Thank the gods that we live in the age of television DVDs, YouTube, and network sponsored streaming videos. I am not one of the many Lost fans I know, and I know I won’t become one until I am able to catch up on prior seasons on DVD. There’s just too much about the show I wouldn’t understand without being properly indoctrinated first.

Instead, I had a good friend who took it upon herself to indoctrinate me with The Venture Brothers earlier this year. I’d seen the show before amidst the Adult Swim lineup that used to be filled with bedtime stories for 18-35 year olds when I was in college, but I couldn’t get into it then. And although apparently the show’s first season DVD hit #1 on Amazon sales the day after it came out on Halloween of 2006, it was never one of those inescapable shows. No one I knew made it out of an undergraduate education in the early millennial years without exposure to Aqua Teen Hunger Force. No one. But despite its popularity, Venture Brothers never seemed to become such a cultural tour de force. (Still no idea how police authorities in Boston, a city whose reputation stands on having the most prominent college culture in the country, believed those Mooninite light shows to be terrorist threats. But that’s another story.) And I never had a bunch of guys at the end of a party gather the remaining guests around the glow of a computer screen to watch at least five episodes of the show in a row, which was my introduction to Metalocalypse.

Venture Brothers, dare I say, is a different kind of show. It has the signature Cartoon Network quality of taking the ideals set forth in much older cartoon shows and reverting it for newer, seemingly more cynical generations, and its target audience is much the same. Many of the shows most die-hard fans are left over from the glory days of The Tick – Christopher McCulloch aka Jackson Publick was a lead animator on The Tick and is the brains behind the whole Venture operation. And I learned all of this by the by. I had to. You’re just not going to get the hilarity of a yard sale at the protagonist’s Super Science Compound full of Super Villains from the Guild of Calamitous Intent if you haven’t watched the show from the first episode. I could tell you everything about the show, and it wouldn’t mean squat without actually having experienced it – in its proper order! The show is littered with secrets and subtle (and not-so-subtle references) and easter eggs throughout. And it’s all hand drawn and it’s amazing to behold. Over the past few months, I’ve watched the first two seasons on DVD, holding out for the finale to Season 2 until right before the premiere of this new season.

What else do I have to say about the series itself to make you want to watch it? If you’re interested in the age old battle between Super Scientists and Super Villains, then it’s worth a few hours and a big bump to the top of your Netflix cue. If you reference David Bowie for at least four solid minutes of every other day of your life, then it’s similarly worth it. If you are a fan of Gustav Holst’s The Planets and you recognize some of the suite’s main themes in everyday use, you’ll be a fan. If you’re like me and might fall off of your couch upon hearing one of the show’s many zany Super Villains talk about an embarrassing photo of him making out with Stiv Bators and Lydia Lunch (the latter a friend of the show’s main composer) at the Danceteria, then it’s fully worth it. If you’re a fan of cartoon humor that doesn’t rely on convenient cruxes and random acts of crudeness but rather an intricately woven web of characters and excellent plot lines that reveal the super heroes of yore as the freaks of nature they really are, then I don’t know what you’re doing still reading this blog.

Go buy the first two seasons of Venture Brothers on DVD. NOW.

And go watch the first three episodes of the show’s long-awaited third season on Cartoon Network. NOW. But watch the first two seasons first, or else you will be hopelessly lost. It is worth it. I promise.

Before you get into Season 3, worry not. It integrates perfectly into what has come before it. Trust me. You’ll thank yourself later. Or you’ll also be like me and obsess about coming home to watch VB clips all day while you’re at work. Or you’ll do it at work and lose your job – that’s how addictive it is.