Venice Menace

After T-Bob is caught in a patch of gelatin on a Venice canal, M.A.S.K. hears that V.E.N.O.M. may be operating in the city, though a sample of the jelly from the canal turns out to be plain water with some pollutants. Scott and T-Bob are sent sightseeing and end up in a gondola chase with V.E.N.O.M. boats. V.E.N.O.M. has a stolen two thousand year old map and a sonograph that locates Cleopatra's sunken golden barge, and plans to gel the canals, which leaves every water vehicle in the city useless. M.A.S.K. takes to land vehicles and the Thunderhawk to fight for the barge, which is bound for a museum.

I hope Moses isn't offended.

What does a city of boats do when the water sets? Venice Menace is built on that question, and its answer, for most of the running time, is that everyone climbs out and finds another way to move.

It begins small. T-Bob is wedged in a clump of white gelatin on a canal, Matt Trakker cuts him loose with a small tool, and the stuff is treated as a curiosity until the sample jar turns out to hold nothing but water with a few pollutants in it. That leaves M.A.S.K. with a puzzle and no evidence, while the audience already knows better, because a V.E.N.O.M. drum has been leaking into a boat and the villains spend a whole scene arguing over who should have noticed the drips. The team that ought to be quick to follow a trail is told to go sightseeing, and the villains' chief worry is whether anyone saw them leak.

Here is what the episode is really about: movement. Venice is the one place where the street and the water are the same thing, and the gel turns that street into a surface no boat can use and no car was built for. Every vehicle in the city has to prove it can cope with ground that has stopped behaving, and the best gags and the best action both come out of that single rule. The jokes about banana peels and somebody's jello dessert are the light version; the V.E.N.O.M. vehicle that rolls over the jelly on tracks is the dark one, a machine whose design happens to suit the crime. The dialogue calls it Scorpion, and it is the one craft in the city that gets to enjoy the weather.

The look of the thing carries the premise. The gelled canal is drawn as a pale, ice-like field, and in the frames where Volcano's tyre crushes chunks of it, or a crane hoists a golden barge out of an icy heap (a lovely image!), the stone arcades and lamp posts behind it make the city look like a frozen lake with a skyline. The writing keeps pace with watery puns, and a would-be gondolier is told not to be a stick in the mud; that steady stream of jokes is a decent way to keep a one-note premise lively.

The gondola sequence is the scene most viewers will remember. Scott and T-Bob are released to enjoy themselves, they find that a gondola has no motor, the pole keeps sticking, a good deal of the afternoon is spent overboard, and V.E.N.O.M. craft begin to chase them, so that Piranha is later named as the boat they were playing tag with. It is slapstick, but it is also how the kids stumble into the plot.

The weak spot is the middle. The map that points to the barge is said to have been sealed in an urn two thousand years old and stolen by V.E.N.O.M. itself, and a sonograph pass through the mud finds the wreck almost as soon as anyone looks, so the treasure arrives before there is any doubt about it. The villains also tell us the gel lasts less than an hour, which is a good ticking clock, yet it never shows up as pressure on the heroes. What follows is a run of vehicle beats, some of them lively, such as a purple jet crossing the rooftops under a pair of red beams, strung together without much sense of who is gaining ground, and the finish feels abrupt: the barge just ends up headed for a museum.

As a verdict, this is a competent late-season heist, held up by a good physical premise and a steady supply of light gags rather than by its plot. When a V.E.N.O.M. scheme is built on a single trick, the best response is to let the trick be fun to watch, and this one is!

1. In the episode's audio the V.E.N.O.M. tracked vehicle that drives over the jelly is called Scorpion, while the episode's character list in the stub names Stinger; the wiki's synopsis names only Stinger.
2. The M.A.S.K. wiki lists a paperback novelization of Venice Menace from Knight Books, published in 1986 as number 03 in its series.
3. The M.A.S.K. wiki lists an error in which T-Bob jumps into the gondola from the bridge and Scott is catapulted out, yet T-Bob manages to turn around to face the other direction before Scott falls back down.
4. Among the errors the M.A.S.K. wiki lists is a moment where Calhoun Burns, driving Volcano, says "Hang on, everyone" in Jacques LaFleur's voice.
5. The M.A.S.K. wiki also notes that when Miles Mayhem hands the map to Sly Rax, Cliff Dagger appears in the shot where Bruno Sheppard should have been.
6. The M.A.S.K. wiki's Safety Tips page says every episode closed with a tip, and here Scott finds T-Bob lifting weights and tells him to work up to each level gradually.