they do a lot of different things with each episode, but the basic plot is this: Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture has two sons named Dean and Hank, and a bodyguard named Brock Samson, and they go around having adventures, mostly involving Dr. Ventures arch enemy, the Monarch. However, every family has problems, and this family is no different: Dr. Venture is a pill-popping failure, Hank and Dean have an annoying habit of dying all the time which doesn’t agree with their lifestyle, and Brock hasn’t met anyone he wouldn’t like to kill. The easiest way to describe the show is to imagine if Jonny Quest was mixed with Marvel Comics, and a few drops of G.I. Joe, drop them in a blender, add some cocaine, smash the blender with a hammer, and throw the results against the wall to see what sticks. That’s the best way that I can describe it, and that doesn’t really begin to scratch the surface.

Season 3 of the Venture Brothers is different from the first two in that it really goes into the histories of many of the characters, yet still introduces us to new and hilarious characters. Let’s do an episode by episode breakdown. That sounds like fun.