The Mantis-Eye Experiment

With a decent amount of confusion surrounding the announcement of Venture Bros. season 4.2's start date as well as the 4.1 DVD, I decided to go straight to the source to get some clarification on the whole thing. Super thanks to Jackson for taking some time to set the record straight and provide some useful info.

Mantis-Eye:

People are somewhat concerned about the Adult Swim 'Season 5' bump. Has the second half of season four been upgraded to season five?

Jackson Publick:

My guess is the bump was a little bit of a gaffe on the network's part, since we've always called these two halves of one season and we are in fact titling the DVD sets "Season 4 volumes 1 & 2." But it's a forgivable mistake. The time elapsed between half-seasons was much longer than we originally anticipated, after all. I mean...who are we kidding?

Mantis-Eye:

Speaking of the DVD, what extra stuff will it have?

Jackson Publick:

We were too heavily entrenched in production on the actual show to come up with any crazy extras. But there is commentary on every episode and there are deleted scenes from animatics. Again, pretty light, but the vol. 2 DVD will probably have a lot more because almost all of the back 8 episodes went over time. We cut three whole scenes from the finale alone.

Mantis-Eye:

The extended scene from "Family that Slays Together" was missing from the season three DVD...

Jackson Publick:

The "lost" prologue to the season 3 finale will be on there, as will the promo we cut for Comic Con last year.

Mantis-Eye:

So given all that, do you know why the set is two DVDs instead of one?

Jackson Publick:

I'm not sure exactly why they made volume 1 a two disk set -- that was news to me -- but I'm glad they did. I can only assume it was to assure the picture quality, since 8 episodes on one disk would have required quite a bit of compressing.

Mantis-Eye:

Anything else you'd like to add?

Jackson Publick:

I must cop to the fact that the episodes are not technically 100% uncensored. The audio is completely uncensored, but we decided against removing the black bars from the video in the two episodes we used them. So you won't get to see Dean's junk in the "Vetruvian Dean" portion of his prog-rock fantasy from "Perchance To Dean," and you won't get to see Brock's when he's naked and tied to a chair in "Blood of the Father, Heart of Steel" (which we had always intended to be too dark to be seen anyway, but it came back from Korea light enough that we had to censor it). Uncensoring those would have added nothing to the story or the comedy, and it would have been a huge pain in the ass to re-render those episodes completely just for 0.5 seconds of pud. I think people got enough of our penchant for full frontal nudity in the season 3 DVD anyway.