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  • by InActionMan
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I have watched “ORB” at least three times and I still cannot fully wrap my mind around it.

A lot of random thoughts, speculations and observations:

The Venture Brothers is about to get as Epic as “Lost”

I thought that the flashbacks were primarily aimed at “League of Extraordinary Gentleman” though someone on another board has mentioned “The Divinci Code as another source of inspiration”

The Guild of ??Good Intent??

Members:

Colonel Lloydd Venture

Eugen Sandow
World Famous Strongman
Father of modern Body Building
Personal Body Guard to Colonel Venture

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Noted 19th Century Author

Alistair Crowley
Satanist
Subject of Ozzy Osborn song

Oscar Wilde
Noted 19th Century Author and persecuted homosexual

Fantomas
Classic French literary villain considered the prototype for the modern villain
Ancestor of Phantom Limb

Vernian Robur
Created by Jules Verne. A sort of Captian Nemo of the sky.
He is most likely the owner of the airship upon which the Guild is traveling.

Possibly:

Teddy Roosevelt
26th President of the United States
There is a rather large thread on Adult Swim where it is speculated that this person:

http://pics.livejournal.com/jacksonpublick/pic/00054ywf/

who they have dubbed “Patriotic Guy” may in fact be Teddy Roosevelt. Kept alive by super science for over 150 years? Is he the “Secret President of the United States” and head of O.S.I.?

Grover Cleveland
Inventor of the Presidential Time Machine

There are several others that I could not even begin to ID. Perhaps someone with knowledge of 19th and early 20th century literary characters could provide more information?

Colonel Venture actually sounds more like The Monarch than Rusty, J.J. or Jonas. He is most definitely voice by Jackson Public and he even seems to be animated to move a bit more like The Monarch than any of the Ventures we have met before.

Kano and Sandow the bodyguards before Brock seem to be sensitive souls, good at what they do but, not in love with violence like Brock. They seem to have friendly nurturing personalities. However, Brock does seem to be softening up a bit. Does exposure to the Venture family somehow bring out the softer side in these hard men?

Kano is apparently a fan of Howard Stern evidenced by his SIRIUS Howard Stern Fist logo T – Shirt.

Sanodow’s Message

“(Garbeled?) man of the future. Sandow is speaking to you from beyond the grave. The voice you now hear is coming from the Victor Talking Machine……..Duty that no man, dagger, bullets or blow would harm Colonel Venture. Foolishly, Sandow believed the device and my dreadful orders to protect it to be a myth. That changed, everything changed……Sandow knew what had to be done. Men like us follow orders. Yes future man, we really are pawns. But pawns that move in that crazy L-shape like that horse piece.”

I think that the purpose of the ORB may be to unite good and evil (or protagonist and antagonist if you want to be politically correct to not offend any guild members).

Where do the orders to kill anyone that tries to activate ORB come from?

We may be getting a time travel adventure. Who took final possession of Grover Cleveland’s Presidential Time Machine from “Are You There God… Its Me Dean”? or the time travel device from “Escape to the house of Mummies, Part II”. Also didn’t Dean say that angry guys from the past keep showing up to yell at Rusty.

Team Venture 3.0 can actually get things done. Is the real talent of the Ventures to bring together disparate people into a cohesive unit? As bad as Jonas Sr. could be at times I don’t think that anyone could accuse him of being a bigot. Team Venture 2.0 was incredibly diverse especially for the sixties. It included Blacks, Jews, Asians, Bi-Sexuals, Hispanics and half-man/half-fish.

The portrayal of Kano in the Rusty Venture Cartoons is quite racist just like Johnny Quest’s treatment of Asians.

Hector does not look very happy to be part of Team Venture.

A mind blowing game changing episode. I probably miss a lot and I look forward to reading what others think.
  • 0
Aug. 9, 2008, 2:53am
  • by Ticking-Glock
  • (unregistered id: EF20B98917)
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Wow, thanks for breaking that down for me. I didn't get to watch it on my own computer so the sound quality sucked during my viewing.

I suspect though that Grover Cleveland's Presidential Time Machine was a throwaway concept.
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Aug. 9, 2008, 3:48am
  • by Jay
  • (unregistered id: 226A569CB6)
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Great post. Thanks for your thoughts and research.
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Aug. 9, 2008, 7:07am
  • by Josh Geller
  • (unregistered id: 89EB6F36BA)
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Aleister Crowley was a lot more than a Satanist and the subject of an Ozzy Osborn song, though he was the one and is the other.

He was a poet, wrote several classic books about magick and related disciplnes, climbed mountains, traveled the World, was openly bisexual and into S&M back when it was actually illegal to commit 'the unnatural crime of sodomy' and started his own religion, which still goes on. He has been a major, if sort of hidden, influence on the 20th century, continuing on into the 21st.


.
  • 0
Aug. 9, 2008, 9:19am
  • by cgeye
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With the real Crowley involved with the superscientist Jack Whiteside Parsons (inventor of the solid castable rocket fuel, as in the Shuttle), it makes sense that he'd be on an earlier version of Team Venture -- if he could have sidled up to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project boys, he would have -- anything to be that close to, um, raw power ....
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Aug. 9, 2008, 11:50am
  • by Experimental
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Actually, Crowley wasn't so much a satanist as that satanists were influenced by him (i.e. the use of pentagram). He studied and borrowed from all sorts of magical traditions in coming up with his own religion, from ancient Egyptian to Buddhism, and it was centered around the belief in free will as the primary force that shapes one's destiny. Yet somehow the scandalous things are what people always remember. . . .
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Aug. 11, 2008, 9:06am
  • by DeimosMasque
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Well he did also claim to be the "Great Beast" and the "Anti-Christ." However he must be able to fly, because he was still alive during World War 2.
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Aug. 11, 2008, 6:21pm
  • by Creepy Crooner
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You are totally right. Crowley wasn't an actual Satanist, but Anton LaVey did use Crowley's writings and the religion he had created (called Thelema) as the main basis for his version of Satanism. Mostly, Crowley was known as an occultist and writer (as well as a hedonist and a bisexual, which was stated above).
He also states that he was the last person to add his "genius" to the ORB, leading us to believe that he may have actually completed the device. Not sure if this will have any sort of implications on the story or the finale but thought it was worth mentioning.
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Aug. 11, 2008, 10:23pm
  • by Josh Geller
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Crowley certainly was a Satanist, but what he meant by that is not what most people mean by that.

.
  • 0
Aug. 12, 2008, 6:22am
  • by jon
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the first thing that popped into my mind with that guy smoking a cigarette saying they weren't a guild of 'calamitous intent'

was Mister Monday. from the Monarch's time in prison.
no?
looked like him.
  • 0
Aug. 9, 2008, 12:14pm
  • by Trashcan Man
  • (unregistered id: B16763C1BD)
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That was Oscar Wilde, though it did sound a lot like Mister Monday. Perhaps that their default "Dandy Englishman" voice.

Incidentally, not that this should mean anything, but I took it initially that the airship was involved in an air battle during WW1 (the implications seemed as such, as people felt that the fate of humanity was in the balance during the war) but then Oscar Wilde died in 1900. That doesn't mean anything, really, as the writers could do whatever they want (such as Wilde faking his death in 1900 to avoid persecution in England).

Tesla as an antagonist seems to be rather tantalizing- he was, in his day, as close to a super-scientist in reality as you could get, as his inventions more so than Edison's seemed to be in the realm of science fiction- at least contemporarily. Don't forget that when he died during WW2, there were serious enough rumors that he was working on a "Death Ray" at the behest of the US government and that the FBI took custody of all his documents upon his death.

Excellent use of real and fictional characters from the Victorian era. This may be the most intellectual episode they've come up with yet.

Here's a pic of Eugen Sandow looking an awful lot like his cartoon version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sandow1.jpg
  • 0
Aug. 9, 2008, 6:29pm
  • by InActionMan
  • (unregistered id: D7B1C846A9)
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Pulled this off Wikipedia Wars from 1890 to 1900
* 1890 Dog Tax War in New Zealand
* 1890 First Franco-Dahomean War
* 1891 Chilean Civil War
* 1892-1894 Second Franco-Dahomean War
* 1893-1894 Rif War (1893)
* 1894-1895 First Sino-Japanese War
* 1895-1896 First Italo–Ethiopian War
* 1895-1898 Cuban War of Independence
* 1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War
* 1896-1898 Philippine Revolution
* 1897 First Greco-Turkish War, (aka the Thirty Days' War)
* 1897-1900 Boxer Rebellion in China
* 1897-1898 Anglo-Pathan War
* 1898 Spanish-American War
* 1899-1902 Second Boer War
* 1899-1902 Thousand Days War
* 1899-1913 Philippine-American War

Wars 1900 to 1910

# 1901-1902 Anglo-Aro War
# 1902-1925 War of Unification of Saudi Arabia
# 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War
# 1904-1909 Black Patch War
# 1906-1909 Pig War
# 1907 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt
# 1908-1909 Moroccan War
# 1908-1909 Persian Civil War
# 1909-1910 Second Rif War
  • 0
Aug. 9, 2008, 7:54pm
  • by Amun-Ra
  • (unregistered id: EBE00567BE)
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I think no matter how we look at it the chronology's a little screwy. For instance, Aleister Crowley was only born in 1875, but for Wilde to be there the events must take place before 1900, when Crowley would only be in his twenties at the latest. I'm not even sure he had changed his name yet (he was born Alick).
  • 0
Aug. 9, 2008, 8:24pm
  • by DeimosMasque
  • (unregistered id: 4A19F71752)
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Well the Guild of Calamitous Intent claims to have been founded in 1910. If you think the inflighting of this other Guild was also the formation of the GoCI, then that places the date slightly.
  • 0
Aug. 11, 2008, 6:25pm
  • by Josh Geller
  • (unregistered id: A0861BFF22)
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Edward Alexander Crowley was Aleister's birth name.


.
  • 0
Aug. 14, 2008, 3:40am
  • by Experimental
  • (unregistered id: 28C9973CE7)
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Also worth noting, I think: Tesla was played by David Bowie in the film "The Prestige".

Plus his coils automatically make him the penultimate villain by default.
  • 0
Aug. 11, 2008, 8:54am
  • by Phil
  • (unregistered id: D3DAE242D1)
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How do his coils make him the second-to-last villain?
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Aug. 11, 2008, 3:21pm
  • by haux
  • (unregistered id: 8B53C9237B)
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yeah, i had that question about the use of "penultimate".

and, really, Tesla should be a hero. Edison should be a villain, that bastard elephant killer and patent-thief.
  • 0
Aug. 11, 2008, 9:44pm
  • by Experimental
  • (unregistered id: 28C9973CE7)
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I was using the common misusage of "penultimate". . . .

Every mad scientist super-villain who was any good mad scientist super-villain had himself some tesla coils back in the day. (Personally, though, I think the guy was unfairly persecuted by Big DC, and it's only fitting he come back for sweet revenge.)
  • 0
Aug. 11, 2008, 9:46pm
  • by Josh Geller
  • (unregistered id: EFD2BC5488)
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Tesla was persecuted by his own messed up personality, inability to get along with people and intense paranoia and addiction to secrecy. That said, he could do stuff that no one was able to do then or is able to do now (like produce ball lightning or something a lot like it at will).

.
  • 0
Aug. 12, 2008, 10:13am
  • by Creepy Crooner
  • (unregistered id: 8F73EA59C9)
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Yep! Bowie did play Doc Tesla in The Prestige. In that film (which was a pretty good but slightly over-long study on the great lengths magicians go to to get revenge on each other for assistant and trick stealing) Tesla is painted as a kind, soft-spoken mad scientist who creates truly fantastical machinery. Edison (though never seen) is presented as the villain - sending his goons to hunt down Tesla, steal his breakthroughs and burn down his lab.
A good movie for fans of EC comics-style revenge twists, mad science and Tesla-as-good guy.
  • 0
Aug. 11, 2008, 10:40pm
  • by Experimental
  • (unregistered id: 28C9973CE7)
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It was a perfect role for him, and excellently executed in my opinion. Plus, the movie also portrays him as someone who's concerned about the ethical ramifications of his inventions.

What I love is how well Tesla-as-villain actually fits the set-up in the Venture universe, in which the so-called heroes are unethical pricks and the villains are not necessarily evil, but almost always perceive themselves as the victims of great wrongs perpetrated by the "good guys". The more I think about it, the more I really want to see him on screen. (Anyone else get this idea of his surrounded by Buck Rogers-esque amazons with ray guns?)
  • 0
Aug. 11, 2008, 10:48pm
Most of you forgot that at the same time Jonny Quest was on Thursday nights before Batman on ABC; NBC on Saturday morning had the pyschodelic SuperPresident show.

http://www.stomptokyo.com/badmoviereport/reviews/S/super_president.html

So why not have Teddy as the secret leader of OSI?
  • 0
Aug. 11, 2008, 9:19pm

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