Way back in the (fictional) 1960's there was a show called Venture Quest. It concerned the adventures of a little boy, Rusty, and his father, a multimillionaire scientist and man of action Doctor Jonas Venture. Together with his best friend Hector from South America, his dog, and Dad's friends, Action Man, Colonel Gentleman, and Kano, they traveled the earth, righting wrongs, solving mysteries, and saving the world.
Flash forward some forty some-odd years. We've seen civil rights, the Vietnam war, civil unrest, disco, punk, Reagan, the end of the Cold War…
Dr. Venture is dead. Rusty is now a man, and father to twin boys of his own, who keep the tradition of fighting for Truth and Justice in the family, aided by Brock Samson, his trusty bodyguard, H.E.L.P.eR, the family robot, and the mystical Dr. Orpheus against the foul machinations of the Monarch and his female companion Dr. Girlfriend, scions of the Guild of Calamitous Intent…
Which makes about as much sense as Dubya's strategies in the Middle East. In reality, Rusty is now a balding, pill-popping skirt chaser, whose mismanagement has brought Venture Enterprises into near-bankruptcy. His inventions are mostly repackaged versions of his father's, things like the "Oo Ray", which goes "Oo", melts things, and could conceivably be used as a weapon (thus getting him kicked out of an exposition at the UN). Venture Enterprises, his headquarters, is still stuck in the mid-Sixties, housed in a replica of the Futurama building from the 1964 World's Fair. His father's friends are now old and infirm, Hector works in a shoe factory back in South America, and his sons…well…
What started as a parody of Jonny Quest has blossomed into a thorough deconstruction of the "youth adventure" cartoon, with a considerable amount of warmth and charm -- at least as much warmth and charm as you can get with random violence, mayhem, and the occasional death. The Monarch, a butterfly-themed archenemy, or "arch" in the show's in-world parlance, never quite bothered to figure out what a Monarch butterfly actually does, so he travels in a giant cocoon, and is more ineffectual than terrifying. Dr. Girlfriend is a gravel-voiced version of Jackie Kennedy, complete with pink Oleg Cassini suit and pill-box hat, who used to hang out with the semi-transparent Phantom Limb…Oh, another thing. The cast is HUGE. The boys have friends, real ones. There's the Guild of Calamitous Intent (a kind of union for villains) but there's also the henchmen of all these villains, and they have stories, breakaway legions from both the Good Guys and the Bad. Keeping track of all the shifting alliances is part of the fun, as it goes from straight adventure to comic-book soap opera and back.
...And yes, the boys. Dean and Hank, All-American Boys (at least initially), full of spunk, though dead below the waist, initiative, aw-shucks…somewhere between Jonny and the Hardy Boys, with a purity of mind, body, and deed that would cause Mark Twain to disinherit Tom Sawyer, a product of sleep-learning beds programmed by the great Jonas Venture, whose ideas of morality and education were, shall we say, a bit dubious. Conceived as one hero separated in two, they are now more of a Ying/Yang duality, with Dean playing the bookish homeboy who only wants to be normal, whatever that is, and Hank the Wannabee Badass, convinced he's going to train to be Batman, and the other great source of fun is watching how their early 60's naivite slams up against the contemporary world. (One scene, for me, says it all: Dean, having heard his ex-girlfriend discuss "Dirty Sanchez" sex acts with a blaze yes-I've-heard-that-one-before attitude, tearily asks her if pooing on her will bring her back.)
I'm not telling you about Brock Samson, except that he's the Only Sane Man, and he was trained by an analog of Hunter S. Thompson, his bad mad self. Just thinking about him makes you want to do pushups in the morning, just saying'.
And the plot. Well, it really doesn't need one, does it? Not when every day brings a new villain to fight, a new mystery to solve, and WHEN are these boys growing up? It's season five, but it still looks like it's finding its true niche...