The Venture Bros. season six, episode two blew my mind! It’s drawn and framed in the style of a 1983 Duran Duran music video; “Is There Something I Should Know?” Rectangles and squares slide in and out of view to frame objects of symbolic import and the characters speak (not entirely) in Duran Duran lyrics.
One story arc (there are many) is the nefarious plot of, Augustus St. Cloud, who menaces Pete White and Master Billy Quizboy. St. Cloud’s superpowers involve an encyclopedic knowledge of pop trivia and “lots and lots of money“. He’s the kind of guy that would bore you with the story of VHS versus Betamax while searching Ebay to find the exact Betamax player to complete his collection. I’m the kind of guy that would run from him!
Meanwhile the story has done wonders with the angles and feel of the music video. Check out the screenshots below, I didn’t add those rectangles. On one level it’s just plain silly. On another level it’s wheels within wheels. Those dumb squares are the reflections of an 1980’s music video incorporated into a 2016 cable TV show that I streamed into my living room in 2019. We live in the future y’all!
St. Cloud likes buying “priceless heirlooms” (1980’s cultural artifacts) and then mistreating them for his amusement. He has purchased a red rubber ball that played a symbolic role on the Duran Duran video and has a pyramid from the video too. He says this is a time machine (which if you watch the 80’s video makes as much sense as anything else).
St. Cloud intends to send the ball back into time so that it never existed. This terrorizes Billy Quizboy who wants to preserve “collective history” but also on a deeper level he’s a character that exists entirely as a pop culture reference (in his case to quiz game shows of the 1960’s). For him it’s a real threat even though nobody on earth… including a half drunk Curmudgeonly blogger on a couch in 2019… takes anything from Duran Duran seriously.
St. Cloud has reconstructed the set from the video to add gravitas to his deadly monologue. You know the kind of monologue I’m talking about “Mr. Bond, I’m going to slowly lower you in the piranha pool…”
Meanwhile, the animation and camera angles are still impressing me, even though I haven’t seen a music video since forever. Billy and St. Cloud argue over the ball as the basis of all subsequent culture; including the threat of an 80’s child actor becoming president.
This is Kim Fields from the Facts of Life.
Can you imagine the insanity of a world where the president is weird and not respected? The horrors! Thank God Duran Duran spared us from that shit!
Eventually the heroes(?) sacrifice everything to preserve the red ball. They think it a wise investment… because (of course) they’re pop culture references themselves. Billy explains “I lost my virginity to side A of Wu-Tang forever. We had to do it!” Perhaps I’ve seen into the mind of people who collect Star Trek lunch boxes and still-in-the-package GI Joe dolls.
I was laughing my ass off!
More to follow…
