Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer of The Venture Bros.
by Keith Daniels for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

The Venture Bros. has since its 2003 debut been one of the best, and most under-appreciated, shows on television. Airing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block, the show began as a parody of (and tribute to) Jonny Quest, and other ‘60s space age adventure shows. However, it quickly developed its own mythology and a massive cast of characters representing everyone from David Bowie to Spiderman. Only four seasons of the show have eked out so far, but hopefully the recent Shallow Gravy special represents progress toward bringing us more. SuicideGirls recently spoke with the series’ creators, pseudonymously known as Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, about the show, the special, and the possibility of season five.

Keith Daniels: It sounded like you guys were talking about SuicideGirls when I cut in.

Jackson Publick: Yeah, yeah. We were talking about how we’ve name-dropped your site twice.

Doc Hammer: We’ve said “suicide girls” twice on Venture Bros.

KD: You two write and direct the show and do practically all the voices yourselves. Would you do it that way again if you had to make a new show?

DH: Would we be as hands-on as we are?

JP: Probably. [Laughs]

DH: It’s nothing we set out to do in the first place. It turned into this because we’re both control freaks. We’re good at what we do, so we took on a lot of responsibilities, and I think it worked. We think the success of the show has a lot to do with Jackson and I really molly-coddling this crap.

KD: What happened with World Leaders Entertainment recently and moving over to Titmouse?

JP: They [World Leaders] went out of business.

KD: Any more detail than that?

JP: Nah, the economy hit hard. Whatever happened. They didn’t have enough projects to stay afloat, and we weren’t going to be coming back for a while. They folded like many animation studios in New York have.

KD: Will fans of the show notice a difference as far as it coming from a different studio?

DH: I doubt it very much.

JP: I doubt it, because we’re just in pre-production [of the new season]. This new studio did it completely in-house, but we’re going to do the series the same way we always have.

DH: If anybody notices a difference, it’ll be because they’re looking for a difference. Like when a bands puts out a record and it’s called ‘a complete sell-out’ and ‘garbage’, and then you listen to it ten years later and it’s great.

JP: They’ve noticed a difference and said something about every season we’ve put out. Every new season we try to up the animation ante. I’ve seen message board complaints about CG Hank.

DH: Yeah, we’re totally lame for trying to get the animation to look the way it does in our heads. We’re huge sellouts.

JP: [Laughs]

KD: I can think of a record like that. The Replacements Don’t Tell A Soul.

DH: They’re all sell-outs! Every Pixies album was a ‘sellout’. Speak to anybody of any generation and they’ll tell you [something like], “Aw man, Led Zeppelin III was such a sellout.” I have a question for you, Keith. If you’re a Replacements fan, were you disappointed by Let It Be?

KD: No way. I love all their records, even All Shook Down. I like Paul Westerberg’s solo stuff.

DH: It’s beautiful. They’re masterpieces. But a lot of people were let down by that [Let It Be] because even though they had songs that talked about other bands selling out, it was a very grand record. Anyway, sorry.

KD: The Venture Bros really allows you guys to do anything you want. Is that sort of open-ended freedom ever a challenge?

DH: We can’t do anything we want. There are a lot of things that the show doesn’t accommodate. We can’t afford to use every song we want. We don’t understand parody law so we can’t talk about everything we want.

JP: We can only get a certain number of backgrounds and locations in every episode, because that’s how fast people can draw. It makes us have to self-edit more. It forces us to keep in mind what our show is and should be about, and not necessarily go down every road that seems interesting.

KD: You two pretty much alternate writing episodes. Do you also alternately play the foil, in terms of keeping each other in check, for the episodes the other person wrote?

JP: I think whatever the other person wrote, that’s the next guy’s jumping off point and you pursuit the new angle. We’re usually refreshed and appreciative that somebody found a new angle on something that makes a character you were bored of more fun, or whatever.

DH: Sometimes Jackson will pull me back or we’ll push each other around, or whatever. Sometimes I pull him forward. We trade off. But yeah, we do kind of push each other around in the universe.

KD: The mythology of the show has gotten increasingly dense over the years, with the OSI, Sphinx, etc. Does that density make it difficult for people who’ve never seen the show before to jump in on, say, season five?

DH: I honestly think the show is so much about character development and interpersonal relationships that all the mythos is just to make it seem more plausible, and to give diehard viewers something to grab onto and deal with. I think you can jump in at any point and enjoy yourself.

JP: I think we try to not go too far up our own asses, or at least not for very long. We do try to make things a little self-explanatory sometimes. But I think the series started with you feeling like you were dropped into the middle of it.

KD: Why start the new season with this Shallow Gravy special?

DH: We’re not really starting the new season. We’re bridging the gap between the two seasons with something tangential.

JP: It’s just something that was fun to do. The new season probably won’t be hitting the air for a while. A little aperitif.

KD: “Hey, don’t forget about us.”?

DH: That wasn’t the intention. [Laughs] It was just, “Hey, we want to do this stupid little thing,” and we could do it quickly.

JP: It includes a lot of the elements of our show. There’s even mild plot development in it, so it’s not completely against the Venture Bros., but it’s its own thing.

KD: What inspired the character of Dermot? I think everybody has known a guy exactly like him. Who was he for you?

DH: Jackson had a Dermot and I had a Ficktel [sp]. He’s actually an amalgamation of both of our bullies.

KD: It seems like everybody had that friend growing up that you think, “Why did I even hang out with that guy? I didn’t even like him!”

JP: That’s exactly why we wanted to write that guy, because we hadn’t seen him on TV, but we’ve all met him.

DH: Yeah, you know the answer better than we do. Everybody has a Dermot in their lives, and Hank has Dermot.

KD: What’s going to happen with Hatred in the next season? At the end of season four it seemed like he was running off with Princess Littlefeet. And it also seemed to hint that Henchman 21 was going to flip to the good guy side.

JP: You will have to wait and see.

DH: We left it with a lot of change, and we’re still playing with all that change. Sometimes changing something that went haywire like it did makes it feel like it went back to how it was. So instead of big changes there’s a lot of resetting back to, “Go,” you know what I mean? We’re playing with that idea.

KD: One of my favorite running gags is the kind of.. obscure cocktails..

Both: [Laughing hard]

KD: ... like the ‘Sam in a Sweater’ or the ‘Hot Mommy’. Things like that.

JP: ‘Hot Mummy’, yeah.

DH: That’s one of our favorite gags. We keep doing that. We’ve done it already and we just started writing.

KD: Where did that idea come from?

JP: I don’t know. I dropped that into a super early one. Everything about Dr. Venture is kind of dated. Old clothes and stuff like that.

DH: He considers himself a mixologist. He’s not just a guy who has weird taste in drinks. He thinks that he’s an epicurean and that he can create these delicious [inaudible]

JP: We spent like a good three hours making up names [for cocktails] like that a few months ago, didn’t we?

DH: Yeah, we did!

JP: Because we looked on Wikipedia at like real cocktails and we found out that some of them are worse than anything Dr. Venture could come up with, and they have, like, quinine in them.

DH: [To me] So, I’m glad that you saw that too. That’s one of our favorite things about Dr. Venture, that he has a mixed drink thing.

KD: I love that you’re talking about characters like Dr. Venture as if they were a real person. Is that how you think about them?

JP: Absolutely.

DH: Oh yeah. Every one of these people, there’s such a fully realized version of them in our head. That’s where the respectful writing comes from. We really do think of these people as people and understand them really well. There are things that each one of them does that the others don’t do.

JP: Most of them are aspects of ourselves or perceptions of other people, you know? 

KD: Season four had a lot of guest voice actors, like Kevin Conroy, Patton Oswalt, Bill Hader. Do you have any lined up for new stuff? Will Bill Hader be coming back as Professor Impossible?

DH: We really hope so!

JP: As soon as we write an episode with Professor Impossible we’ll know. We had a really good time with him and he seemed to have a really good time with us, so I hope he comes back if he’s not too busy. And that we have something good for him to read. As far as casting anybody else, it depends on what new characters we come up with, and what voices -- in our heads -- that character demands. We make a lot of permanent characters out of guys we think are one-offs on this show, so if you hire somebody famous to do it it makes it trickier to bring the character back.

KD: Do you have any idea in mind when we might see a new season?

JP: I would say this time next year, is probably a fair guess considering where we’re at in the writing and production.

KD: How many hours of work is involved in one 22-minute episode?

JP: Oh my god. [Laughs]

DH: It’s incalculable. From when we start the production to when the episodes leave Astro-Base to go on the air there’s not really a second where we’re not dealing with the show.

JP: Yeah. Every script is like day-and-night writing for three weeks or a month or something like that. Three weeks if you actually know what story you’re going to tell, a month if you’re figuring out along the way.

DH: You insult me!

JP: [Laughs] When we were in full production I was working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and also the weekends and everything for nine months straight. Then it would lighten up for me when we were editing the shows, but that’s when it would get heavy for Doc.

KD: Do you ever wonder how Trey Parker and Matt Stone have managed to do so many seasons of South Park?

JP: I do. I do wonder that. I know they have writing help. I know they have a crazy pipeline of re-use stuff. A giant render farm and everything. But I still wonder how they do it in a week.

DH: I’m not amazed that they do it in a week. I’m amazed that they do with such consistent quality. That show hasn’t slacked off at all. So kudos, they make a fucking brilliant, fantastic TV show. And they do it quick. They are better than us, apparently.

JP: [Laughs]

KD: Music has always been a big part of the Venture Bros. Just in the last season you have the song when the Monarch got his rocket sled, Dr. Venture trying to write a musical, the “Jacket” song, things like that. Is that one of your favorite parts of the show?
DH: It’s one of our favorite parts of life, period. Jackie and I just love music. It just gets stuck in there. It’s a part of our world, so it’s a part of their world.

JP: Yeah. That said, last season was an uncommonly musical season.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Jackson+Publick+and+Doc+Hammer+of+The+Venture+Bros./