RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media Jackson Publick talks Venture Bros. season 2

When last we left our heroes, Dr. Thaddeus Venture had just survived a murderous attack from his long-lost twin brother; the Monarch was delivering a "Scared Straight" lecture to young punks in prison; the Monarch's henchman were closing down the last of their boss' operations; and Brock had lost his mullet in a fiery explosion.

Oh, and the show had killed off its two title characters.

The Venture Bros. now returns to the Cartoon Network for its second season with "Powerless in the Face of Death" and picks up right where that screw-you cliffhanger left off, with Brock digging a pair of graves in the back yard and Drs. Venture and Orpheus freaking out in highly characteristic ways. Jonas Jr. is also still on hand, lording it over his brother by showing off his competence and some nice looking arm candy. Meanwhile, the Monarch is still in jail, and Dr. Girlfriend is still canoodling with Phantom Limb.

And the show has modified its title sequence, putting in Thaddeus and Jonas Jr. as "the Venture brothers."

Really, I can't say more in this review without giving away some major spoilers.

Be warned that you'll want to tape or Tivo the premiere so you can run it back and catch all the little surprises that pop up during the course of the story.

The wait for new episodes has been cruel, but now that it's back The Venture Bros. feels like it never left us. First-time viewers who get their introduction to the show with the season two premiere might feel a little lost. But discombobulation has probably never felt so good.

Mr. Fantastic is a sociopath who hides his super-powered brethren in a giant-sized Arctic laboratory. The Scooby Gang is a collection of addled misfits with a talking dog that barks wisdom like "You are the hand chosen by the master!" And David Bowie's shapeshifting powers have helped make him the world's greatest supervillain.

This is the universe of The Venture Brothers, the series on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block whose second season appears on DVD today. It's not the breakout hit of the AS lineup. That would be Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the farce that inspired one of the most accidentally successful promotional campaigns in history for a slightly-less successful movie, which opened on Friday. And it's not the first Cartoon Network series to mangles the characters and conventions of classic cartoons or comics and paste them back together Burroughs-style. Over the weekend, Space Ghost Coast to Coast (which is on "permanent hiatus") turned 13 years old.

The Venture Brothers is a different beast. It flaunts all of the elements of the series on the adult/hipster animated landscape: irony, satire, uncomfortable pauses, outright parody. But as creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer frequently explain, the show is about failure. It's about the vision that inspired the science fiction wave of the 1950s and 1960s, the optimism of the space race, and the baby boomers' beloved, indulged idea that they could achieve anything they wanted.

These were ideas that satirized themselves. Awarding its 1966 "Man of the Year" award to the "Young Generation," Time magazine's editors saluted the boomers as the folks "who will land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world, and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war." Forty years later the boomers have disappointed no one as much as they've disappointed themselves, buckling in to watch movies about how great their parents were as they pop pills and build their Dennis Hopper-endorsed "Dream Books."

This explains why Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture, the failed boy genius and father of the series' eponymous brothers Hank and Dean, is such a screw-up. As we learn in flashbacks across the series 27 episodes (so far), Venture pere was a Jonny Quest figure himself who solved mysteries under the wing of his brilliant father, his friend Hector, and their bodyguard Swifty. The 1960s were an era of superhero teams, super-science, space stations, and helpful robots. And as Rusty grows up, all of that peters out. He drops out of college (after palling around with two other super-scientists and a Doctor Doom analogue named Baron Underbheit), loses portions of the family business, and enters middle-age trading off his family's successes and reluctantly fathering his two boys. When Venture's lab is broken into by The Monarch, his butterfly-fetishizing archfoe can't find anything worth defiling or smashing. "What can I do to this guy that life hasn't already?" he sulks. "I almost feel sorry for him."

Hank and Dean don't know all of this. They believe their father is a genius and the adventures they stumble into are legendary. They think nothing odd of the fact that he wears a one-piece "speed suit" and they dress, respectively, like the Scooby Gang's Freddy and like Buddy Holly. They don't seem to notice that the villains they battle are poseurs or trust-fund kids who usually belong to a hamstrung, bureaucratic supervillain union called the Guild of Calamitous Intent. They're blissfully unaware that nothing important has been invented for a long, long time. But when they inevitably screw something up or get targeted by one of their wannabe archenemies, their heroic, nigh-invulnerable bodyguard Brock Samson steps in to save them with palpable boredom and a heavy sigh.

Not that the series is some relentless Bergman downer. Far from it - the world Publick and Hammer have sketched out mashes together every trope from the classic age of sci-fi and boys' fantasy. The multiplicity of supervillains and influences isn't too surprising, since Publick (whose real name is Christopher McCulloch) cut his teeth working for The Tick creator Ben Edlund on the comic, animated, and live-action versions of that superhero parody. It's the other pop culture lifts that surprise. Depeche Mode's David Gahan shows up at a super-science yard sale. David Bowie, as mentioned above, is the superpowered figurehead of the Guild of Calamitous Intent.

Nods like that distinguish the Venture Brothers and make Hammer and Publick's ambitions a little clearer. The cartoonists aren't simply slapping a show together. They're synthesizing everything they like about pop culture into one narrative, one over-arching science fiction vision. What Robert Anton Wilson did with conspiracy theories, Hammer and Publick do with science fiction, mystery-solving kids, and new wave rock.

Reason spoke with Publick over the phone from his home in New York.

Quote:

---

the G-man said:
The Horrible Truth about Super-Science: An interview with Jackson Publick of The Venture Brothers

They think nothing odd of the fact that he wears a one-piece "speed suit" and they dress, respectively, like the Scooby Gang's Freddy and like Buddy Holly.

---

• "Venture Bros." writers Christopher McCulloch (better known as his pseudonym Jackson Publick) and Doc Hammer unveiled new footage from their third season in a packed-to-the-walls panel this Saturday at New York Comic Con. The room exploded in applause as the two fashionable pop-culture satirists took their seats. The panel included Chris McCulloch, Doc Hammer, James Urbaniak (the voice of Doctor Venture) and Michael Sinterniklaas (Dean Venture).
  
  "We have a clip from the third season," McCulloch said. "Do you want to see it?" The room roared with applause. Dispensing with any further formalities, McCulloch started the preview as the room darkened. Scenes from the video included Brock with his Office of Secret Intelligence (OSI) mentor Hunter, last seen in season two's "Assassinanny 911," the return of The Pirate Guy from "Ghosts of the Sargasso," a disturbingly Freudian sequence involving Doctor Venture and his heroic father's large penis, and a gorey "GI Joe" satirizing OSI sequence.
  
  Christopher McCulloch took a moment to advocate for the new season. "It's going to be very exciting," he said. "It's going to be funny, you're going to learn things that you never wanted to know about the characters." He paused for a moment. "I wish I could show you the unedited footage of the penis."