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ToyFare to Feature Venture Content
From ToyFare's Blog it appears that issue
#141 will contain some Venture Bros. stuff:
Do you like the Venture Bros.? Of course you do! It’s the friggin’ best. We go in-depth with VB creator Jackson Publick on everything from the show’s origin to its future to what Venture toys should be like. Also, reprinted for the first time ever: Jackson’s first ever sketch of the Venture Bros., plus a bunch more awesome design sketches!
Also since it's ToyFare maybe you can hold out some kind of hope for actin figures or figurines, though I wouldn't get them too high. The issue goes on sale tomorrow, March 11th.- by tsox
- (unregistered id: 4BF7CE2F96)
TOYFARE: What were your earliest ideas for the show, and how did it develop from there?
JP: I think I found the first sketch I ever did of them which was a doodle done while I was still working on The Tick, so the latest it could have been was the beginning of 97. And there was no idea, I was just trying to draw the most annoying, cheesy dorks possible. That's pretty much all I did for a couple of years. And then I would draw a father/doctor kind of character with them... immediately it became Johnny Quest plus Scooby Doo plus The Hardy Boys. And I was like, "Oh it would be fun to take that 'Golly gree' and mystery angle, and just murder these kids every time." Because if 15-year-old boys tried to follow jewel thieves into a mine, they would probably get their heads caved in with a rock by jewel thieves. [Laughs] So I think that's what I started with, and then they picked up a Brock along the way, who I think I was calling Vince at first. And when my friends and I started publishing a comic anthology Monkeysuit, I started a little bit of a story intending to publish it in that.
Toyfare: So you eventually took the idea and turned it into a pilot script, but what was the comic story going to be like? Was it basically the same story the pilot ended up being?
JP: Well, you know we only put on of those out a year. I'm sure I intended it as maybe a dozen-page chapter three of an ongoing story. And there were going to be a lot of little references and editor's notes. Like, anytime anything comes out of their mouth, "Oh remember when", there'd be that little asterisk and a little editor's note that says, "See the 'Adventure of the Crystal Skull'". As if there had been this rich history the whole time. And yeah, I think it was going to be some part of the pilot. It was just going to be a slice of their dumb lives.
Toyfare: How did you decide to add costumed super-villains into that Hardy Boys/Johnny Quest kind of world?
JP: Just look at everything I've done. I'm so weaned on superheroes and crap that there's no way that wasn't going to find its way in there. And that's what was exciting to me. I think why I was able to write it so quickly was because I realized that all these little stray ideas in my notebook for a variety of different things--whether they were comic stories or just like half-ideas--so many of them fit under this umbrella because it crossed so many genres. It can be Marvel Comics or James Bond or Scooby Doo and whatever we want it to be.
Toyfare: Was the Monarch sitting around in your notebook, waiting to find a home?
JP: No, no Monarch I made up on the spot while I was writing the pilot. I didn't put a lot of thought into him on purpose, because writing The Tick was all about, "Who's the villain of the week, and what pun is he based on?" I really thought that there would be a new villain every week. And actually I think the earliest draft of the pilot really had them intersecting with a lot more jerks. Like, even just quick cut-aways for no reason of people hating Dr. Venture, who then never get involved in the story. Like, they see somebody at the airport who's like, "Ooh, I hate Dr. Venture...but I have to catch this plane." It was a little bit more ironic and meta and all that crap. When you don't have characters yet, you're a little more conceptual. [Laughs] And I thought that it would be kind of bad-on-purpose animation, it would look like a Spider-Man cartoon from the 60s...and then you just slowly fall in love with your characters. I think the Monarch became a main character because we were coming up with story ideas for the first season and we would pretty much have a blank slate for a villain, and it's, "There's this guy who's doing this to Dr. Venture this week, and he should turn him into a caterpillar." And I was like, Well...Jesus, why we just make that the Monarch?" [Laughs]
Toyfare: Were there any major plot points that you knew about from the very beginning?
JP: I think that because my original idea was that the boys would die in every episode, probably we knew about the clone thing. And I thought we would kill them a few times during the first season, and we just held it...then you learned temperance, too. So you learned, "Oh maybe it's better to hold that until your finale." And then it becomes a cool thing instead of just one more throwaway joke. There's a lot of stuff that was in the pitch book that was indicating characters that we wanted to work with, and Doc and I would both every once in a while remember to flip through it and go, "Oh yeah, what's that guy's deal again?" Doc would go, "Hey, has Brock ever been in love?" and I'd go "Yeah, Molotov Cocktease. This is her deal." I think there's even one or two characters that are in the pitch that I still haven't gotten to because you start thinking about it and you're like, "Oh that's not funny," or veers too much into taking itself too seriously. "OH that's some Weapon X stuff. That's way too up its own ass an
JP: I think I found the first sketch I ever did of them which was a doodle done while I was still working on The Tick, so the latest it could have been was the beginning of 97. And there was no idea, I was just trying to draw the most annoying, cheesy dorks possible. That's pretty much all I did for a couple of years. And then I would draw a father/doctor kind of character with them... immediately it became Johnny Quest plus Scooby Doo plus The Hardy Boys. And I was like, "Oh it would be fun to take that 'Golly gree' and mystery angle, and just murder these kids every time." Because if 15-year-old boys tried to follow jewel thieves into a mine, they would probably get their heads caved in with a rock by jewel thieves. [Laughs] So I think that's what I started with, and then they picked up a Brock along the way, who I think I was calling Vince at first. And when my friends and I started publishing a comic anthology Monkeysuit, I started a little bit of a story intending to publish it in that.
Toyfare: So you eventually took the idea and turned it into a pilot script, but what was the comic story going to be like? Was it basically the same story the pilot ended up being?
JP: Well, you know we only put on of those out a year. I'm sure I intended it as maybe a dozen-page chapter three of an ongoing story. And there were going to be a lot of little references and editor's notes. Like, anytime anything comes out of their mouth, "Oh remember when", there'd be that little asterisk and a little editor's note that says, "See the 'Adventure of the Crystal Skull'". As if there had been this rich history the whole time. And yeah, I think it was going to be some part of the pilot. It was just going to be a slice of their dumb lives.
Toyfare: How did you decide to add costumed super-villains into that Hardy Boys/Johnny Quest kind of world?
JP: Just look at everything I've done. I'm so weaned on superheroes and crap that there's no way that wasn't going to find its way in there. And that's what was exciting to me. I think why I was able to write it so quickly was because I realized that all these little stray ideas in my notebook for a variety of different things--whether they were comic stories or just like half-ideas--so many of them fit under this umbrella because it crossed so many genres. It can be Marvel Comics or James Bond or Scooby Doo and whatever we want it to be.
Toyfare: Was the Monarch sitting around in your notebook, waiting to find a home?
JP: No, no Monarch I made up on the spot while I was writing the pilot. I didn't put a lot of thought into him on purpose, because writing The Tick was all about, "Who's the villain of the week, and what pun is he based on?" I really thought that there would be a new villain every week. And actually I think the earliest draft of the pilot really had them intersecting with a lot more jerks. Like, even just quick cut-aways for no reason of people hating Dr. Venture, who then never get involved in the story. Like, they see somebody at the airport who's like, "Ooh, I hate Dr. Venture...but I have to catch this plane." It was a little bit more ironic and meta and all that crap. When you don't have characters yet, you're a little more conceptual. [Laughs] And I thought that it would be kind of bad-on-purpose animation, it would look like a Spider-Man cartoon from the 60s...and then you just slowly fall in love with your characters. I think the Monarch became a main character because we were coming up with story ideas for the first season and we would pretty much have a blank slate for a villain, and it's, "There's this guy who's doing this to Dr. Venture this week, and he should turn him into a caterpillar." And I was like, Well...Jesus, why we just make that the Monarch?" [Laughs]
Toyfare: Were there any major plot points that you knew about from the very beginning?
JP: I think that because my original idea was that the boys would die in every episode, probably we knew about the clone thing. And I thought we would kill them a few times during the first season, and we just held it...then you learned temperance, too. So you learned, "Oh maybe it's better to hold that until your finale." And then it becomes a cool thing instead of just one more throwaway joke. There's a lot of stuff that was in the pitch book that was indicating characters that we wanted to work with, and Doc and I would both every once in a while remember to flip through it and go, "Oh yeah, what's that guy's deal again?" Doc would go, "Hey, has Brock ever been in love?" and I'd go "Yeah, Molotov Cocktease. This is her deal." I think there's even one or two characters that are in the pitch that I still haven't gotten to because you start thinking about it and you're like, "Oh that's not funny," or veers too much into taking itself too seriously. "OH that's some Weapon X stuff. That's way too up its own ass an
- by tsox
- (unregistered id: 4BF7CE2F96)
Toyfare: In the Season 3 episode "The Doctor is Sin," it seemed to make a lot of sense that Rusty might become a super-villain. was that ever seriously considered for a plot line?
JP: No. I mean that's always looming, the question of whether or not Dr. Venture is a force for good or bad in the world, in the final analysis. But I don't think we'd ever have him consciously become a villain. But obviously his moral choices led an expert in villains to confuse him with a potential villain. I don't even think he was trying to seduce him there. I think he was just trying to make him what he thought he was supposed to be. I've seen people disappointed that we didn't keep going with that. And I was like "Oh man, I can't even imagine writing for that." We're not writing Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Although I will say this: I think when I started the show Dr. Venture was meant to cause a lot more damage than he does. I think that was one of the themes of the show, but we kind of dropped that because he became more interesting as a human being than as a vehicle for broad sight gags.
Toyfare: At the end of Season 3, the boys' clones are all killed and Brock quits as the Venture bodyguard. Will Season 4 feature Doc dealing with the boys now being mortal?
JP: Yeah, a lot of that sticks. We don't reboot, exactly. Things move in a different direction, but it's the same show.
Toyfare: Without the cloning, will they age now?
JP: Yes. In fact the one thing I will tell you is that the premiere, in part, picks up roughly nine months after the finale. And yes, they have aged a little. Because that's something we're interested in too, kind of moving them forward. And yeah, last season was a lot about looking back. I mean people developed, but we did a lot of flashbacks and stuff. I think Season 3, at least for me, was about getting all that back story out there. We've purposely been writing more stand-alone-ish episodes. There's definitely some minor arc advancement within them. There are stories that pick up where something from last season left off, and there are stories where the relationships are morphing a little bit. But for the most part, they're pretty stand-alone, and they're not as indebted to past episodes or future episodes as we can sometimes get. It's like, first season we wrote a second season. And then second and third season we got really deep into stuff, and I won't say we're pulling back exactly, but I think Doc and I just had to remember what's fun about this. I get like this at the end of every season. Like usually our last few episodes are really tying stuff together, or they're heavier on the fake drama of where we've been taking them all season. And then we've got to finish it big, and I get so sick of how interconnected and internalized our little world is by the end of it. I just want to write one of those episodes where something fucking stupid happens. [Laughs] Just, Hey this is the episode where a ghost pirate shows up, you know. Remember that? Remember, we could do that?
Toyfare: Are there any formerly minor characters getting the spotlight next season?
JP: Actually one thing we do each year is we give somebody an episode we forgot to give an episode the year before. Like last season I was hell bent on getting the old Team Venture into an episode, because we didn't give them anything in Season 2. So Phantom Limb was missing from all last season, pretty much, and so he gets a little more attention. As far as the minor guys, I don't want to ruin too many surprises, but Doc is good at plucking quickly mentioned characters from obscurity and turning them into important players in an episode. Actually we both did that this year. I took a page from his book and I did an episode that largely has to do with a character we've never seen, but we've heard him mentioned a couple times.
Toyfare: What would you want the Venture Bros. toys to be like?
JP: Well, I mean just the purist in me would like see just the good-looking action figures, you know? Our fantasy, since day one, would be to just make crazy action figures, to have complete control over the whole thing and put as much thought into making this product funny as we do into the show. We want to just throw all the useless gadgets that our toys had when we were kids into them, and completely inappropriate to the character. Like, you should be able to look through the back of Dr. Venture's head, like Steve Austin's head. And pairing characters that have no business being packaged with each other. And giving useless accessories to certain characters, like Billy Quizboy having his head be able to shoot off. And one character gets the fuzzy G.I. Joe head for no reason. And you wish you could control the packaging too, just to have sad children on the back...children about to cry, or just confused because they're playing with these toys that are no fun at all. [Laughs] That'll never happen, so I just want to see quality sculpts and the kind
JP: No. I mean that's always looming, the question of whether or not Dr. Venture is a force for good or bad in the world, in the final analysis. But I don't think we'd ever have him consciously become a villain. But obviously his moral choices led an expert in villains to confuse him with a potential villain. I don't even think he was trying to seduce him there. I think he was just trying to make him what he thought he was supposed to be. I've seen people disappointed that we didn't keep going with that. And I was like "Oh man, I can't even imagine writing for that." We're not writing Lost or Battlestar Galactica. Although I will say this: I think when I started the show Dr. Venture was meant to cause a lot more damage than he does. I think that was one of the themes of the show, but we kind of dropped that because he became more interesting as a human being than as a vehicle for broad sight gags.
Toyfare: At the end of Season 3, the boys' clones are all killed and Brock quits as the Venture bodyguard. Will Season 4 feature Doc dealing with the boys now being mortal?
JP: Yeah, a lot of that sticks. We don't reboot, exactly. Things move in a different direction, but it's the same show.
Toyfare: Without the cloning, will they age now?
JP: Yes. In fact the one thing I will tell you is that the premiere, in part, picks up roughly nine months after the finale. And yes, they have aged a little. Because that's something we're interested in too, kind of moving them forward. And yeah, last season was a lot about looking back. I mean people developed, but we did a lot of flashbacks and stuff. I think Season 3, at least for me, was about getting all that back story out there. We've purposely been writing more stand-alone-ish episodes. There's definitely some minor arc advancement within them. There are stories that pick up where something from last season left off, and there are stories where the relationships are morphing a little bit. But for the most part, they're pretty stand-alone, and they're not as indebted to past episodes or future episodes as we can sometimes get. It's like, first season we wrote a second season. And then second and third season we got really deep into stuff, and I won't say we're pulling back exactly, but I think Doc and I just had to remember what's fun about this. I get like this at the end of every season. Like usually our last few episodes are really tying stuff together, or they're heavier on the fake drama of where we've been taking them all season. And then we've got to finish it big, and I get so sick of how interconnected and internalized our little world is by the end of it. I just want to write one of those episodes where something fucking stupid happens. [Laughs] Just, Hey this is the episode where a ghost pirate shows up, you know. Remember that? Remember, we could do that?
Toyfare: Are there any formerly minor characters getting the spotlight next season?
JP: Actually one thing we do each year is we give somebody an episode we forgot to give an episode the year before. Like last season I was hell bent on getting the old Team Venture into an episode, because we didn't give them anything in Season 2. So Phantom Limb was missing from all last season, pretty much, and so he gets a little more attention. As far as the minor guys, I don't want to ruin too many surprises, but Doc is good at plucking quickly mentioned characters from obscurity and turning them into important players in an episode. Actually we both did that this year. I took a page from his book and I did an episode that largely has to do with a character we've never seen, but we've heard him mentioned a couple times.
Toyfare: What would you want the Venture Bros. toys to be like?
JP: Well, I mean just the purist in me would like see just the good-looking action figures, you know? Our fantasy, since day one, would be to just make crazy action figures, to have complete control over the whole thing and put as much thought into making this product funny as we do into the show. We want to just throw all the useless gadgets that our toys had when we were kids into them, and completely inappropriate to the character. Like, you should be able to look through the back of Dr. Venture's head, like Steve Austin's head. And pairing characters that have no business being packaged with each other. And giving useless accessories to certain characters, like Billy Quizboy having his head be able to shoot off. And one character gets the fuzzy G.I. Joe head for no reason. And you wish you could control the packaging too, just to have sad children on the back...children about to cry, or just confused because they're playing with these toys that are no fun at all. [Laughs] That'll never happen, so I just want to see quality sculpts and the kind
- by tsox
- (unregistered id: 4BF7CE2F96)
of crap that anybody else wants to see. I'd love to see the kind of vinyl stuff too, like all that Kidrobot kind of stuff. I think the character designs and proportions would do well in that format.
Toyfare: in the world of the cartoon, were there toys for the old Rusty Venture cartoon?
JP: Absolutely, I'm sure. Undoubtedly one of them shot something children could choke on, and there was a lawsuit, and they're all gone now. Maybe we'll get to that in an episode.
THE END
Toyfare: in the world of the cartoon, were there toys for the old Rusty Venture cartoon?
JP: Absolutely, I'm sure. Undoubtedly one of them shot something children could choke on, and there was a lawsuit, and they're all gone now. Maybe we'll get to that in an episode.
THE END
- by Phil
- (unregistered id: D9E2840B5A)
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