I'm Not Doc Hammer or Jackson Public

So I was going to attach this to my next retrospective, but the more I think about it, the longer it gets, and the better serving option becomes chopping it off so it can run about on its own without the extra lump on its back. If you’ve read and understood the title, you are probably ahead of me, but I’ve been wrong before, so let’s hedge our bets. Doc Hammer is part of the two-man team alongside Jackson Public, who gave us the Venture Brothers, a parody of old adventure stories and one of the main citations for my own personal project. However, after toiling away for the past few months trying to crack a story, I’ve realized that I’m drawing too much from the Venture Brothers and merely trying to imitate it rather than make something akin to it but different. There’s an excellent video by Steak Bently (here’s a link, go watch it) that posits that while the show started as a parody of things like Jonney Quest and the Hardy Boys, it quickly outgrew those shallow waters and into a more exciting theme of failure. Something I think I was unconsciously trying to do as well.

However, my game and the Venture Brothers are not the same. For starters, Venture Brothers is an animated show, so there is a broader and more traditional method of storytelling available to them than a video game. Moreover, that theme of failure works better in a non-interactive medium where we only watch the sad, fraught life of Dr. Thadus ‘Rusty’ Venture and not living it ourselves. This is not to say that building a game around failure is impossible; the Dark Souls franchise has more or less set the foundation for that concept in games, and smaller teams like Red Hook have tackled the issue in their own ways to similar success. But in both cases, failure is not the end state; it is merely an inevitability that the game wants you to overcome by understanding its rules and being reactive aside from proactive. In essence, you get better and overcome failure. Dr. Venture never overcomes his failures; he lives with them, day in and day out, trying to get by and failing more and more each day. There are windows of victory, but they are short-lived and more or less lead the good doctor to another easily avoided blunder. Again, this is not to say improvement is impossible within the show, nor are the creators trying to say the world revolves around failure. It is trying to posit what you do when you see shortcomings in life. Do you get lost and try to find your way out like Henchman 2, getting better along the way; do you try and play the game and put people against one another for your own game like Dr. Venture Senior, or do you cut through the charade and just try to see and work around everyone’s own baggage like Rusty; and the more I write, the less a story that can accommodate those characters and those arcs forms. Instead, something fights and struggles against the world I’m trying to establish, and I think recognizing that my game isn’t about failure is the first step to calming it down. The second is no longer treating Zolo like the Mighty Monarch.

So, the Monarch is the main antagonist for Rusty Venture in the Venture Brothers. A butterfly-themed nutcase who wakes up each and every day to harass Rusty Venture. The Monarch loves being the bad guy. More specifically, he loves being the bad guy who gets to make Dr. Venture’s life miserable. He’s not all that good at it and can’t really play within the rules that allow him to do what he loves, but he does it anyway. There in lies, I think, the first important separation between Monarch and Zolo: Zolo didn’t choose to become a villain; the Monarch did. Zolo can play the villain and enjoys the liberties it brings to some degree. But at the same time, he is annoyed that he and his band of misfits are being placed next to dudes who level city blocks simply because Zolo thinks the whole LARP everything is built upon is stupid, and he’s pretty vocal about that opinion. He’s been labeled a villain by a system that needs to create villains to maintain itself. So now the question becomes, how well do you play that part? There is liberty in being outside the law, but risk as well as the more you rage senselessly at the machine, all you are doing is bolstering the machine. I have this slight irritation for the new line of Power Ranger and Superhero parodies and satires of this modern age. Mainly because for all the Venture Brothers and Invincibles out there, that peel back the question of good and evil and expose the two as just roles we play with a very thin line between the two, there are plenty of shows that just flip the script and now the monster is the good guy and the Power Rangers are the bad guys; completely missing the mark and wasting an otherwise interesting premise. Because some of the really fun ones strip it back even further and have no good or bad guys, just people living in a system that will punish them if they step out of line. A personal favorite of mine is Love after World Domination, a rom-com about a legally distinct Red Ranger and one of the villainesses he fights weekly, trying to keep their secret relationship under wraps.

What I really like about the show, in particular, is that no one is the bad guy. All of Red Ranger’s (Fudo) pals are well-adjusted people, with the possible exception of Blue Ranger, who’s a bit of a sex pest but is always the butt of a joke, and all of the villainesses (Desumi) co-workers are equally lovable, quirky, and given equal screentime to the hero characters. Hell, early on, Pink Ranger (who is also in love with Red Ranger) discovers what’s going on and agrees to help the two of them, and it's not some vindictive saboteur job either. She recognizes that he’s in love with another woman and, knowing that being with her makes him happy, decides to put her feelings aside to help them out, forming more or less the central trio for the show. But there’s still a danger to their relationship getting out. It is not that either one of them lives in fear of the other being put in danger because of it, but because the media backlash to such a scandal would most likely cost both of them their jobs. So they have to walk this tightrope between maintaining their professional carries with their personal lives, with a lot of the conflict coming not from ‘oh shit, someone’s going to find out’ but rather ‘How are we going to make this work?’

Early on, when Fudo and Desumi start dating, Desumi is given a promotion opportunity that would shoot her up the ranks but also merge her with gorilla DNA and lock her into the villain role for life, but she doesn’t know if she wants to take it. She admits later to Fudo that she only got into being a villain because of her parents and that she was just naturally good at it, but she has no real love for the job; now that she’s started dating Fudo, she starts to wonder what she wants to do with her life outside of the role she’s fallen into. Does she want another career? Does she want to go to college, or does she want to stay with Fudo? All questions she asks herself and Fudo helps her answer, and it’s the start of the two of them redefining themselves outside of the public eye. Because that’s the real villain of that story, public perception, and it is a more fitting antagonist and theme for my story than failure itself.

So why not try combining the two? Retool the story to focus more on Zolo’s frustration with the system and his outspoken and non-regulated acts of villainy while at the same time not really knowing how to fix what he’s mad about and failing to escape the system he hates. That way, we can still draw upon the inspiration of the Venture Brothers without just following behind them, stepping exactly where they stepped. Hopefully, we can blaze out our own trail alongside them and just rehash what they did in a different, ill-fitting package.