How do we say goodbye to The Venture Bros.? For 20 years, the chaotic yet clever cartoon show created by Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer has evolved beyond its origins as a crude and kooky parody of '60s animated action series to become a sprawling sci-fi universe with deeply flawed but lovable characters and a message of love as radiant as the blood of a baboon heart.
With the Adult Swim series drawing to a close with the film The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart, Mashable sat down with Publick and Hammer,* who not only co-created the series but also shared writing duties across two decades and 81 episodes, along with producing the show and voicing a slew of characters, including Hank Venture, Sergeant Hatred, The Monarch, Dr. Mrs. Monarch, Billy Quizboy, Pete White, and many, many more.
So, what's it like for these two pioneers of adult animation, who forged a path before Bob's Burgers or Rick and Morty became sensations, to say goodbye?
"It sucks," Publick said bluntly. Then Hammer chimed in: "It sucks ass."
The pair are the first to admit this movie isn't how they'd hoped the series would end. The original plan was for an eighth season.
SEE ALSO: 23 extremely underrated TV shows you should binge ASAP"It might have been getting close to time to say goodbye for a while, just as creative people," Publick admitted. "But yeah, I really wanted that eighth season, at least. An eighth season and a special would have been a little nicer."
Instead, the decision was made for them, when Adult Swim rescinded the eighth-season green light and offered a movie in its place. This happened in 2020, when the pair had already begun mapping out the never-to-be eighth season.
How did The Venture Bros. go from Season 8 to Radiant Is the Blood?
Credit: Adult Swim"It was what you what you think it is," Hammer said. "We had something planned. They said, 'No, but how about this?' And we said, 'We'll see what we can do.' And this [The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart] is what we did."
"We put on our list — these are the things we want to include," Hammer recalled of the process. "These are the things that aren't important. These are the things that are funny. These are the things we care about. And we wrote out [a] way too long script and did a few rewrites."
"We wrote our most detailed outline ever," Publick said. "And we started writing the script. And when we got to the halfway point of the outline, we were already at the, like, seven-eighths point of what our page count should be. So we went, 'Oh, we gotta cut five scenes we wrote already and pare down the second act — like, way down.'"
While Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart features a thrilling new villain in Mantilla (voiced by Nina Arianda), the Season 8 outline included two more new big bads. More screen time would also have been given to Hank and Dean's arcs, but that's not all. "I'll be honest; there would have been some more Brock in there," Publick said. "That's a bummer."
More vexing for Hammer was the loss of scenes involving New York gangster Wide Wale and his daughter Sirena, who broke Hank's heart at the end of Season 7. "It was a bummer to lose Wide Wale and St. Cloud and a brief Sirena scene that would have been nice as a button for her," Publick added.
Killing your darlings became crucial for The Venture Bros. finale.
Credit: Adult SwimBut it wasn't all bad news. Hammer found some joy in the process of paring down, telling Mashable, "It was also a treat because when we get to that point where we've overwritten, we can read it and go, 'Well, now I understand you.' We're good at looking at something and going, 'I know why this is broken. And I can fix it.' Jackson and I are both real good at repairing things."
" — And we're killing our babies," Publick interjected.
Hammer took this malapropism of "kill your darlings" screenwriting advice and ran with it.
"Yeah, oh, we love murdering children. We make them, and we're like, 'Time to go! I love you!'" Hammer joked, before continuing solemnly, "It made it easier to understand what it was, and it made the cuts and rewrites even easier. Because I was like, 'I know why it has to go.'
"We've been doing this our whole lives," Hammer explained. "So we knew this is just what you do. You know? Don't compromise the project, but compromise your idea of the project constantly."
Publick reflected on the hardships of shouldering so much of the show's production, including in his case directing and working on VFX of episodes. "Every time, the production is really hard on me, in particular," he said. "So, when I get to the end of the season, I've been working like 70 hours a week for a year straight, and I hate it, and I go, 'I don't know if I want to do this anymore.' But then you get a month or two off, and...like, these idiots [meaning the characters] start talking to you again. You start writing stuff down. We've always reinvented it as we went. Any time we felt like we were getting a little stale, we would go, 'Let's fuck it up.'"
"And it's a unique situation," Hammer added. "It's the show made by the creators from season one to its cancellation date. No writers' room. No nothing. The amount of help we didn't have writing these things is fucking monumental."
But at the end of the day, the show — as outrageous as it got — was deeply personal for both creators. "[The Venture Bros.] was a perfect vehicle for our personal growth," Hammer said. "You can watch the show and watch characters grow and go, 'They're about growth.' People used to say the show is about failure, but the show is about growth. I mean, the show is about change. And it's about everything. And it's about how Jackson and I look at things."
So, how do Hammer and Publick say goodbye to The Venture Bros. after all this?
Credit: Adult Swim"We haven't said goodbye to them," Publick said. "They're in my notebook."
"They're in my head," Hammer added.
"Yeah, they're still talking to us," Publick concurred.
"They're in my dreams," Hammer continued. "They're in every conversation Jackson and I have. And it's probably uncool to say, 'Yeah, man, I'd make this show tomorrow.' I just — we loved doing it.
"It was done our entire adult life. This is a 20-year process. And our personal love affair," he said referring to his bond with Publick, "is based on these children that we made. And it's so hard to just throw them to the wind and just be like, 'Okay, bye bye! I gave you everything I had, buh-bye.'"
The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart will be released on July 21 on digital and July 25 on Blu-ray.
*This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.
