Western Animation / The Venture Bros: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart

The Venture Bros: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is a 2023 movie serving as the Finale Movie to The Venture Bros. The film was written by series creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick, who also directed and produced it.

Dean, with the help of the Order of the Triad, begins a cross-country search for Hank, who has gone off the grid in order to find himself. Meanwhile, the Monarch plots a new scheme against Dr. Venture with the aid of a mysterious new villain and her professional arching company, whilst Dr. Venture puts the entire Venture Industries company at stake with the launch of a new product.

The film was initially released digitally on July 21, 2023, followed by a Blu-ray release on July 25, and streaming on Max September 2.

Due to the nature of being a Finale Movie to the series, all spoilers pertaining to previous events will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

Tropes:

• Aborted Arc: Early on, it's mentioned that several Guild villains were mysteriously resigning to join A.R.C.H., making it seem like the GCI will have to deal with a new guild of villains. However, this is quickly dropped.
• Actually Not a Vampire: After escaping from the Blaculas, Dean sees he's been bitten and believes he's turning into a vampire. As it turns out, he accidentally got pricked on the neck by Jefferson's vampire fang necklace and isn't actually turning.
• And the Adventure Continues: The last scene of the film shows that, despite learning that he is a clone of Dr. Venture, the Monarch will continue to arch him, especially after the Guild will finally let him do it properly.
• Animation Bump: While not a massive upgrade, the movie gets a bump compared to the (already high quality) animation of the final season, including more vivid colors, crisper details, and improved 3D effects. When you compare it to the first season, it is amazing to see how this franchise's art style and animation has evolved over the years.
• Anti-Climax: All over the place, in typical Venture Bros. fashion. Though the finale does subvert this a few times.
  • Mantilla's entire plan boils down to I Just Want to Be Special. What does Sheila do to stop her? Negotiate and give her everything she wants by setting her up in the Peril Partnership as a professional supervillain, since her demands are fairly reasonable and easy to accommodate.
  • Dr. Venture, Sgt. Hatred, The Monarch, Number Two and H.E.L.P.E.R. all descend into the lab where the Helper Pods are levitating the building, armed to the teeth and with a fairly coordinated plan to save the day. Unfortunately, the magnetic field generated from the Helper Pods is so strong that it wrenches all their guns away and subjects them to an extreme amount of pressure, nearly killing all of them immediately. Subverted later when the team stumbles upon the remnants of the Ventronic mech, and use its awesome might to stop the building's descent.
  • Dean seemingly gets bitten by a Blacula after he discovers two pricks on his neck and believes he is starting to change, even at one point having a burst of adrenaline to shove Dermott up against the wall with more strength than he is usually shown possessing. Turns out Dean was never bitten, and instead got pricked by Jefferson Twilight's vampire fang necklace when the two fell on top of each other during the fight.
  • After a serious Myth Arc's worth of buildup, Hank and Dean's mother is still not revealed. Working out the timeline (and some comments from Debbie) imply that she was the egg donor, therefore technically making her the boys biological mother, but who actually gestated the boys is not made clear... until The Stinger, where it's revealed that Dr. Venture himself nursed them in an artificial womb.
  • The ending seems to set up a moral quandary with the Monarch, who discovers that he's a clone of Rusty Venture and thus a brother of sorts to Dr. Venture. He thinks about it for all of one scene before immediately confirming his hatred and vowing to arch Dr. Venture for the rest of his life.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Wouldn't be a Venture Bros. story without it.
  • Rusty made an Alexa-style HelperPod as a last ditch effort to save his company, but as the Pirate Captain points out they've spent so much on "improvements" they actually cost more to produce than what they're selling it for.
    Pete White: Basically, you Blue Monday'd it.
  • The Monarch and 21's new ARCH-supplied hover tank has a cannon that can shoot their butterfly logo. However it turns out the logo is much smaller and thinner than they anticipated, as they have trouble trying to squeeze into the hole they made in the glass wall at VenTech.
• The Bad Guy Wins: In the end, Mantilla gets everything she wanted and more, when Dr. Mrs. The Monarch figures out her motive and offers her a professional supervillain gig at the Peril Partnership, with no punishment for poaching the Guild's talent, framing Mrs. The Monarch, or nearly annihilating Manhattan with a Colony Drop. Somewhat Justified due to the fact that Mantilla's demands are reasonable enough for Dr. Mrs. The Monarch to actually accommodate with little trouble.
• Bait-and-Switch: As the Monarch and 21 attempt to attack the VenTech building using their new tech from ARCH, the Monarch starts freaking out about the police, seemingly concerned that they might get arrested... Until it turns out that he and 21 are having an argument about who sang "Roxanne", The Police or Toto.
• Bilingual Bonus: Combined with a Freeze-Frame Bonus; the "pants golem" is activated by a sock bearing the Hebrew letters נס, which spell "miracle", but are also shown to create a part of the word מכנסיים on its head, which spells "pants".
• Booked Full of Mooks: When the Monarch and 21 first meet Mantilla in a subway station, all the other passersby briefly vanish from sight before revealing themselves to be her ARCH minions in disguise.
• Brick Joke: When arriving at ARCH, Mantilla encourages the Monarch to kick one of the employees in the "throat meat." Later on, the Monarch strangles Dr. Venture and threatens his "throat meat."
• Cain and Abel: Apparently, Sibling Rivalry is an ideal qualification for arching in the Guild for the poetry of it, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch trying to assure her husband that his possible relation to Rusty would help him qualify to arch him. Even more so when it's revealed that he's Rusty's clone.
• Call-Back: Hank still refers to Ben as "Old Man Potter" because he never learned that the name "Potter" refers to the Potter's field of dead clones and henchmen surrounding Ben's house.
• Cerebus Retcon: Inverted with the most straightforward explanation of Malcolm being a Rusty clone, Zig-Zagged if some other details are taken into account. It had previously been implied that Malcolm had been conceived from Jonas Venture seducing Malcolm’s mother, with it being reiterated here that they knew each other, making Malcolm and Rusty half-brothers. We learn here that Jonas instead provided her with a Rusty clone, which would be the Inversion, although it's left unclear as to whether he simply handed her a "fresh slug" or, based on Ben's ambiguous phrasing and the fact that nothing suggests the Fitzcarraldos "adopted" Malcolm, artificially impregnated Mrs. Fitzgeraldo with one of Rusty's clones, making her technically a surrogate mother to her baby, and playing with it to the point of a Zig-Zag.
• Character Check: Rusty and Monarch start the film displaying their most prominent shared flaws. The self-centeredness, the abrasive manner they treat their families, and the snarky demanding vitriol they splash onto who they perceive to be in their employ. Rusty even makes morbid jokes about Hank potentially dying in a gutter and being nonplussed at remembering how one of his clones actually did die when he ran away from home. However, Rusty begrudgingly begins to show off his longstanding standards and the modest amount of new ones he got over the course of his Character Development since the series started. The Monarch reminds the viewer that he has very few and feels no inclination to change despite how sympathetic he can occasionally be in an episode.
  The Monarch: I can't believe we stayed for your over-the-hill rent-a-cop. Why didn't we just leave him and get the hell out of here?
  Rusty: We didn't stay for Hatred. We stayed because if we leave, the building will kill a bunch of people
  The Monarch: (scoffs) So?
  Gary: Dude.
  Rusty: And that's why I'm always the hero and you're always the villain.
• Clone Angst: After spending the previous two seasons strongly implied to be Rusty's half brother, a blood test confirms that the Monarch is actually a slightly altered clone of Rusty, with 2% Baboon DNA added in to offset hairloss (which also increases his aggressiveness). The Monarch is understandably devastated to learn that he's a clone of his Arch-Enemy at first, until his wife reframes it as the ultimate Cain and Abel situation (and implying that it all but guarantees him being Rusty's Arch by Guild standards) and the Monarch proclaims that he will continue to arch Rusty, while proclaiming that he is Rusty's better self.
• Colony Drop: Mantilla levitates Dr. Venture's skyscraper into space and he has to find a way to bring it down safely so it doesn't destroy Manhattan or get blown up by the OSI with him in it to prevent it. In the end, he manages to safely bring it down where his old house was with a Humongous Mecha and the help of the OSI and the Monarch.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Sirena was seen watching Follow That Bikini in "Faking Miracles."
  • The Order of the Triad have now moved into a new sanctum, which the Alchemist had shown was up for sale in "Arrears in Science."
  • When Hank arrives at the Venture Compound, he sees flashes of scenes from various episodes, all the way back to the pilot episode.
  • Similarly, Dermott keeps a stash of items from past episodes in a safe from Rusty's old office on the compound.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Between her invisibility superpower, apparent knowledge of tech, hacking skills, and spying ability (keeping a 20 Stalker Shrine of the Monarch and Dr. Mrs. updated), Debbie/Mantilla could have been one hell of an outright supervillain or even hero if she so desired. Instead, she preferred hatching a convoluted Evil Plan to sabotage the Guild instead. Dr. Mrs. The Monarch takes advantage of this by simply landing Debbie a supervillain gig at the Peril Partnership.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • The Alchemist only appears during the first scene at the Triad's new headquarters.
  • The GCI Council appears for just one scene, with Radical-Left getting no speaking lines.
  • Watch and Ward have one line each near the end of the film.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Monarch incorrectly believes that Rusty slept with Debbie, who he was dating at the time. Upon hearing this, Gary assumes this is why he hates Dr. Venture.
• Foreshadowing:
  • One of the items Dermott took from the dismantled Venture Compound is the artificial womb Dr. Venture carried the original Hank and Dean in, which is shown during The Stinger.
  • Dr. Venture snaps and confesses that he was much happier as a "middling super-scientist in the middle of nowhere" instead of bearing the responsibility of a multi-billion dollar company. By the end of the film, Ven Tech Tower lands back where the Venture Compound once stood and the company is presumably bankrupt (although Billy and White do point out even if the personal helpers were a bust, they did accidentally create miniature hover engines).
• Evil Is Petty: The Monarch reaffirms his desire to arch Rusty by having his wife (who is invisible thanks to a Superhuman Transfusion) yank down his pants in front of his friends.
• Fanservice: Sheila spending most of the film on the run from the GCI and the OSI in nothing but her Guild trench coat over a set of purple lingerie. At least she had the foresight to keep a sidearm in her garter belt.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • While the picture of Brick Frog's GCI file is partly hidden, much of the text is visible, including that his real name is Steve Mathews, and he arches a Mr. Dale who was his previous business partner at a brick-making company - the same Mr. Dale into whose factory he broke in after joining ARCH.
  • The Follow That Bikini trailer is shown to be uploaded to "Boobtoob" by Augustus St. Cloud.
• Holy Burns Evil:
  • The punches of the "pants golem", a presumed protector of the abandoned synagogue the Order of the Triad purchased as their new headquarters, can kill blackulas.
  • Jefferson uses holy water...as windshield wiper fluid.
• Humongous Mecha: Ventronic, a massive Combining Mecha built by Jonas Jr. and last seen in The Lepidopterists, turns out to be hidden within the Ventech building. Rusty, Hatred, Monarch, and 21 pilot it to escape the descending building and then ease it's impact.
• I Just Want to Be Special: This is revealed to be the motive of the Big Bad Mantilla. She was the daughter of the former Sovereign of the Guild of Calamitous Intent, until her father suffered a Klingon Promotion and her mother tried to give her a normal life. She spent 20 years working on a convoluted Evil Plan to become a successful supervillain by sabotaging the Guild, but Dr. Mrs. The Monarch manages to talk her down and help her find her footing while saving the Guild and her husband.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After spending the last few seasons killing his fellow Guild members, undermining his wife's career, verbally abusing Gary, giving grief to almost everyone around him, and expressing a willingness to allow the VenTech Tower to plummet to the Earth and kill untold numbers of people while he flees to safety, the Monarch spends the closing minutes of Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart getting thrashed around the inside the mech clown head that belonged to Ned (who he insulted in season three), nearly fatally getting impaled by the statue of Jonas Venture Sr., having his life saved by his archenemy Rusty willingly providing him blood, discovering that he's a clone of Rusty, and learning that he has baboon DNA spliced into his genetic makeup.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Dean gets the utter crap beaten out of him by Hank's alternate selves once he accidentally stumbles into his Coma Dream, as revenge for stealing his girlfriend. Hank then lampshades this, with Dean sheepishly stating that he deserves it.
  Hank: Woah! I guess I had some resentment left over.
• Last Episode, New Character: Mantilla a.k.a. Debbie St. Simone appears as the Big Bad of this series finale despite not being seen or mentioned before. In some sense this could also in a way apply to her parents Bobbi St. Simone and Force Majeure, who have been mentioned up until now but are now Unseen No More.
• Moon-Landing Hoax: In a flashback, Jonas Venture is seen consulting with Stanley Kubrick on a studio backlot where they're shooting a fake moon landing.
• Mundanger: The perilous fate that Orpheus is desperate to save Hank from is the simple yet serious possibility that the stress of talking to Bobbi St. Simone combined with his recent head injury could put him into a permanent coma.
• Mythology Gag: The Pants Golem was a character Doc and Jackson developed very early on in the series, but never got around to working it into the show until now.
• No Sympathy: Rusty shows no outward concern over the Monarch getting impaled by Jonas' statue. Rather explicable given that he had earlier admitted that he likewise hates his archenemy. But he ultimately gives him a life-saving blood transfusion anyway.
• Pants-Pulling Prank: In the end, the Monarch has an invisible Sheila yank down Rusty's pants in front of the rest of the cast, as a means of arching him and reaffirming their rivalry (since Monarch is barely able to stand up on his own at the time). It's so laughably petty that Brock decides to just grant Monarch's following request for an Uber rather than "stop" him.
• The Reveal: Many long-standing questions receive answers:
  • The Monarch is actually a clone of Dr. Venture. His DNA contain 2% of that of a baboon, intended to counteract the hair loss caused by other clones of the time, which is what accounts for his perpetual anger. His particular clone, dubbed R-22 by Ben, was then given to Mr. and Mrs. Fitzcaraldo when they were unable to conceive a child.
  • Bobbi St. Simmone, previously suggested to be the Venture brothers' mother, is in fact not their mom. Instead, she fell in love with Force Majeure, the original GCI Sovereign, and gave birth to Deborah.
  • It is heavily implied that Deborah gave her eggs to Dr. Venture in exchange for curing her mother/giving her the ability to turn invisible, and he is shown incubating Hank and Dean using a specially-designed womb strapped to his body, therefore technically making her the boys biological mother and not her mother as originally believed before (this would also makes Bobbi St. Simmone and Force Majeure their biological grandparents.)
• Run for the Border: In spirit with Mantilla at the end. Dr. Mrs. the Monarch sets her up as a villain with the Canadian-based Peril Partnership, putting her out of the Guild and O.S.I.'s reach.
• Status Quo Is God:
  • Ven Tech Tower lands in the same spot as the Venture Compound, bringing the Venture family back to their true home.
  • The Monarch disregards his and Rusty's shared past and vows to keep arching him like always.
• String Theory: Played for Laughs when Dr. Mrs. The Monarch breaks into the apartment of the Big Bad Mantilla and finds a Stalker Shrine of herself and her husband taking the form of this, which Mantilla awkwardly tries to explain.
• Superhuman Transfusion: Mantilla is able to temporarily share her invisibility powers with other people this way, demonstrated when she gives Dr. Mrs. The Monarch her blood so they can sneak into Guild headquarters together. Mrs. The Monarch later uses her invisibility to pants Dr. Venture at Malcom's request.
• Third Line, Some Waiting: The movie starts off with three main plot threads (Dean tracking down Hank with Orpheus/Jefferson/Dermott, Rusty's new product launch involving Billy/Pete/Hatred, and the Monarch/ARCH/Guild/O.S.I.) and cycles through them through for some time before finally coming together by the end.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Save the Monarch, almost the entire cast present in the film gets to show their better sides with Rusty managing to outright save the day and win a measure of real respect from General Hunter Gathers.
• Took a Level in Badass: Joining ARCH has taken Brick Frog from a level one Harmless Villain to a supervillain capable of blowing up and robbing a legitimate scientific facility.
• Torso with a View: Zigzagged. Monarch gets impaled near the end of the movie, which of course leaves a massive hole in his stomach. However, the “only” problems depicted are a crushed liver and near-fatal blood loss. After a blood transfusion and bandages he’s up and walking around, albeit painfully. The liver problem is never addressed, but presumably he got a transplant from Rusty as well. (A small piece of a healthy liver can be transplanted and regenerate into a new one).
• Unseen No More: After having been namedropped twice in the show, Force Majeure is finally seen in person and he's revealed to be the father of Mantilla.
• Uterine Replicator: It’s strongly implied that the titular twins' Missing Mom never actually birthed them and simply donated her eggs to their dad, Rusty, who used one of these to birth them.
• Vehicle Vanish: Played for Laughs. Monarch attempts this when Sheila notices him watching her. However, Sheila just waits for the bus he hides behind to come back around, revealing the Monarch clinging sheepishly to the side of a bus pulling up right in front of her.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Snoopy meekly points out that Mantilla's plan is pretty much lifted (no pun intended) from the Fantastic Four comic "Captives of the Deadly Duo".
• Zombie Infectee: Dean thinks he's been bitten by a Blacula, but since he's traveling with Blade expy Jefferson Twilight he panics and hides it. However, it's subverted as he was just pricked by Jefferson's necklace and was freaking out over nothing.

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"Well, looks like they're about done, H.E.L.P.eR. Are you ready to meet... The Venture Brothers?"

— Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture

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