Venus Flytrap (WKRP in Cincinnati)
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Venus Flytrap is a character on the television situation comedy WKRP in Cincinnati (1978-82), played by Tim Reid. He was the evening and early night-time disc jockey at WKRP, and during the course of the series he also became assistant program director.
[edit] Character History
Venus Flytrap is the pseudonym used by disc jockey Gordon Sims, the evening DJ at the radio station WKRP. His real name was not revealed until late in the show's first season. The background of his character is complicated, but pieced together from various episodes it seems to be as follows: Gordon Sims is from New Orleans. His parents were divorced and his mother raised him. At the age of 22 he was drafted into the army and served in the Vietnam War. After seeing another soldier go crazy and commit suicide, Gordon had had enough of the war and deserted; he spent the next several years hiding out under assumed names, which explains why most of his colleagues at WKRP didn't know his real name at first. When station manager Arthur Carlson found out about Venus's secret, he convinced him to stop running and turn himself in. On the basis of what he went through in the war, as well as the fact that he was near the end of his tour of duty when he deserted and therefore wouldn't have seen any more combat, the investigating officer decided not to court-martial him.
While he was on the lam, Gordon became a schoolteacher in his native New Orleans, and worked part-time as a disc jockey under the name "The Duke of Funk." As a teacher, he became frustrated with his inability to reach his students (whom he described as "hoodlums") and quit. He then accepted an offer from Andy Travis, a friend who was impressed with Gordon's talent as a DJ, to come and be the new evening/night-time man at WKRP in Cincinnati, where Andy had just taken over as program director. However, Andy decided that Gordon needed to change his image: new clothes, new style, new name. He convinced Gordon to dress in outlandish, multi-colored clothes (on the basis that it would help him act cooler and become a better radio personality) and gave him his new name, based in part on the planet that ruled his astrological sign: "Venus Flytrap." ("I'm a plant that eats bugs," Gordon lamented.) Andy duplicitously introduced Venus to the station's owner, Mama Carlson, as "the number-one night-time DJ in this country," and Venus lied and told her that his audience in New Orleans was "the biggest." Mama Carlson's research soon confirmed who Venus really was, but she decided not to say anything.
Like his colleague and friend Dr. Johnny Fever, Venus picks the music he wants to play. He plays a lot of contemporary hits by artists like Kenny Loggins ("This is It") and Earth, Wind and Fire ("After the Love Has Gone"), but he also sometimes violates Andy's rock n' roll format by playing jazz music like "Remembering the Rain" by Bill Evans. His style as a DJ is smooth, soft-spoken and sexy; he calls his listeners "my children" (something he made up after he accidentally addressed his listeners as if they were a classroom full of students) and says things like "This is Venus Flytrap, here to brighten, tighten and enlighten your starlight hours." He sometimes punctuates his statements by banging a small gong, and he turns down the lights in the broadcast booth in order to create a more mellow mood for his broadcasts. He also takes advantage of his working hours -- he's on the air after almost everyone else at the station has gone home -- to entertain women in the broadcast booth.
Despite the way he dresses and his occasional use of '70s vernacular slang like "what's happening," Venus is actually one of the more straitlaced members of the WKRP staff. He is somewhat conservative on social issues; he is against "hard drugs," sometimes expresses disapproval over the sexual content in modern song lyrics and television shows ("I saw, at eight o'clock, two adults arguing about abortion -- now, is that right?"), and his theory of parenting is that "there's nothing wrong with [discipline] as long as it's tempered with love." And unlike the perpetually cash-strapped Johnny, Venus is good at managing money; he is very knowledgeable about playing the stock market.
Also unlike Johnny, who is more or less content being a DJ, Venus is determined to go on to bigger things: "I can't spin records all my life." When he turns 30 in the second season, he looks at his wardrobe and asks himself "does a grown man dress like this?" Wanting to make more of his career, he considers accepting the job of program director at WKRP's competitor, WREQ, an all-automated station where all the programming decisions are made from corporate headquarters. He turns down the job when he finds out that the station only wants him so it can have a token black employee.
Working at a station where all the other employees are white, Venus sometimes worries that he is losing touch with black culture. There are a number of jokes that play on the fact that Venus is rather "white" in his cultural tastes: Dr. Johnny Fever sometimes seems to know more about black performers than Venus does, and in the episode "Daydreams," when Venus imagines what he would like to be, he becomes a bland, unctuous Las Vegas stand-up comedian in the style of Joey Bishop. In the episode "Changes," when Venus learns that he is going to be interviewed by a reporter from a militant black magazine, he fears that the article will expose the fact that "All I know [about black culture] is what I see on The Jeffersons." He tries to fool the interviewer by adopting what he thinks of as a more typically African-American wardrobe and way of speaking. To his surprise, the reporter turns out to be white: the only white employee at an otherwise all-black magazine. Before the interview starts, the reporter explains his situation, which parallels Venus's exactly, and pours out his feelings and, by extension, Venus's: he cares for the people he works with, but he feels a little uncomfortable at being the odd man out (a humorous moment occurs during the conversation when the reporter laments that there are two gorgeous women at the place he works at, but because they are black and he is white, he doesn't feel he could ever ask them out successfully; Venus does his best to look nonplussed at the humorous inversion of his own situation).
Another episode dealing with racial issues is "A Family Affair," whose script is credited to the actor who played Venus, Tim Reid. The episode touches on the relationship between Venus and Andy: they are friends who like to assume that they have "put all that black-white junk behind us," but when Venus goes out with Andy's sister, Andy gets angry without fully being able to explain why. In the end, Andy has to grudgingly admit that there was a racial motivation to the way he reacted, and goes overboard trying to prove that he does not, in fact, object to Venus dating his sister, forcing the two of them to dance together just so he can show that he doesn't have a problem with it. Andy and Venus finally patch up their differences by teaming up to punch out a open, unapologetic racist in a barroom.
A very popular episode focusing on Venus is "Venus and the Man" (originally called "Venus Flytrap Explains the Atom"), an episode written by series creator and showrunner Hugh Wilson. In it, Cora Isley, the station's cleaning woman, tells Venus that her son Arnold is planning to drop out of high school, and Venus offers to talk to the boy. Arnold comes to the station to see Venus, and turns out to be the huge, muscular leader of a street gang. Venus has to figure out how to make Arnold believe that education is worthwhile when Arnold is already making more money than he would make at any "respectable" job. He does so by explaining to Arnold that everything in life is a matter of either "survival" or "conquest," and that Arnold, who is mostly interested in conquest, hates school because it has "conquered" him. Arnold admits that he hates the feeling of being weak and powerless that he gets when he can't understand something in school, but Venus offers to prove to him that it doesn't have to be that way: he bets that he can teach Arnold the basics of the atom in two minutes, and Arnold agrees to go back to school and finish out the year if he can do so. In a memorable sequence, Venus explains the structure of the atom by pretending that the protons, neutrons and electrons are rival gangs competing for control of a neighborhood that consists of "block after block of nothing." Before Arnold realizes it, he is able to recite all the features of an atom. He then admits that it feels good to know something most other people don't know, and Venus explains that the learning is itself a form of conquest. Arnold keeps his part of the bargain and goes back to school, but Venus warns Cora that the odds are against Arnold continuing in school after the year is out. The episode is also a moment of triumph for Venus, who at once gets to prove himself as a teacher (a profession he failed at earlier in life) and earn the respect of a boy who earlier accuses him of "sounding white" on the air.
Venus appeared in only one episode of the "revival" series, The New WKRP in Cincinnati. The episode, "Venus, We Hardly Knew Ya," showed that Venus had become a successful broadcasting executive, re-adopting his real name of Gordon Sims and not very interested in talking about or remembering his years as Venus Flytrap. This episode was written and directed by Max Tash, who was a producer for the entire run of the original series, so it could be interpreted as being closer to "official" WKRP canon than most of the "New WKRP" episodes, especially since it fit in with the direction Venus seemed to be taking in the original series.
