The Venture Bros. is really over, and its creators are bummed

Released in July, the new issue of The Venture Bros. : Radiant Is the Baboon Heart’s BloodThis is a fitting end to one of animation’s greatest series. Adult Swim was canceled The Venture Bros. in 2020, an abrupt ending to a seven-season run that started in 2004, the feature-length finale properly concludes the unhinged parodic brainchild of Eric “Doc” Hammer and Christopher McCulloch, aka Jackson Publick. It was well-deserved.

The satirical action series followed the globe-trotting misadventures of Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, his Hardy Boys-esque teenage sons Hank and Dean, and their hulking bodyguard, Brock Samson. And by the show’s accidental finale, the creative team had amassed a sprawling set of characters and interwoven storylines that presaged and arguably outdid the kind of world-building made famous by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Publick & Hammer woven together a tapestry pop-cultural memorabilia to tell the story of a new generation of men who are haunted and shaped by their predecessors’ expectations, while also becoming their own person. The story was a prestige TV-era tale with supersuits and funny jokes.

Quality, Ambition, and Irrationality of The Venture Bros.Publick and Hammer are almost entirely responsible for the show. With the exception of one episode — penned by the pair’s mutual friend/mentor Ben Edlund, creator of The Tick — Publick and Hammer wrote over 80 episodes of the series together over the show’s 16-year run. Polygon interviewed the Venture Bros. Zoom Creators ahead of release The Blood of Baboons Heart is RadiantTo talk about how to make the ending, which questions were answered, which left unanswered, and their creative partnership, which led to one of greatest animated comedies ever.

[Ed. note: This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike against the AMPTP went into effect.]

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The Venture Bros. : Radiant Is the Baboon Heart’s Blood picks up one week after the cliffhanger of the series’ seventh season, with the Office of Secret Intelligence mounting a nationwide manhunt in search of Hank Venture after his sudden disappearance. Publick and Hammer say the story ideas for the film emerged organically out of ideas they originally had in mind for the series’ eighth season, and ideas tied to long-standing questions they wanted to answer with the show’s finale.

“A lot of what Hank was going through was part of my plan [for season 8],” Publick said. “We weren’t gonna see Hank until like, the third episode of the season, he was gonna be missing. We would’ve had him on the road for a season and he would have really done the High FidelityIt was his idea to look up his former girlfriends. He would bother the post lady and Mary Lou Retton, because he owned a picture of her. And he got his first ever erection when he watched. Mary Lou’s Flip Flop Shop,” Publick laughed. “Everybody’s starting points in the film matched with what we were going to do with the season, and then everything went in a whole new direction.”

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Writing For Publick and Hammer The Blood of Baboons Heart is Radiant — as well as deciding which of the series’ most persistent mysteries to answer — emerged as naturally as if they were writing an episode of the series itself. The film answers a number of questions, including the relationship that was implied at the end season 7 between The Monarch (the main character) and Dr. Venture.

“We would have been punched by every Venture Bros.If we answered that instead, what if, You all know what happened to Moppets, right?” Hammer said. “Like, we knew we had to answer that question. We had a deep understanding of what we wanted this movie to be emotionally, and that’s hopefully what you get when you watch it: It’s a very emotionally well-handled story that answers big enough questions that long-standing You can also find out more about the VentureThe fans are satisfied. We’ve had 20 years to weave an entire existence for these characters and honestly, if they gave me another 20, I’d tell you what happened to the Moppets, but you’re not gonna like it.”

In paring down the focus of the Ventures’ final outing from that of a full-length season to a feature-length direct-to-video movie, Publick and Hammer committed themselves to telling a story that felt natural, without arbitrarily throwing in characters just for the sake of it.

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“There’s no cameos; everything was organic, which I think is The Venture Bros. way,” Hammer said. “We made everything that would otherwise feel improbable feel real and organic, and I’m really proud of that. The original pitch for The Venture Bros.We wrote the script as a six-part live-action movie. The ball was dropped and we ended up doing something completely different from what we would have liked to do. But that’s who we are, and when you have a show piloted by the same two people for an entire run, with no writers room and not a lot of help, with just a belief in each other and a great love for our characters, that’s what happens for the good and bad of it.”

It also sets the stage for a close partnership between both parties. The Venture Bros.It is not only different from the other Adult Swim shows, but it also stands out in the broader field of American Adult Animation. They were both full of praise for each other when they were asked to describe what makes them the best writers and collaborators.

Hammer recounts the story of meeting Publick at a party hosted by Ben Edlund, where the two bonded over the most surprising of shared interests — Tomb Raider. “We’re just at a party and we start talking, and the room disappears,” Hammer said. “And all I could see was this person. Every idea he had was brilliant. We talked about the dumbest fucking shit.”

The two discussed how they were elated when Lara Croft did handstands on ledges or got eaten by crocodiles. Both were horrified by Tomb Raider — Hammer added that the problem of mindshare did not end there.

“When we started our friendship, we weren’t writing together; we would just play darts. We would play darts and yell, or act out characters we had invented. Writing was effortless for him. It was also our language. The fact that if we didn’t do this, it would have been a fucking crime because I’ve been alive a long time and I’ve never met somebody who I could just riff off of like this, and we do it effortlessly.”

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Hammer responded by saying that he feels a lot of the things he brought with him. The Venture Bros. that wouldn’t have existed without him, Publick became visibly introspective and thoughtful before answering. “Doc brings a deeper depravity and a deeper decency than I am capable of,” he said. “I’m great at creating dumb comic book shitheads, but Doc is excellent at picking that up and going, Well, here’s the heart of that motherfucker, Then I’m going. Now I understand the entire thing, and then we just feed off of each other’s ideas in that way. We discuss our scripts. It’s a combination of like, one-upping each other and trying to make each other laugh.”

The future of continuing The Venture Bros. universe in some other format, either as a series of direct-to-video specials or even as an audio drama, both Publick and Hammer remained open to the idea while nonetheless saddened by the series’ premature conclusion.

“It is so sad, we love the show,” Hammer said. “We left for reasons that were out of our control. Were we willing to do it again in the future? Sure. It’s fine if it never happens again. We love the show more than our fans do, which seems ridiculous, but we do.”