Wow what a strange 20 years it’s been. The Venture Bros. debuted on Adult Swim in February 2003, and what was seemingly a good natured parody of Jonny Quest soon exploded into a caustic, hilarious exploration of the price of narcissism, toxic masculinity and bad parenting. While seven seasons of the show eked out over the years, in September, 2020 word leaked out that the show had been canceled. Things looked bleak, what with an added pandemic and all, but Cartoon Network came to the rescue with the offer of a feature-length movie to tie up the loose ends of what would have been Season Eight. It’s called The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart – an ominous title that gives a hint at the bizarre goings on in the tale. But we wouldn’t have it any other way.
You’ll be able to see for yourself later in the week: Baboon Heart comes out on digital on July 21st and BluRay on July 25th.
In this interview, conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike, I got a few minutes to catch up with series creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick. As you can see, it was an all too brief conversation, but we got to touch on a few major points. It’s all the more fortunate that we got to do so as their appearance at San Diego Comic-Con has been canceled due to the strike.
Brief as it was, it was a blast to Go Team Venture one more time. (And if words are daunting, you can watch a video of the interview above. (This transcript has been edited for clarity.)
MacDonald: So we have15 minutes to cover 20 years – I don’t know how we can even do it! First off. I mean, I’ve been with you guys a lot of the on this. How does it feel to have told the story that I assume you set out to tell?
Doc Hammer: Well, I don’t think we set out to tell a story. And we never prepared an ending to the story. This is just how it organically happened. The Venture Brothers is just a bunch of great ideas and bad mistakes made by two people. That’s what it is. It feels sad to say goodbye. I’ll be honest, I’m not ashamed of saying I would keep going with this in a heartbeat. But at the same time, I’m very proud of our film, and it doesn’t have a lot of resolution, but it’s got a lot of emotional resolution. If not just emotional, it’s touching base with our fans and touching base with our characters.
MacDonald: Jackson, how about you? How are you liking right now?
Jackson Publick: I concur. You know, I’m bummed. It wasn’t part of the plan to go out this way. But I think we rose to the occasion, I think we did a pretty good job on this thing and made it work.
MacDonald: You definitely did. I’ve seen the movie. And it’s so much fun – there was a lot crammed in –
Hammer: You should have seen the first draft! (general laughter)
MacDonald: That was my next question. This was originally going to be Season Eight and now it’s a movie, of about an hour and 20 minutes, I believe. So how did you shrinky-dink it down?
Publick: Just by grabbing a couple of things off the rack that we really liked. And then starting fresh and going well, what does this need? What’s the most important thing that needs to happen?
Hammer: I was gonna go with your metaphor. And then we had to pair it with a nice pair of socks. Yeah, find the right shoes. It’s true. We picked a very colorful pair of pants, and a shirt that goes with nothing. So yeah, we need a jacket that kind of apologizes for the shirt. And we need a belt that makes you forget about the pants.
Publick: There’s a few broad strokes. They’re almost like allusions we made to ourselves. They’re like little throwbacks to a season that never happened, that only we understand. Like, Oh, that has to be in there because we wanted that in there. But it kind of works for the context because everything else was fresh and new and tailor made for this situation.
Hammer: We made it for fans. This is not going to bring anybody into the Venture-verse. I don’t think anybody that watches it goes wow, they waited to the last episode to flesh out Brick Frog. It’s like, there are so many weird Venturian – wow first time ever said that? I said Venture-Verse. Will I accept Venture-verse? Venture-roos? There’s so many Venturian places that we go that I believe a fan will go, oh, yeah, I miss these people.
MacDonald: What was a little bit of the behind the scenes, because, the news came out that the show was being canceled, and of course, the sound of the hearts breaking across the world, cried out, could be heard crying.
Hammer: It was a rift in the cosmos. Venture Brothers got canceled.
MacDonald: But then there was this tweet of hope, saying we still want to work with you. So what really happened?
Publick: We got canceled in March of 2020. And we just were not supposed to talk about it for a while. And then immediately, they said, Do you want to talk about doing this through Warner Home Video and doing a sort of last hurrah, long form special, and we were like, yeah! Then it just takes a long time to lock down a deal, so at some point it started leaking out that we were canceled, and I felt compelled to answer it. I think Ken Plume blew the lid off, either by accident or on purpose? Or maybe I responded to a comment that he made or something on Twitter. And then it was like, oh, cat’s out of the bag, but I was like, Well, screw it.
MacDonald: I mean, I think during that period, March 2020, a lot of things were happening.
Publick: Yeah. We waited for just the right moment.
MacDonald: The world is ending. Let’s cancel the Venture Brothers, too!
Hammer: Yeah!
MacDonald: I mean, I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. But what are some of the things that like you’re saying, you put in these things that were special to you? What were some of the things that you had to put in there, some of the characters you had to address?
Hammer: If a fan watches it, though, they’ll spot all these little things, you can’t walk away without seeing very specific people. You need to see Shoreleave again, you need to see Billy again, you need to see even Perfect Gentleman. It’s a tightrope walk, because there are so many people that we wanted to have in this, but we can’t. So we needed good representatives of the Venture universe to kind of pull this story ahead. And we also need it to be about the Venture Brothers, which is, you know, your Monarch, Doc, and your Hank and Dean. These are important people. And then there are immediately ancillary characters. So if you have Doc, you need Brock, you have Monokini 21. You have Dr. Girlfriend. It did it itself when we decided what it’s going to be about, which is it’s going to be about the Venture Brothers. So that’s what we did. We knew who we had to have in it.
Publick: But we didn’t even really start there. What we started with was, what do we have to answer for from the Season Seven finale? I mean, maybe we’re idiots for not doing a standalone movie, but we could not stop ourselves. We need to pick up from five minutes after that thing ended the way we would have if we were doing Season Eight, because
Hammer: That’s the Venture way.
Jackson: Yeah that’s the Venture way. We left cliffhangers and so that automatically meant we got to address Hank, we got to address the Monarch/Dr. Venture thing. And we needed to resolve what happened between Hank and Dean. Those were the most important things and then the other plot machinations and the mysterious new villain woman and, the helper pod and all that stuff. That was more of the like, oh, how do we make a stupid adventure show? What are the trips we throw in there and bounce it off of all this baggage and emotional stuff that we have to accomplish? And then Orpheus entered as a way to make Dean going after Hank much more fun than Dean taking a bus by himself.
MacDonald: Which was a great relationship. So we have just a few more minutes. I have two things I have to ask you. I’m sure you can’t answer either of them in five minutes! The Venture Brothers was a show about toxic masculinity. And without giving too much away, this movie does sort of address the female element. But it’s still, you know, it’s a boy’s world. Was that on purpose, is what I’m asking.
Hammer: You’re so correct, because you want to say it’s a man’s world. It is not. It’s a boy’s world. This whole world is not about – I mean we can go and sit there and armchair diagnose our characters very quickly. Doc is a narcissist. He was made that way by his father. And it’s a horrible fucking thing that is real. And we have to deal with it in government, it’s a real thing. It’s just the Venture Brothers were able to talk about it in a way that wasn’t shaming, and wasn’t condoning. It’s a very unique thing that we did, and I don’t think we set out to do it. The topic of toxic masculinity from the first episode of the Venture Brothers was just out there. Or at least Episode Two. About how Doc had a father that was an asshole.
Publick: And specifically also just adolescent male fantasy is what this adventure genre is. It’s what superhero comics are. To play in that world, these are dumb men’s worlds. And then for us to go, well, this is what happens when you don’t have a mommy or a reasonable female voice. Any women you meet is either a femme fatale or a potential love interest and that’s reductive and damaging, so this is why none of these characters have grown up. This is why they’re trapped in circles in their lives, and our characters are the first ones to start breaking out of it. This is kind of about escaping your generational parental bullshit to some extent.
Hammer: They’re not just toxic masculinity, but hopefully looking at it where people can find a roadmap out. We’re not giving you the answers, but we’re definitely pointing and going, you should recognize this paradigm. This is everywhere. This is the road to forgiveness, that you have to embrace this and not perpetuate it. Venture Brothers wasn’t trying to be a public service announcement. It was trying to entertain you in a way that made you kind of uncomfortable, but go I think I’m learning about myself watching this mess. And that’s all we ever wanted to do. And we made our mistakes as creators. We’ve done some things that we look back on and go, boy, that was a young kid trying to be funny. And we luckily were on the air long enough to go, forgive us. And please understand us. This is I think what we’re talking about here, and our viewers just go Yeah, yeah, I think that is what we’re saying. And we talked about topics that were horrifying to people. We had a lot of gender issues in our show that were handled in this David Bowie casualness of just like, people have gender problems. That is just who we are. They’re not frightening. They’re not weird. They’re just something that happens.
Publick: But the other people engaging in the stupid boys world are the ones who go like, bleah, I don’t know about that.
Hammer: Yeah. And that those are realities, we’ve very much lampshaded our ideas like idiots the whole time. Monarch has a big speech where he calls somebody “r——“, somebody immediately goes, we don’t say that. And then the Monarch goes, but I’m the villain. We literally put it out to say they don’t look at the Monarch as anything but a villain. He’s going to say he’s not the worst thing–
Publick: Also, he just murdered six guys. That’s awful too, right?
Hammer: Yeah. Apparently murdering doesn’t matter to you guys. But yeah, we said a lot of things out loud where people could go, yeah, shit, the Monarch’s an asshole.
I never got to ask my second last question! But here’s a clip of the movie. The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is coming to Digital 7/21 and Blu-ray on 7/25!
