#doctor orpheus

[katchcern]

Been watching them Venture Bros

[homuku]

this is the defender of our cosmos its so over

[softiesooshiscribbles]

Saw @turtle-trash 's darling vbros oc Achilles, and my heart melted 😭❤️

[crispyafterdark]

Dr. Orpheus' outfit in Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart.

Seeing him wearing this is quite the unexpected treat, especially for the Orpheus fans. Seriously, he looks so hot in that outfit.

[zombolouge]

Emmrich is really just this guy huh

[theperfectquestion]

ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT'S ME, DEAN

The Venture Bros. approach to God Almighty is in line with its approach to all authority: one more rubber mask on one more old weirdo.

A revelation hit me during a recent rewatch of adult swim's long-running animated pastiche of adventure fiction, The Venture Bros. It is such a large scale Biblical relevation that I can't believe I didn't notice it before: Yahweh, the Lord of the Old Testament, is a recurring minor character, voiced by Archer and Bob Burger's H. Jon Benjamin.

For the uninitiated, one of the supporting players in The Venture Bros. is Doctor Orpheus, who rents rooms from Doc 'Rusty' Venture, the father of the titular twins. Doctor Orpheus is one of my favourite characters in the show, because he is a protagonist of a whole other pulp fiction genre who is comfortable being a secondary character in the world of The Venture Bros.

Orpheus is a mix of Doctor Strange any number of Christopher Lee's characters from Hammer Horror films. He looks like Vincent Price in those occasions when he is being chummy with Kermit the Frog. And this Sorceror Supreme, who guards the very fabric of reality from unfathomable peril, who commands his own super-team with its own villains and long-term plots, serves the sitcom role of kindly but wacky neighbour, and the father of young Dean Venture's hopeless love interest, Triana.

A brilliant recurring joke is that, although magic is definitely real in the universe of The Venture Bros., and that Doctor Orpheus unquestionably has talents that bring the entire nature of reality into question, Doc Venture refuses to acknowledge or respect magic. As a former boy adventurer, he has seen so many supernatural threats pulled out from under their rubber masks that, as an adult, he simply doesn't waste a microsecond of his time considering magic as anything other than a cheap trick. Doctor Orpheus is often torn between defefending his professional pride and placating his often unkind landlord.

There's a lot to Doctor Orpheus, but the aspect I'd like to focus on is the fact that he regularly visits an extradimensional entity in his daughter's closet. Orpheus' command of spatial dimensions is dealt with matter-of-factly: his rooms are physically located elsewhere, and the abandoned arachnid research centre he rents on the Venture property is just a convenient place to warp space so that he can access them from Colorado. You see, Doctor Orpheus is recently divorced, and retains full custody of his teenage daughter, Triana. One has to read between the lines here, but presumably the Venture Compound is close to where Triana's mother has moved, and this extradimensional trick is a way for Triana to be able to visit her mother while being legally resident at his address. The fact that this is treated so casually is a joke in itself, and is another Definitely Magical thing that Rusty completely ignores, though there may be some connection between Doctor Orpheus' rooms and the reason why Rusty, who is a notoriously workshy and light-fingered kind of super-scientist, is able to produce the world's first functional teleporter later on in the series.

So with all this malarky being commonplace, it is only a small elaboration to say that, within Doctor Orpheus' house, there is a portal to another dimension. But due to some magical snarl he can't straighten out, the portal is located inside his daughter's wardrobe. Orpheus goes inside the closet to talk to the Master.

The Master, all all-knowing, shape-shifting entity who lives beyond time and space and who mentors Doctor Orpheus in the magical arts (though, in practice, we see him act more of a life coach), is presented without ceremony or occasion. Even his flat voice which, as mentioned, is from the proudly rangeless but reliably hilarious mouth of H. Jon Benjamin, undercuts the enormity of his presence. The Master seems to spend most of his mental energy coming up with live-action productions of custom Aesop's Fables for Orpheus using his shape-shifting abilities and, occasionally, a put-upon assistant. These morality plays seem to always, by accident or design, lead to the Master getting his rocks off in some way or another. The Master's horniness seem to cast him in the mold of a Tibetan vajrācārya - after all, if Orpheus is Doctor Strange, then the Master is his Ancient One, who is vaguely Tibetan in origin. The joke is that rather than being enigmatic, the Master blurts out the morals and meanings of his koans almost immediately. But then in the Season 4 episode, 'The Better Man,' the Master shows that he may have origins further West.

So in that episode Triana, Doctor Orpheus' daughter, enters her closet and unexpectedly encounters the Master. We have established before that only Orpheus can enter the Master's realm. The Master of course was expecting her and has assumed a form to deliver a parable. In the form of an adult Dean Venture, the Master reveals that Dean is an artificially produced clone, insists that his genes are therefore polluted, and expresses profound disgust at the fact that Dean is uncircumcised. He outright tells Triana to leave the Venture Compound to live with her mother and claim her birthright as her mother's pupil.

To me, all this feels very unlike something a Tibetan Tantric Master would say. All this talk of bloodlines, foreskins and abominations makes me suspect that the Master is actually Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, in one of his burning bush moods. Now, in any other show, the existence of God Almighty living in a character's wardrobe might be more of a big deal. You could certainly build an entire series around that exact premise. But it is perfectly consistent for The Venture Bros. to present the ultimate authority of the Universe as a funny side character who appears in four episodes and has only a small bearing on the plot. That's all in a day's work for The Venture Bros., a show that shares Rusty's deep-rooted skepticism of any and all authority figures and the structures that support them.

For example, we meet the President of the United States on one occasion and he is a crass, childish buffoon who spouts out reheated Clinton jokes. That's fairly run-of-the-mill, but the secret agent characters of The Venture Bros. often invoke the Secret President. We never meet Secret President, and the character who is most likely to have encountered them in person, General Timothy Treister, talks about Secret President in the tone of voice a 13 year old would use to brag about their girlfriend in Canada. As it is, we're given no reason why there should be a Secret President or what function they serve, except to give spies something to brag about. In the United States of The Venture Bros., the fake President is an idiot and the real President doesn't do anything.

The pattern repeats: the diabolical Guild of Calamitous Intent, which dominates the world of professional villany, is governed by a board of shadowy figures who, once we get to know them, are all either has-beens or senile and I've of them is literally a clown. Their leader, The Sovereign, appears either as an intimidating floating head like The Wizard of Oz or as David Bowie, though we learn later he is just a shapeshifter who takes the form of David Bowie because he wants to be cool. The Guild goes through a few changes of management throughout the series, but it doesn't really matter who is at the top - the whole operation is run by two admin goofuses who are perfectly content to prop up a desk and pee in bottles.

Even when we meet the Illuminati, the chosen powerful few who work behind the scenes to keep the torch of civilisation alive by managing technological progress, they turn out to be a VR simulation designed to allow intelligence agencies to hoard the best gizmos for themselves.

When Doctor Orpheus detects the presence of a malicious evil so great that he nearly suffers a panic attack - Doctor Orpheus, who routinely travels to Hell and back without too much trouble - an unholy entity that turns out to be a vintage AI built by Rusty's father, this unspeakable Satan is easily distracted by a roll of old videotape projected onto her camera.

This is a world where it is rubber masks all the way down. Anybody who presents themselves as an authority is invariably mistaken. Doomsday devices are easily defused, or revealed to have never been anything of the sort. Secret are kept by braggarts, heroes are hollow, crowns are held by those who couldn't find a chair when the music stopped, and power is a ball that is always fumbled. So why wouldn't God Almighty live in a teenager's closet, licking his balls, obsessing over foreskins, while the world muddled along without Him?

[spockvarietyhour]

[tlwebb]

[cupid-circus]

he's here and happy to serve

[bonesdoesart]

A page of Venture Brothers characters :)))

[sillysiha]

Got this darling Orpheus charm from @viktorsaintclaire 's shop! (The note doodle was so cute tduut)

Get a magic man for yourself here! 💜🤟

[deyasworld]

Has anybody talked about how interesting Doctor Orpheus’ name is? Because he’s a necromancer named after the myth of the legendary poet who went to the underworld to bring his lover back to life.

He was successful to convince Hades to let him take her with him! But he lost her due to his own foolishness and insecurities! And that’s EXACTLY why he lost Tatyana, and why his daughter chose to move with her mom. I just think it’s genius, like the names of other characters in the show 😄

[thecupsmith]

The older I get, the more I think about this and since I couldn't find it anywhere else I decided to put it here. It is such a good observation of how and why weird shit gets past down: we're trying to save other people from our own lives. And while that is noble, we often don't tell people (or even know ourselves) that is what we are trying to do or why, so it seems inexplicable.

[softiesooshiscribbles]

They're not late just early for next Halloween 🩵💜

[crispyafterdark]

A highlight reel of Dr. Orpheus in his Zardoz-inspired outfit from Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart.

[cinder-no]

Doctor Byron Orpheus - Pony Town