The Venture Bros creator Christopher McCulloch
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Christopher McCulloch is the creator of the Adult Swim Cartoon, The Venture Bros. McCulloch along with writer/producer Doc Hammer and composer/legendary musician Jim Thirlwell have made The Venture Bros a major cult hit whose audience will explode upon the release of the first season on DVD. McCulloch was an aspiring comic book artist before he got taken under the wing of comic wunderkind Ben Edlund which led to work on both The Tick cartoon and live action series.

The Venture Bros chronicles the adventures of two dopey teenage boys, their super-scientist father and their father's secret-agent bodyguard.

Buy the first season DVD of The Venture Bros

Daniel Robert Epstein: When you first started The Venture Bros, did you see it as a parody or satire of Jonny Quest?

Christopher McCulloch: A little of both. It’d be pretty limiting to just go “I’m going to make fun of a cartoon that maybe ten guys would remember and maybe two of them liked.” But it seemed like a good jumping off point. Even The Tick wasn’t a parody of anything specific but it brought a whole bunch of things into it. I didn’t really start thinking of it in terms of an ongoing thing until it got to the point where I realized that it could house a lot of other ideas.

DRE: What did it start as?

CM: As a stupid drawing in my notebook of two idiot Hardy Boys kids. I just kept drawing these two dorks going “Go Team Venture” and “My mentor didn’t raise no fools” and “Golly” and stuff like that. I wanted to do something stupid where these naïve 60’s Hardy Boys type characters actually do the things that the Scooby-Doo kids, Jonny Quest and all these adventure boys did. But in real life if you follow a bank robber you’ll probably get shot so I wanted them to die all the time and then just reappear in the next scene. Then South Park did that.

DRE: How long ago did you think up The Venture Bros?

CM: It was back in The Tick cartoon days. But I didn’t touch them beyond that until probably 1997 though I probably didn’t consider it as a cartoon until after working with Ben [Edlund] on The Tick. I really didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do but around then my friends and I were starting Monkeysuit Press which was an anthology comic. Monkeysuit and I were going to try to expand the publishing company to do more comic books. I wanted to do a Venture Bros comic so one day I took all of those stray comic ideas and then, just for kicks, I started typing them into a Final Draft document. After an hour I had about ten pages. Then I worked on it for like four or five nights and suddenly I had a script. Something different clicked while I was doing it and I got a sense of the timing. At that point it was still very different from what it became because I was thinking it would be bad looking on purpose. I thought we would make it look more like one of those old Marvel cartoons, kind of a Minoriteam aesthetic. That’s how I initially saw it once I started thinking of it as a cartoon.

DRE: Was it at that point you started to pitch it?

CM: Yes and no. Around 2000 I was working on cartoons like PB&J Otter and Doug. A friend named Ralph Vincelli and I had collaborated on this other comic strip and we were trying to pitch that as a cartoon. We had a couple meetings with Comedy Central and they were basically telling us “It’s intriguing but no thanks.” They asked if we had anything else and I was like “Yeah, and this is going to be better than what I’ve been pitching to you.”

DRE: Did Ralph slink away as you were telling them this new idea?

CM: [laughs] He didn’t come to the meetings. He’s an older guy and he lived in New Jersey and he doesn’t work in animation or anything. We were starting to not quite see eye to eye anyway. Ralph figures into Venture Bros in other ways because it’s through him that I met James Urbaniak. Ralph was really good friends with this cartoonist who worked for The New Yorker and that guy was roommates with James Urbaniak a long time ago.

Anyway Comedy Central said no. Later I got an agent when I went to work on the live action Tick show. But I really didn’t have any interest in writing sitcoms and stuff and I think he thought “Hey, this is an interesting new project. Do you want to work on Yes Dear?” So I probably was a huge disappointment to him.

DRE: Are you still with him?

CM: Yeah, he still gives me work and he did negotiate my Venture Bros deal. Sometimes they get a little more intimidated when you have a real person there. I think it’s a better deal than if I didn’t have an agent but it’s not great.

DRE: I interviewed Tom Stern not too long ago. He mentioned his show, Saul of the Mole Men, which is going to be on Cartoon Network soon. He said that the budgets for Cartoon Network shows make MTV2 look like NBC.

CM: For what Family Guy gets to make one episode, I think we make five.

DRE: What grounds the characters for you?

CM: The characters are pretty real at this point. It’s not much different from writing for The Tick; we just get to go a little further and we’re a little older now and I think I have slightly better access to creativity than I did back then. Since it’s my show and because it crosses 20 different genres and because it’s for adults, it can go anywhere. But then at some point something shakes loose. It can a little too constricted sometimes in your mind and then Doc would push it somewhere that I wouldn’t. That would open up a new vein for the character. I go “Yeah, why can’t I do that with him? Why can’t he be that horrible?” Doc and I really care a lot about the characters and we’re interested in a lot of the same things. Every script, one of us tweaks a character in a new way and the next script the other hits that even harder and it becomes part of their personality. Also we know what James Urbaniak can do. A lot of the inflections and stuff that he did for the pilot struck a chord with us and we went “That’s how Dr. Venture should be.” It suggested these different colors to his personality rainbow. Dr. Venture would be a little sleazy in one place or he’d be snippy in another place or slightly effeminate and we’d want to push that. It’s like that for every character.

DRE: Brock Samson seems like the kind of guy who would only fuck a married woman up the ass.

CM: I think he likes all kinds of sex.

DRE: But it seems like he would leave her pussy for her husband.

CM: Maybe his personal code would tell him that was more appropriate.

DRE: Do you see Brock as the idealized version of a spy?

CM: Well he’s like the worst spy ever. Brock is what a working class 14-year-old kid thinks is like the coolest guy in the world is. He’s a working class James Bond but he’s not into any of the James Bond frills and he won’t touch guns. He drinks beer instead of martinis. But a lot of the action comes from him which we toned down after a while.

DRE: How come?

CM: The action with him will probably get weirder. How many times can you do the “oh he’s flipping out and killing guys?” My ultimate goal would be to have him do Jackie Chan level choreographed weird ultra-violence at some point. But the violence is fun to play against. If he pole-vaults into somebody’s mouth, that’s pretty hot. But if he’s just going to take out a room of guys, who cares? It’s more fun to write him as the opposite of what you expect from him. To stick him in this position where he is basically a nanny to these boys and in his own way he shows more love for them than their father does. I’m more interested in writing for that side of him but I know he’s always there when I need the juice.

DRE: Why does The Venture Bros get animated in New York while all the other Adult Swim shows are done in either LA or Atlanta?

CM: Because it’s where I live.

DRE: Was it that easy?

CM: Yeah, the other shows are done in Atlanta just because that’s where they guys are. They let me pick whatever studio I wanted with the understanding that Burbank would be the default if I couldn’t figure out where to do. But my friends were all working at Monkeysuit in New York and I had just moved back here from LA and I didn’t want to go back there.

DRE: What kind of animation is used for The Venture Bros?

CM: It is traditional.

DRE: So that’s cels?

CM: No. I don’t think even traditional uses cels anymore because they’re still digital coloring and a lot of times they’re inking digitally. Probably the last piece of actual hand drawn non-digital art is the layout kind. The Korean studio uses a program called Animo, which is AfterEffects meets Flash.

DRE: How limited is that animation program?

CM: We actually have more animation this year than we did the first season. The first season’s budget was based on that original idea of it being limited Flash animation. We were going to do it all in-house but we couldn’t afford that so we sent it overseas. By the time we got the first episode back we were doing pre-production on the ninth episode and so I was seeing my first animation from Korea, three quarters of the way into the season. You can see that from episode nine on, there’s more animation. That’s because when I saw what was coming in I was like “Oh man, we’re going to make The Monarch move a lot more. He’s screaming his head off so he should be flapping his arms around.” It got bad for Korea by the last episode because that one was particularly dense and there was a lot of character animation in it and they were like “Hey we really thought this was going to be a lot simpler. Can you give us a little more money?” So we worked something out with them this season and now we have a little more animation. They seem to do whatever we throw at them but they cheap out sometimes by panning a guy instead of having him really walk, but I don’t care. I’m almost charmed by some of those stiff awkward moments.

DRE: Jim Thirlwell said that you were just a fan when you contacted him. What made you want him to score the whole show?

CM: I got into him because a friend of mine lent me the Steroid Maximus album. The minute I heard it I knew it would be perfect for the show. In fact it’s almost partially responsible for me thinking about Venture Bros as an animated thing instead of a comic book. That’s because for Monkeysuit’s website, we used to make little movie trailers for our upcoming comics. So when I was going to do the Venture Bros as a comic, we would have a made a flash trailer for it and the minute I heard some of the Steroid Maximus music, I immediately saw a lot of those actual images that are in our opening title sequence now, like the silhouettes of the boys running.

DRE: Does Jim need much direction?

CM: I gave him more direction this season than last season because we both just decided that’s how it’s going to be. I think we only got the opportunity a couple of times last year to talk about what a scene needed and stuff like that. This year we met on every episode. He’d turn it into me and we’d sit and watch the next one and talk about what it’s going to need. But for the pilot we actually just licensed pre-existing songs of his.

DRE: Seth Green told me that Cartoon Network’s notes are pretty good. Is that the same for you?

CM: Yeah, actually I get my notes from Mike Lazzo [the head of comedy programming at Adult Swim] and half the time he’s like “You’re going to do what you want but here’s what I think.” You always understand that he is a fan of what you’re doing so you do take it with a grain of salt. The first time I ever got a note was a week before we started production. He said “The second act just isn’t working for me and I’m not even sure it should be a half hour show.” I freaked but he was right, the second act was weak. So we made it better after that and except for one episode his notes have always been right. They’re sparse and their usually pretty vague. It’s usually like “This scene’s not doing it for me.”

DRE: What was a specific note?

CM: One was on Ghosts of the Sargasso which has become one of our more popular episodes. That’s the one with the pirates and the Major Tom ghost. It couldn’t have come at a worse time because that was when we were hitting our mid-season, getting exhausted and overworked and overwhelmed and I had writer’s block. Doc and I had no idea what the next script was going to be about. So we did this pirate thing and cobbled together this story over a couple nights. We turned it in and Lazzo hated it. So we did go back and pare down Dr. Venture’s speeches and we did add the part where the guys have to go up Brock’s ass to find the keys. Then when the first take came back from Korea, Lazzo thought it was the best episode and he apologized to us. That was awesome.

DRE: Why does Dr. Girlfriend have a man’s voice?

CM: I don’t know. Because she did in the pilot. She may have started as one joke and became another over time, but she’s pretty memorable.

DRE: What does the name Jackson Publick mean?

CM: That’s my name and I’m Jackson Publick the third.

DRE: Right, hmmm.

CM: Alright! When I started this whole thing, I was going to have way more fun with the nom de plume thing. I was going to be Jackson Publick for this and if anybody ever cared about interviewing me it will make it fun because I will just lie and tell colorful stories. I would blog about my exciting non-existent life and supermodels.

DRE: Let me guess, you didn’t have the time.

CM: I didn’t have the time and I got outed by the first fucking guy who interviewed me. I told him to please not call me Chris in his article and he wrote or something, and it like “Jackson Publick who voices the characters under his real name.” I was like “What are you doing?” I was going to talk about my penthouse and my time in the Special Forces. Part of the shtick was that I wanted it to seem as if The Venture Bros had existed for a long time just like The Hardy Boys really started in the 30’s and then they brought them back in the 60’s. Those books were supposedly written by the son of the original author. So I am third generation Venture Bros writer. My grandfather wrote Doc Savage books in the 30’s and my father wrote Rusty Venture, Doc Savage’s son basically, in the 60’s and so now I’m taking up writing about Dr. Venture’s kids. I just wanted to lie.

DRE: What does Patrick Warburton bring to the table?

CM: Generally he makes it funnier. At this point I’ve honed a Patrick Warburton impression because sometimes when we’re putting together the initial audio track for the show we haven’t recorded Patrick yet. So I usually do a scratch track and generally I can get pretty close to his timing because I’m so used to hearing it. I think I can predict with like 87% accuracy how he’s going to read a line.

DRE: The Aqua Teen Hunger Force creators have a movie coming out later this year. Would you be interested in doing something like that?

CM: Absolutely. It’s probably pretty obvious how much I love movies and I’m always trying to make the show more cinematic. We cut about 15 pages of material from every script we write so there are definitely things trying to get out. I want to make feature films in my career but I don’t know whether they would be animated or live action.

In terms of The Venture Bros, I know everything that’s wrong with our show but there’s just no time to fix all of it and you don’t always have the resources. I would love to do the perfect cartoon so if you’ve got a year to make 80 or 90 minutes of animation, we could do something great and it would be fun. I don’t know that I need to make a Venture Bros movie. I’d probably be into it but I would like to see them live action with Patrick as Brock and James Urbaniak as Dr. Venture.

DRE: Who would play the brothers?

CM: That’s the hard part.

DRE: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

CM: I’d hate to say it but Frankie Muniz would probably be a good Dean Venture.

DRE: How many episodes of The Venture Bros has Ben Edlund written for you?

CM: Last season he and Doc came up with a story for one of them and then Ben had to go back to LA so Doc wrote most of it by himself. This year he actually wrote one episode and he’s had a few ideas here and there.

DRE: How did you get the job writing for The Tick cartoon?

CM: Before I went off to Rutgers I worked in a comic book shop in my hometown. At night I would work on some comic stories and after a while I developed an idea for a weird little superhero spoof comic called Cement Shooz. I started submitting it to all the independent publishers that were around at the time and the owner of the store was so supportive of me that he promised that if no one else would publish it, he would. So we published two issues and I got a table at some big comic book convention in New York to promote them. Toward the end of the day, an odd, wiry, long-haired fellow ambled over and we struck up a conversation. It turned out he was Ben Edlund, creator of The Tick. He had seen an issue of Cement Shooz and thought highly enough of it to suggest I try out to be a writer for an upcoming Tick spin off comic. He was beginning to work on the cartoon series so he wouldn't be around to do the comics anymore. We started a mail correspondence, back when people still wrote letters, and ultimately we started meeting in the city to discuss storylines for the comics I was to write. I did four or five of those and by then the cartoon series was starting to need more writers because Fox had increased their order from six to 13 episodes. By then we'd gotten to know each other better and we were developing a real creative rapport, so he asked me to write one of those, too. I became a regular staff writer once the series continued and I drew a lot of the storyboards which was pretty great work for a kid in college.

DRE: When will the cartoon episodes of The Tick be released on DVD?

CM: I know that Disney now owns the old Tick shows and that they are planning on putting a DVD out sometime this year.

DRE: Would you like to do commentary on The Tick?

CM: I would, yeah. I would be honored to revisit that work and to sit in front of a microphone talking like an idiot with Ben although I hated doing commentary for The Venture Bros DVD.

DRE: Why do you hate doing commentary?

CM: Because I hate myself, that’s why. I hate hearing me talk when I’m not in character and I can barely deal with hearing me as a character. You’re sitting there talking about stuff you and your friend know already.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/The+Venture+Bros+creator+Christopher+McCulloch/