The creators of Venture Bros. reflect on the end — the real one
The July release of The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart properly closes the book on one of the all-time great animated series. After Adult Swim canceled The Venture Bros. in 2020, an abrupt ending to a seven-season run that started in 2004, the feature-length finale properly concludes the unhinged parodic brainchild of Eric “Doc” Hammer and Christopher McCulloch, aka Jackson Publick. They earned it.
The satirical action series followed the globe-trotting misadventures of Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, his Hardy Boys-esque teenage sons Hank and Dean, and their hulking bodyguard, Brock Samson. And by the show’s accidental finale, the creative team had amassed a sprawling set of characters and interwoven storylines that presaged and arguably outdid the kind of world-building made famous by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Publick and Hammer wove together a tapestry of pop-cultural ephemera to tell a story of a generation of men haunted by the expectations of their forebears while at once growing into their own people. It was prestige TV-era storytelling with supersuits, dick jokes, and idiosyncratic charm.
The quality, ambition, and lunacy of The Venture Bros. is almost solely the creation of Publick and Hammer. With the exception of one episode — penned by the pair’s mutual friend/mentor Ben Edlund, creator of The Tick — Publick and Hammer wrote over 80 episodes of the series together over the show’s 16-year run. Polygon spoke to the Venture Bros. creators over Zoom ahead of the release of Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart to talk about what went into the making of the finale, how they decided which questions to answer and which to leave open, and how their particular creative partnership
Read more on polygon.com
