The Venture Bros. is the best show on TV that not enough people know about. It is a wonderfully creative, funny, touching and intensely intelligent show about a family, their enemies, and a wide world of heroes, villains, ghosts, monsters, and idiots.
In terms of world-building, there’s nothing like it. Each season added more and more to the canvas until the Venture world felt like a living breathing place that you could go to with its own rich history, rules, and organizations. For a continuity nerd like myself, it’s perfect. I’m one of them fans that love jumping on IMDB and Wiki after an episode to see all the connections, callbacks, and references I may have missed and I’m always rewarded with easter eggs, foreshadowing, and jokes that require very specific pop culture knowledge which then leads me to watch something else to understand the jokes.
The Venture Bros., created by Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, began in 2004 and ran for 7 seasons. The production cycle was long because every episode was written by Publick and Hammer, and because the show was one of the only major productions still being completely hand-drawn. Having to wait 2-3 years between seasons was always a struggle but always one that was rewarded with quality.
And then, because we can’t have nice things, The Venture Bros. was renewed for an eighth and final season before being canceled. Shows get canceled all the time but canceling The Venture Bros. after season 7 would be like the MCU making The Avengers: Infinity War and then saying “You know what, we’re gonna just stop here.” It is one of those decisions that makes me wonder why anyone gets into the TV-making industry if they just actively hate audiences.
Luckily though, whether a Venture Bros. fan working in Adult Swim’s development team or Hammer and Publick’s incredible persuasiveness, we were gifted a finale in the form of a movie.
The End is Not The End
In classic Venture Bros. style, the movie manages to answer questions about the characters’ pasts while also asking more. It gives closure while leaving doors open and completes arcs in a way that feels like they could also continue forever.
Throughout the show’s run, they’ve dropped specials that have felt like endings that would leave the show open to continue but also be great finales. “Operation P.R.O.M” and “All This and Gargantua 2” could easily have ended the show in a way both satisfying but also leaving fans wondering what happens next. Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is that kind of finale.
Finales often fall into a handful of categories. There is the Victory Lap when a show revisits its best moments or brings back old characters as a thank you to fans who have stuck with it like The Office. There is The Ending where the show puts a full stop on the story like Better Call Saul or Barry. And there is the Life Goes On ending where the story comes to somewhat of a conclusion but it’s more like the people in the show are going to carry on and we’ve just finished our time with them e.g. Cheers or The Wire.
Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is more like that third one. There is some Victory Lap stuff in there when Hank returns to the compound and has a flashback to a lot of previous events that have occurred on the hallowed grounds of the former Venture home, but mostly Publick and Hammer opted to give us a really good feature-length episode without getting bogged down in endings.
If you’re going into this disappointed that you won’t be finding out Scare Bear’s true identity or who perpetrated the Movie Night Massacre, then you haven’t been paying attention as Publick and Hammer have never been known to close a door without opening five more.
A Labour of Love
Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart begins a few days after the finale of Season 7. The Monarch is still reeling from the news that he might be related to Doctor Venture while Hank is still missing with the OSI and Hank (and, begrudgingly, Doctor Venture) searching for him. Into this comes a new villain, Mantilla and her organization, Arch who has a plan to lure The Monarch away from the Guild so that he can arch Venture to his heart’s content. Of course, nothing is what it seems and it quickly becomes apparent that everyone is in over their heads.
The movie gives most of its runtime to the established characters but new additions in the form of Mantilla, Bobbi St. Simone, and Nuno Blood make an impact and definitely would have appeared more if we had gotten the eighth season that we were promised. A big part of enjoying this movie is pushing that out of your mind and trying not, as hard as it is, to think of what-ifs.
The Venture Bros. has always felt cinematic with its big sequences and Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon’s Heart ups the ante with an incredible climatic sequence featuring the return of a vehicle I had almost forgotten about and a nail-biting moment of heroism from some very unlikely partners. It almost manages to retain its usual levels of heart with Hank dealing with his heartbreak from being betrayed by his brother which manifests in him seeing his other personalities: The Bat, Enrico Matassa, Russian Guyovitch, and Detective Hank. It is a great way to show the inner workings of Hank Venture’s brain, a very odd place for a very odd guy.
The thing that separates The Venture Bros. from Rick and Morty, a show it is often compared to, is its lack of cynicism. The show never undercuts its emotional moments, never punishes the viewer for getting invested in it, and never seems to actively dislike its fans. Rick and Morty is a show steeped in misanthropic dismissal (sometimes seemingly of its viewers) that always like it’s trying too hard to show how cool it is compared to other trendy things.
The Venture Bros. on the other hand wears its heart on its sleeve and will happily have a character give one of those cowboy speeches or bare their soul or admit weakness without the need for it to be dismissed or mocked. In a just world, the popularity of these two shows would be switched but it’s not to be.
Conclusion:
Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is hopefully not the last time we see these characters. Maybe we’ll get a comic book or another movie. Maybe that final season may still be made one day. Ten years ago, if you had told me we would get a new season of Twin Peaks I would have laughed in your face but we did get it and it was a masterpiece so who knows?
If this is the final adventure that we get to go along on, it’s a great one. Publick and Hammer didn’t turn this into a nostalgia fest or a nested sequence of call-backs. They told a fantastic Venture story that is exciting, hilarious, shocking, and sweet. There are no tearful goodbyes or final bows. In the end, we’ve had our time with this world and it will carry on without us with the final image we see after the credits an incredibly fitting one for the end.
With all that said, there’s only one thing left to say and that is simply this: Go, Team Venture.
The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart was released VOD on July 21, 2023!
Watch The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart
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