The Venture Brothers series has long been a favorite because of its wit, deft skills with parody, and impressive ability to work on several levels at once. It decided the subject of this semester’s Natural Narrative.
Episode 45 (?) entitled “Self-Medication” has perhaps 2 plots – the main being:
Dr. Venture attends a group therapy session for former boy adventurers, but a strange death causes the patients to fall back into their old mystery-solving habits.
The boy adventurers are clever parodies of classic action cartoon syndications from a golden age of animation prior to the 80’s – when art, story and character development in cartoons were scrapped in favor of extended toy marketing campaigns and banal politically correct bore-a-thons.
But it was the murder weapon that triggered a flash-back and inspired my next Natural Narrative. The name, description, and dialogue about the “Vietnamese 2-step viper” showed an amazing insight and knowledge about southeast Asia (as did the reference to Thailand, boy-girls and the modern sex-tourist/slave trade – but that’s in the sub-plot. That kinda thing happens here too). The viper is, like the boy adventurers, real but/and legendary.
Just as “Lance Hale” the mockery of the assertive Hardy Boy series (written by another Dixon) ridicules and disputes the existence of the snake that just killed their therapist – as western experts who haven’t lived in southeast Asia denigrate the Bamboo Viper. My knowledge of the snake came from lurid fiction, the legends of the locals who lived on my mountain in JuDong, and some close and physical contact.
The story of evil amah (wikipedia may have it wrong – I like “Grandmother” as an honorific as a better translation) who demanded I kill the viper pictured may be a better story than either the 7.6 Richter-scale 921 earth quake story (powerful – tho perhaps a downer) or the time I posed as a roadie to sneak into a sold out psychobilly show and hung out with The Reverend Horton Heat. Good fun – but questionably relevant; both stories I’ve told students in the past. I haven’t written or told this story yet.
Will post outline of Viper story soon – but it will require an intense amount of orientation (pardon the puns) – and digressions into the intense ethnicity of my jungle neighborhood (Hakka and Aboriginal), other venomous encounters (krait, cobra and an insect that may not have an English name – but it’s nasty) and perhaps unpopular history of the occupation and abuse of Taiwan by Japan.
FYI: Venture Bros. aired at 11pm Sunday Jan. 17th on Adult Swim – on the Cartoon Network. Gotta look up MLA for documentation.
