Go Team Venture!: A Venture Bros Retrospective: Season 1
Hello all you happy people! Last year I decided to do something a little special for my birthday, deciding to review something I had a long, personal history with, loved dearly and wanted to start a full retrospective on, resulting in my Scott Pilgrim Retrospective, a long and storied look at one of my favorite comics ever.
This year I decided to continue that tradition… albeit about two weeks late because my schedule slip got really bad combined with my life getting really busy, but the spirits’ the same. And for my 30th birthday, there was really only one option. One show that has been part of my life for over two decades, but i’ve never rewatched in full, and one that’s a true masterpiece, an adult cartoon ahead of it’s time that much like Scott dominated my Teen Years. As you can tell by the top it’s time to Go Team Venture as I take a months long look at The Venture Bros, easily one of my faviorite cartoons of all time and what I consider to be one of the best, most influential and most funny, warts and all.
For those less aware of the show a bit of backstory: The Venture Bros was an adult swim show that started in 2004. Masterminded by Jackson Public and Doc Hammer, a former writer and former artist for the Tick respectively (Both the 90′s cartoon and the 2000′s live action series), the show lasted for a bind bogglingly awesome 14 years, with the creators taking decent hiatueses between seasons to recharge. It was Adult Swim’s most popular show before a certain abusive alcholic took the crown, and is almost easily my faviorite, tied closely with Tuca and Bertie, not an easy task given the network’s long history and great back catalogue.
The show was also ahead of it’s time: while shows with rich continuites, snappy dialouge, pop culture shout outs, and deep, often heavily flawed characters who change considerably are normal, Venture Bros was one of the only ones at the time like this and probably the only one in adult animation. There were other good shows sure, but Venture Bros slowly evolved from a messy if fun parody of adventure shows like Johnny Quest, into a deep involved world that skewered the superhero supervillian dynamic, had characters who changed with every season in interesting ways, deep cut refrences, and a status quo that never settled for more than a season. It’s inventive, hilarous, and throughly itself.
I also feel the show is directly responsible for some of my faviorites: the Ducktales reboot plays to me like the Venture Bros if the world wasn’t realistically broken, Bojack took the concept of having a deeply flawed protaganist who struggles to be better and ran with it, and Final Space comes off as the venture version of Guardians of the Galaxy. It was thanks to Jackson and Doc taking the leap, making their singuarly weird show and doing it the way they wanted that other shows could fly along with them and carry on the torch after their gone. This show isn’t without it’s flaws, which I won’t hesitate to point out, but I can’t help but geninely and wholeheartdly love it.
So let’s start at the beginning: back in the late 90′s, a young man named Christopher McCulloch, the future Jackson Publick, was working on The Tick. For those of you who don’t know what The Tick is.. i’m sorry it took you this long to find it you poor bastard, and it’s a superhero franchise that lovingly spoofs the genre, following a cheeful, gung ho, nigh invunerable big blue lunkhead and his nervous sidekick arthur as they fight crime. It’s crossed comics and three tv series and Jackson was working on the first of those, an animated series. There Jackson honed his craft writing and drawing under the watchful eye of his friend and Mentor, Ben Edlund, creator of the Tick and later Supernatural. So we have him to thank for that time Mystery Inc mentally broke down after finding out their world isn’t real. Thanks Ben!
While doing that a co worker brought in some books from a series he used to read, Tom Swift Jr, about a boy adventuerer who was the son of the previous tom swift who had his own boy adventures. He sketched two dorky brothers, one saying “Ma Venture didn’t raise no fools”… and thus the Venture Brothers were born. According to the book Go Team Venture: The Art and Making of the Venture Brothers, a massive and beautiful book from Dark Horse that covers the first 6 seasons of the show that not only reignited my love for the show but serves as most of my background material for this retrospective, Doc had the name venture from the second he sketched their “Dumb little heads” and never wavered on that for good reason. Also just to head this off if your wondering why i’m not using the DVD commentary it’s simple: I don’t have the dvds, I can’t afford to buy all of them, and it’d slow the retrospective down greatly to have to watch each season twice so if I miss something that was on the commentary, feel free to point it out politely.
Anyways Jackson kept these two in the back of his head, slowly coming up with the idea to make them a Johnny Quest pastiche, while having the father be a second generation adventurer like Tom Swift Jr. He tried bringing them to comics while working at Jumbo pictures as the animators there had a regular anthology comic called Monkeysuit, but wanted them more fleshed out. He picked at it for a while and eventually realized it’d just work best in animation.
So he tried one of the only games in town for Adult Animation: Comedy Central.
As you can tell by the whole “Adult Swim” thing, that didn’t really pan out and Comedy Central passed on what could’ve been another flagship show.
Granted it’s for the best: the show didn’t quite fit Comedy Central. So Jackson shelved it for a bit to work on the first live action Tick show, moving to LA for it and getting an agent who asked if he had anything to shop around. He had some venture boys to shop around, so his agent brought it to a company that was experimenting with Claymation. Given Dean and Hank never went on an adventure to save baby new year, you can see where this went.
After the 2000′s Tick bottomed out because Fox was a sink hole for good ideas back in the day, in case you were wondering “Gee why didn’t he try Fox?”, Jackson decided to get serious about the Venture Bros, headed back to NYC and made a proper pitch bible for the series, a book that’s a general idea for what the series will be. To my shock most of the stuff in the pitch bible made it to the series. From Dr. Venture’s pill addiction, to his unspoken attraction to brock, to Brock being the Boys true parental figure, to characters like Mol, Monarch and Underbeit. The only really notable bit they never got around to was Army Joe, Brock’s long lost brother whose told what to do by a hallucination of uncle sam on his shoulder. They just haven’t found a way to make it work. And Brock having a brother IS canon and was mentioned in season 3, something Jackson pointed out… he just never found a way to make it work. It happens.
He shopped it around and just happened to be friends with one of the execs at Cartoon Network, who was looking for new pilots for Adult Swim. They said “Sure why not” and the race was on to actually make it.
This is where the other half of our dynamic duo comes in: Doc Hammer. Doc and Jackson were already good friends at this point, having met at a party through Edlund and hit it off. When Jackson had needed a workspace in NYC, Hammer gladly let Jackson use his, christned the astrobase because their that level of nerd and that’s part of why I love these guys. What started as a workspace for a bunch of guys slowly evolved into a fort for two guys to work in the middle of the night, randomly shoot the shit about whatever popped into their heads, make swords or props to fool around with and general shenanigans.
So when Jackson needed help with the editing and music for the pilot, as his production studio NoodleSoup knew how to make cartoons in flash but not edit them. Keep in mind flash wasn’t as ubiquitious as it is today, nor as heavily abused as it’d soon be. So Doc naturally agreed since..
Jackson also needed to cast the core four: Starting with what’s truly our lead, Jackson had only one person in mind for Doc: James Urabanik. He’d seen James at a stage show a few years back and given Dr. Venture looks like a sadder more desperate version of him, something James noticed but gladly agreed to do. Next up are the boys. Jackson wanted to do a voice himself as he’d always WANTED to on the Tick but the weird way the animation industry worked back then, they refused to let writers do character voices. This stands out to me because, in part thanks to adult swim doing just that a lot this show especially, it’s now fairly normal for one of the creators to do a voice if they want, with Alex Hirsch voicing three major characters on Gravity Falls, Ian Jones Quarterly voicing two of the leads on Ok KO and Olan Rogers of Final Space voicing at least two including leading man Gary. It also scratches my head WHY they woudln’t, especially with a creator as it saves on money.
So Jackson ended up just deciding to do Hank and given he was at ease doing this from the pilot, it’s clear he was always meant to be a va. This would be the first of dozens of voice he and Doc would do and god bless em for it, they really have a ton of talent in the craft. Anyways, Hank wasn’t a solo act, yet, but finding that right Dean charm was tricky. Thankfully a friend of Jacksons recommended Micheal Sinterniklas. This and TMNT 2003 have made Micheal a faviorite of mine even if he does games and anime more. Though he did do Kappa Mikey so he has that going for him. He was the perfect dork for the job and that just left Brock, who like Doc Jackson had someone in mind, Patrick Motherfuck Warburton. Warburton was already a name thanks to Seinfield, and had starred in the 2000′s Tick Show, playing the roll to perfection. And he was already a VA at the time, having just started his career with Buzz Lightyear and Family Guy, the latter he’ll probably be doing till a hellmouth opens and finally claims what’s left of the show and the earth. He’d go on to VA for some time and still does, one of the most notable being Sheriff Bronson Stone for Scooby Doo Mystery Inc.
Patrick happily agreed and the cast was set with Jackson filling in the gaps. And Mike but… we’ll talk about that when we get to the episodes themselves, and thus the pilot itself.
The Pilot was enough of a success that after a short wait, the show got picked up and Jackson was happy to procede as usual. The show switched to traditional animation, got simplier backgrounds jackson hated and moved on for season 2.
There was a hiccup though: Writing a show by yourself.. is incredibly hard espiecally when your also showrunning it. This is why most shows have multiple writers on most episodes and even ones that have the creator write every episode usually have at least two. So Jackson naturally went to Ben for help since he knew how to do this, but Ben, while a great guy and still friends with Jackson to this day, was also busy with his own stuff and couldn’t commit to a full season workload. So Doc, who was in the room because of course he was, agreed to help so Jackson could keep a show. While Doc hadn’t written before, Ben could teach him the ropes, then pass it off to him when he was ready. In Theory. In practice Ben helped a bit, enough that Doc knew the formatting and stuff, but had to leave the learning curve to the poor guy as he got pulled away.
So through this Doc became one half of a team, and the two scrambled through the season. The season ended up being a sleeper hit, not too much bigger than adult swim’s other shows but enough to get them renewed. But is “Good enough for a sure why not renewal” good enough for today’s fat guy at a computer?
Find out under the cut!
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