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custody of young Jonny Quest and his pal Hadji, with lots of innuendo sug-
gesting that Dr. Quest and Bannon may have been involved in a longtime
homosexual liaison. It first aired in December 2000 and was rerun as part
of Adult Swim’s first night of programming. The series then ran intermit-
tently over the next two years; its first “season” (comprising nine episodes)
lasted until June 2003. The 11-episode second season then ran from January
to November 2004. A third season began in July 2005, running through
October, with each episode airing several times per week.
The premise of Harvey Birdman allows any number of former cartoon
“stars” to make appearances on the program, usually in situations that are
very different from the ones in which we are accustomed to seeing them.
In the episode “Trio’s Company” (April 18, 2004), for example, former
Hanna-Barbera crime sleuth Inch High, Private Eye, keeps popping out of
Harvey’s fly, with reminders that private detectives are also called “dicks.”
These often extremely risqué situations create a tremendous ironic sense,
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Drawn to Television
while the program’s constant insistence on pushing the envelope of allow-
able animated action drives the program with a “What’s next?” energy. Still,
the character of Harvey remains dominant in most episodes and provides a
strong center for the program. Thus, in the two-parter “Deadomutt” (May
25 and June 1, 2003), Harvey himself is accused of the gruesome murder
of cartoon robot dog Dynomutt, sidekick of former superhero and Harvey’s
current legal rival, the Blue Falcon. “SPF” (May 9, 2004) focuses on the
tribulations of the title character as he comes to grips with the knowledge
that sunlight can cause skin cancer, then discovers that shielding himself
from the sun makes it impossible for him to recharge his powers. He finds
that a strong dose of tanning cream, provided by his psychotic legal aid,
Peanut, will restore his strength, but then he has to cope with addiction to
the cream, which he needs in larger and larger doses in order to remain
functional.
Gruesome murder, skin cancer, and drug addiction are not exactly the
conventional stuff of children’s cartoons, but they are they typical fare
for Harvey Birdman, which gets a great deal of mileage precisely out of the
seeming mismatch between its subject matter and animated program-
ming. Thus, much of the humor of an episode like “The Dabba Don” (July
28, 2002) derives from the amusing incongruity of seeing Hanna-Barbera
superstar Fred Flintstone on trial as a racketeering mob boss. The episode
ties into more contemporary popular culture as well, including an open-
ing sequence that revamps the famous opening of The Flintstones to mimic
the opening of The Sopranos. The episode contains other references to The
Sopranos as well, as when we find that Fred owns a strip club called Dabba
Doo!—as opposed to Tony Soprano’s Badda Bing! The episode spoofs other
classics of “gangster” culture as well; in one hilarious scene that reprises
a classic moment from The Godfather, Harvey, reluctant to accept an invi-
tation to become the “godfather” to Freddy Flintstone’s daughter Pebbles,
awakes to find a horrifying (sort of) warning left beneath the covers of his
bed: the head of famous cartoon horse Quick Draw McGraw. One of the
major ironies of this episode is that, looking back on the original Flintstones
program, one finds that much of the subject matter there dealt with crime
and corruption, so that recasting Fred as a mob boss is not as unlikely as
it would first appear. On the other hand, as the episode ends, we find that
Fred is not the boss of the local mob after all. The real boss is the seeming
innocuous Barney Rubble!
While programs such as Space Ghost and Harvey Birdman featured fac-
similes of Hanna-Barbera characters from the past, other Adult Swim
series, such as The Venture Brothers and Sealab 2021 have been constructed
Pushing the Animated Envelope
173
as pastiches of entire Hanna-Barbera programs. The Venture Brothers is an
extended irreverent parody of Jonny Quest, with dashes of the Hardy boys
and a variety of other predecessors thrown in as well. Created by Jackson
Publick (a pseudonym of Christopher McCulloch), formerly a writer for
the off-beat Saturday-morning cartoon series The Tick, the show features
teenagers Hank and Dean Venture (voiced by McCulloch and Michael
Sinterniklaas, respectively), essentially splitting the role formerly played by
Jonny. Like Jonny, their father is a scientist, though Dr. Thaddeus S. “Rusty”
Venture (James Urbaniak) is only a would-be superscientist, struggling to
live up to the legacy left by his own father, Dr. Jonas Venture (Paul Boocock),
a true superscientist, as well as a he-man adventurer in the mold of Doc
Savage. The Ventures’ bodyguard, filling the role played in Jonny Quest by
Race Bannon, is the ultramasculine secret agent Brock Samson (Patrick
Warburton), who spends most of his time getting Dr. Venture and the boys
out of a variety of jams, usually largely of their own making.
This main cast is supplemented by a variety of other wacky charac-
ters, including an array of often incompetent “super” villains who provide
opposition to Samson and the Ventures. Most important among these is the
Monarch (voiced by McCulloch), Dr. Venture’s self-declared nemesis, who
is totally dedicated to the destruction of Dr. Venture and Venture Industries,
the conglomerate that was founded by Jonas Venture and that Thaddeus
Venture now heads. The Monarch is, however, even more ineffectual than
Rusty Venture, as is suggested by his rather unthreatening choice of the
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