The Venture Bros. was one of Adult Swim’s very first original series and it blazed the trail for sophisticated serialized animated storytelling. Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick’s magnum opus was way ahead of the curve in terms of its subversive superhero obsession and pop culture pastiches. The Venture Bros. seemed to exist in its own universe as episodes would quietly come along every few years before it would go back into hibernation. After a devastating cancelation after its seventh season, it was announced that a movie-length adventure would function as the animated series’ swan song after its two decades on television. The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart meets expectations and provides satisfying closure, but not always how one would expect. The Venture Bros.’s creators graciously break down the development and events of their super-sized finale. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer open up about feeding and starving fandom, retrofitting a whole season into a movie, emotional closure versus narrative closure, and why we can’t talk about Scare Bear.
This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Daniel Kurland: There was such overwhelming support for the series when the initial cancelation was first announced that seemed to help bring this movie together. There’s always been a passionate fandom for the show, but what was it like to experience that level of appreciation when it might have been needed the most?
Jackson Publick: Emotionally, it helped.
Doc Hammer: I’ll just say this right off the bat: we didn’t want to go away. We love The Venture Bros. and we want to make Venture Bros. This was out of our hands and we’re doing what the world will let us do. That being said, our fans have always been wonderful and super reasonable. We’ve gone to a lot of cons and met a lot of fans. 95% of them are people I’d want to hang out with. What we put out is so deeply personal and authentically us that when someone responds to it they’re responding to our humanity. It’s an honor to have that many friends in the world.
Jackson Publick: I think we also haven’t shied away from referencing things that only five people in the world will get. And I think that’s how we grew our fanbase, to some extent, because those people think that we’re talking directly to them. And we are.
Daniel Kurland: I mean, I remember watching–and reading– The Eiger Sanction because of something that you guys said in an audio commentary.
(Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer laugh)
Doc Hammer: Holy shit! I am so sorry. That is one of the ugliest, rapiest films. We never wanted to promote it! We watched that movie with our mouths agape. We were just like, “Wow.” Human relationships were handled like nobody had ever had one! “What is it like when people touch each other? I don’t know…” It’s written by crazy monkeys on a thousand typewriters. We kicked at it, but we never wanted to give it to the world. But how do you not talk about that film?
Daniel Kurland: That’s the beauty of what you guys do! What were some of the biggest and most challenging changes that were faced when this story had to shift from a full season into a movie?
Doc Hammer: In a nutshell, it was something that we had to do. We had begun season eight. We had it mapped out and had written close to four episodes, I think. And we liked them! But now, they’re gone. We had to do what was asked of us though, which was to make a movie that wraps up The Venture Bros. and we wanted very specific emotions to come out of it. And we wanted to answer very specific questions. We wanted this to be a drama that’s fun to watch and we just went away and wrote.
Jackson Publick: The benefit of having started season eight is that we had some building blocks. However, I think that all of the originality of this movie came out of the story’s emotional needs. Yeah, we have multiple Hanks and we’re going to have a building do something stupid, but that was it. They were just little fun, stupid things. It’s when we considered what we really wanted to say here that all of the new material wrote itself. It also inherently squeezed out the unnecessary plot elements that we over-wrote. We just had too much plot and we realized where the important beats really were and then were able to give them even more time and love. It worked out.
Daniel Kurland: It’s such a tight movie, too. Were you given free reign on the movie’s length and was it difficult to condense it down to 83 minutes? Or did it initially have a longer runtime that had to then get pared down?
Jackson Publick: It’s actually ten minutes longer than what we were contracted to do! We had written an outline that was much longer and when we were about half-way through writing the script we knew we were just going to have to pare it way the hell down. That’s where we did all of our cutting. There were only two lines that I cut out from what actually ended up on the finished page. There was just a conversation that was just running a little long. When we thought we had to stick to 70-75 minutes, I started looking for cuts and I couldn’t find any to make other than this one conversation that didn’t need one extra back-and-forth. When we were like, “Hey network, it won’t cost you any more if you let it stay at 81 minutes,” and they were fine with that. It was originally supposed to be between 70 and 75.
Doc Hammer: And that was just so the thing would work properly. When we were writing, we put together practically a whole draft that we eventually gutted. We removed characters and scenes that are still stuck in my head and I can’t put them anywhere, so I’m sad. That warehouse scene with Wide Whale, man. It’s a masterpiece and I don’t even know if I saved it! It was like during season eight when I thought we were canceled so I just went, “Delete!”
Jackson Publick laughs
Daniel Kurland: On that note, The Venture Bros. has such a huge extended cast of characters and obviously everyone can’t make the cut. I was very excited that you worked Brick Frog in.
Jackson Publick laughs
Doc Hammer: Look, not only did we work him in, but he’s crucial! That was almost a meta joke because people would sometimes talk about Brick Frog and he was such an ancillary character. People were like, “This is the one character that The Venture Bros. hasn’t developed, so let’s do it ourselves.” So on our last beat we’re like, “Fuck you! We developed him. Goodbye.” That was why I kept touching on Brick Frog.
Jackson Publick: There are so many Easter Eggs and happy accidents where stupid stuff came together and none of it was intentional. None of it felt forced, either. We got everyone that we wanted into the movie, but not in a dopey way where there are cameos for no reason. It just kind of worked. Colonel Gentleman lives where Pete and Billy live. So they get lines.
Doc Hammer: Also, now we know everything about Brick Frog.
Jackson Publick: We wrote a backstory for him!!
Doc Hammer: Jackson and I wrote a full backstory for him that we kept investigating. It’s fully fleshed out. We could write a full episode on Brick Frog right now and that was all just to make a tiny joke. That’s the level of idiocy you’re dealing with.
Jackson Publick: I was walking around the Queens waterfront, taking pictures for references, but then we’d get distracted talking about Brick Frog and his history!
Daniel Kurland: That’s lovely though! Similarly, Scare Bear is a character that the audience really went nuts with when it comes to theories. Can you expand at all on him and what the original plan might have been there? Did you ever think who might be in that costume or was he always just a cryptic force of nature?
Doc Hammer: I’m going to tell you one thing about Scare Bear and then we’re going to move on because we can’t expand on him–
Jackson Publick: We’re going to tell you two things.
Doc Hammer: If we were ever going to truly investigate Scare Bear then that movie would be very long. So we couldn’t do it. We just couldn’t do it and so we thought that the best way to approach Scare Bear–who Jackson and I still talk about–is to not talk about him. There are certain things that The Venture Bros. is very good about answering and others where it’s like, “You’ll figure it out.” The Scare Bear had to take a bullet here. Can’t go there. We don’t have the time.
Jackson Publick: Having said that though, we never had a plan for Scare Bear. Scare Bear was chaos. Having said that, I did have to cut Scare Bear from the opening sequence. He was in the first draft of the script where there’s one more detail that followed Scare Bear.
Doc Hammer: Answering the questions of Scare Bear is something that we know. We put him out there and in these weird places. The answer is in our collective head, but we could not investigate it. It’s never a ret-con with us. We just go back and say, “What were we saying to ourselves?” and attempt to answer it.
Daniel Kuland: On that note, you finally reveal the truth behind Hank and Dean’s “mom,” so to speak. Did you always have this resolution in mind, or did this change over time as fan theories further developed?
Jackson Publick: I don’t think we should tell you! It’s a quantum physics kind of thing. There were always several thoughts about it and any one of them could have taken over.
Doc Hammer: What we did is now canonical. How we got there is not interesting.
Jackson Publick: Yeah, exactly.
Doc Hammer: Don’t worry about that.
Daniel Kurland: There’s a note of finality here, but would you like to do more Venture Bros movies or did you truly approach this as the end?
Doc Hammer: Yes and no. We approached it as the finale and our charge was to frame it as an emotional finale. It’s to resolve emotions more than it is plot. The plot didn’t need that much resolution. There’s some information that you might want to be okay with now, but it was an emotional ending and a bit of a reboot to show that they’re still these people. Did we want to make more? Yes! I’m not ashamed to say it! If somebody would let us make more then we’d probably make more. We just love these characters. It was difficult for us to say goodbye, but that was our job: to say goodbye. We wanted to leave everybody feeling how we do about them, which is like, “Christ, I miss them! But it was still great to hang out with them again.”
‘The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart’ is digitally available on July 21, available on Blu-Ray on July 25, and will later be available on Max