The second episode of season four returns to a traditional Venture Bros. tale of arching gone awry. The Monarch is holding Hank and Dean for ransom but Captain Sunshine shows up to partially settle a beef with the Monarch while also saving Hank from his clutches. Dean, apparently, wasn’t Captain Sunshine’s type. The fun of “Handsome Ransom” comes as it explores two aspects of the Venture universe. First, we get the hijinks of Monarch and Dr. Venture’s interactions as they consistently bump against the Guild of Calamitous Intent’s laws of arching. The Monarch’s ambitions never fail to either backfire or break the rules of his chosen profession, and the pattern is still as hilarious as it was in season one. Like most of the show’s characters, the Monarch is his own worst enemy.
Captain Sunshine is fundamentally a spoof of Batman mixed with a little Michael Jackson. To cement the Batman comparison, Kevin Conroy (the voice actor for most animated Batman projects) provides the hero’s voice, taking Batman and exaggerating him into a mess of flamboyance and emotion. See, Captain Sunshine is reeling from the death of the third Wonderboy (read: Robin) and sees Hank as a potential new ward. That cues a couple dozen gags regarding Captain Sunshine’s relationships with his young male sidekicks along with no shortage of Batman references. Oh, and wait until you see Sunshine’s alter ego, and for that matter the alter egos of the whole superhero team of which he’s a member.
“Handsome Ransom” will go down as one of the great self-contained episodes of The Venture Bros. thanks to its use of the show’s meat-and-potatoes arching plotline plus the fantastic performance Kevin Conroy gives as Captain Sunshine. Hopefully we get to see him again in some capacity down the line. And the episode’s greatness was accomplished without a single appearance of Brock, too…
