INTERVIEW: Jackson Publick ventures on
Photo: The Monarch and Dean Venture are caught in a fierce stand-off. The Venture Bros. season seven premieres Aug. 5 at midnight on Adult Swim. Photo courtesy of Adult Swim / Provided with permission.
How’s this for an unbelievable factoid: The Venture Bros. animation show on Adult Swim is almost 15 years old.
That’s right, everyone’s favorite family of super scientists have been around longer than most TV shows, venturing into a realm only shared with the likes of Family Guy, The Simpsons and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
The network premieres the seventh season, spanning 10 episodes, Sunday, Aug. 5 at midnight. The 22-minute comedy, with equal dashes of drama and action, follows Team Venture as they tackle adventure after adventure in their inimitable style. Hank and Dean are back, plus a host of fan-favorite supporting characters.
At the helm of the production is creator and director Jackson Publick, who writes each of the episodes with his partner in crime, Doc Hammer. They have been hard at work for the past two years to produce these 10 episodes, and all signs point toward mystery, action and plenty of laughs.
But the secret of the new season still remains intact. Here’s what audiences can expect: “They can expect to have to watch it to find out,” Publick said with a laugh during a recent phone interview. “I don’t know, the usual mix of action and fun and tying up loose ends and making new ones.”
The long interval between Venture seasons is because Publick and Hammer take on most of the responsibilities themselves. This means, in order to achieve a consistent level of comedic success, they need time to think, write, voice act and produce.
“Just in animation production, it takes something like 15-16 months, and we spend a few months writing before that,” Publick said. “Even though it’s been two years or something since we were on air, we have been working constantly that whole time. I think at our best it might take a year and a half — at best.”
He added: “Some life changes in the middle of it, like I moved across the country and stuff like that. Mostly it’s because there are only two of us who write it, and one of us directs all the episodes. So we generally write all or most of the episodes before we can start production because it’s very difficult to write while you’re a full-time director. We have to spend a few [months] writing all those episodes and getting them in shape, and then we start animating. It just takes as long as it takes, and I guess on a normal show, it wouldn’t be the two writers were also involved in post-production and all that.”
If fans of the show think Hammer and Publick write the episodes while hunched over the same computer, deciding on what the next line is going to be, they would be wrong. It’s a little more loose and freeing for the two creative forces.
“We spend some time together brainstorming, broad strokes and comparing notes and stuff, anything we’ve come up with since the last go around,” he said. “We kind of look at the season we just made and decide where the characters need to go, or what we got to say, or like, ‘Oh, man, I really wish we had used this favorite character, but he didn’t make it into this season. We got to make a point to put him in next season.’ We kind of loosely plan out the major thrust of the next season, and then we kind of just write our own things and shoot them back and forth to each other. Sometimes we give each other notes. Sometimes it’s a, ‘Hey, don’t do this in that script. Don’t kill that guy because I have a story planned for him.’ But mostly we’re on the same page about the major stuff and give each other room to mess around with the details, and sometimes one of us will turn a script in. And it will spark something in the other guy and go, ‘Oh, I want to pick that ball up and keep running with it.’”
There are many popular characters on the series, including brothers Hank and Dean Venture; their father, Rusty Venture; Brock Samson, the family’s bodyguard; and, of course, the archenemy, The Monarch. For Publick, they are equals in his mind, and he enjoys writing for them all (and voicing a few as well).
“It’s hard to pick a favorite,” he said. “They’re all our children. It’s fun to write for Hank. It’s fun to write for The Monarch. It’s fun to write for all of them, but there’s some that I take a shine to maybe because they’re a mouthpiece for the best or worst or dumbest in me.”
Hank holds a special significance because that’s a main character actually voiced by Publick.
“I knew I would do some voices just because I like to and because a lot of our writing is by accident, just kind of riffing in character in the same room together,” he said. “I didn’t think [Hank] would necessarily have a distinctive enough voice that you would get somebody younger or cleaner or a better actor than me to do it, but I guess we just didn’t know who the characters were fully yet. We had to kind of find them. In the pilot, my first take on him was less idiosyncratic. I was just kind of trying to sound like Jonny Quest.”
Jonny Quest, the cult classic animation show from the 1960s, is an obvious inspiration for The Venture Bros. The Adult Swim cartoon’s entire premise is an homage to Quest’s sci-fi/action/adventure plots. Although Publick is too young to remember the original series in its first run on television, he has an older brother who helped him fill in the blanks.
“He’s seven years older than me, so he did watch it on the first run,” Publick said. “We were big on comic books and cartoons in my house, and I remember, as a little kid, complaining that the cartoons didn’t look like the comic books. He was like, ‘Oh, you have to see this thing that I used to watch when I was a kid called Jonny Quest.’ He told me about it, and then finally somebody started rerunning it. It was the art style that appealed to me because it had that great, brushy ink. It looked like it was taken from a comic book, and so that’s probably why it stuck in my craw originally. And then I revisited it later on in my 20s or whatever, and realized that it was ridiculous and cool. There just hadn’t been anything like it.”
Publick’s love of comic books stayed with him for many years, and at one point, he thought he was preparing for a career in the publication world. However, when still in college, he landed a gig on The Tick animated series, and it has been animation ever since.
“When I was in high school and early college, I think I wanted to be a comic writer and artist, but then I started working on The Tick animated series while I was still in school actually,” he said. “It was just a great job, and I kind of liked it more than just being alone in a room trying to draw stuff that I wasn’t good enough to draw. The pay was really good and everything, and we did that for a few years. When we got canceled, now I was a self-sufficient, semi-adult living in the city and went, ‘Oh, I guess I work in animation.’ It became easier to find work in animation. I miss dabbling in comics a little, but animation is so much more fulfilling for me because it has sound. And it moves, and it has voices. And I can more fully express whatever I’m trying to do. I can manipulate more of the experience of watching it, so it’s more exciting to me. I would love, at this point, to do some live action stuff or longer-form stuff. Sometimes I think about that because this is pretty all consuming, but it’s also so satisfying. And I have so much creative freedom that nothing has come up — whether out of my brain or offers from anybody else — that I’d rather be doing than this.”
Fans should also hold off on any letter-writing campaigns just yet: The Venture Bros. appears here to stay for quite some time. The upcoming season is the seventh, and Publick believes there’s a lot of mileage left to keep telling stories about these characters. Adult Swim has also responded in kind.
“We’ll keep it doing it until either party is not excited about it anymore, and we’re still excited about it,” he said. “There’s a lot of mileage there, not just because of the adventure thing, but because we’re really invested in these characters now. We’ve learned that we can kind of take them all over the place. We’ve kind of earned the right to have genuine emotion in the show. We got out of our post-modern, ironic shackles early on and just have gotten deeper and deeper into these characters that we love so much.”
That’s a fair point about a unique show. The Venture Bros. is not 100-percent comedy. In fact, in later seasons, there have been large doses of emotion and drama, and the action sequences are well thought out and based in reality, albeit animated reality. In a sense, The Venture Bros. has matured and created its own genre.
“We have been kind of learning how to stretch that as much as possible,” Publick admitted. “It was important for me early on for the thing to look good and to actually engage in all the stuff that everything we’re parodying excels at. If we’re doing action, it’s got to actually be cool. If we’re doing a spy episode, it’s got to feel like a spy thing. I got to stretch myself and learn how to direct that kind of stuff and how to control the narrative and the tone. All the ingredients were always really important to me to sell it, from the music to the sound to the acting and everything. It was always important to us that even though this was a comedy, the characters in it thought they were in a dire adventure and took everything seriously, even the most ridiculous thing. I think we’re most successful when the stakes are really low and super dumb, but they’re incredibly important to everyone involved in the story. From that, we started to grow emotional stuff more.”
For example, early episodes of The Venture Bros. would often parody sentimentality and have brief sad moments, but always with a tongue in cheek. By season three and four, those parodies started to be laced with reality. Even listen to the show’s score. The music has become more serious and less jokey, and that’s thanks to JG Thirlwell, who, according to Publick, just goes for it.
Not everything has been perfect for The Venture Bros., but fans don’t seem to mind. For instance, when the show jumped from 13 episodes per season to 10, there was a readjustment period for Publick and Hammer. They needed to plan the premieres and finales a little more closely.
“We used to do 13, and then we switched to 10 in season five,” he said. “But we obviously didn’t quite know how to handle that because we used to be really good at premieres and finales, and I think we were just used to having 13 episodes to play with. So when we hit 10, we started kind of messing up and not really finishing our story arcs over the course of a season, so … the special that ran between five and six was actually conceived as the finale for season five. But we were just writing in a tizzy as fast as we could go and writing whatever script was in front of us before we looked up and went, ‘Oh my God, we can’t wrap this up in one episode.’ We’re a little better on that this season. I think this season we were just determined to not leave the audience hanging without intending to.”
As Publick looks at back at the last 15 years of The Venture Bros., he can view a changed landscape in television (the advent of streaming services) and Adult Swim (the proliferation of 11-minute comedies versus Venture’s 22 minutes). He sees the show as a bridge between the old and the new, and there’s no denying that Venture’s success mirrors the success of the network.
“It’s a different climate than it was when we started,” Publick said. “I think even our pilot script proved that it worked as a half an hour, and so that’s why nobody really had any compunction about going forward with that. It’s nice that we’re this different thing on Adult Swim.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Venture Bros. returns with new episodes Sunday, Aug. 5 at midnight on Adult Swim. Click here for more information.
