The Mantis-Eye Experiment

For those of you interested in the 3 3/4" Venture Bros. action figures that were revealed back during San Diego Comic-Con you may remember that BifBangPow!'s distribution partner Entertainment Earth put them up in convenient but expensive packages of five figures for $49.99. Well now, if you only wanted a couple figures there are pre-orders of some of them individually for a mere $9.99:

• Brock Samson (Black Shirt)
• Dr. Mrs. The Monarch
• Dr. Venture (Red Speed Suit)
• Dean Venture
• Hank Venture
• The Monarch

And remember, these are not entirely set in stone yet, so get to pre-ordering if you ever want to see them!

Thanks to roving reporters attending Dragon*Con, in spite of me not going to the show you still get some high-quality Venture Bros.-centric coverage.

Dragon*Con 2011 Coverage: A Dr. Who And A Doc[tor] Hammer
Katie Delz of the Hench 4 Life Podcast has a nice write up of the many Venture-related events at the convention including the various panels involving Doc Hammer.

Dragon*Con 2011 Cosplay Photos
And if you're craving more DalekEmpress graciously offered up some of her photos the Venture Bros. cosplayers at the convention. There are some awesome (and obscure) costumes in there, so check it out.

Many, many thanks to both Katie and Vanessa for being Mantis-Eye reporters for the convention and for being the first major contributors to the site (outside of capsule notes) since its inception seven years ago. Thanks guys!

For even more Venture Bros.-related Dragon*Con panel news videos you should check out the following from impromptu panel "Quiet Time With Doc Hammer" put together by Venture Bros. Blog. The panel is distinctly less Venture Bros. centric than the Venture Bros. panel, but there's a good amount of facts about Doc Hammer from the man himself.

Thanks to Marc Ilagan for organizing the panel and Adam 'Kuiosikle' Albert for recording the whole danged thing.

The awesome kittininja has posted videos from a ridiculously front and center position of this year's Dragon*Con Venture Bros. panel starring Doc Hammer and James Urbaniak. The first part is embedded right here:

And here are part two, part three and part four and the final part (or click through for embedded versions). That should cover you for a while! Enjoy!

Also if you happen to be Jackson Publick you may want to check about 22 seconds into part three.

This is somewhat off-topic, but news will probably be slow for a while and it's the first bit of Jonny Quest news probably in a while. Here's a recreation of the Jonny Quest opening titles done entirely with stop-motion (and some post-production compositing when needed). It's quite impressive and be sure to check out the behind the scenes info for a more in-depth look at all the work that went into making this.

Thanks to JP for sending this my way!

As promised, Adult Swim's web store has a physical copy of the "Jacket" EP that you can pre-order for a mere $5. It includes all five tracks from the downloadable version and each CD will be hand-numbered. Quantities will be limited so get while the gettin's good! These will ship on September 6th. On top of that a Shallow Gravy tshirt has also been offered up. It features a picture of the band featured in the album art. Also promises to be the "raddest shirt featuring H.E.L.P.eR." ever sold. The shirt can be yours for only $18.

Last night I finished up the capsule for "From The Ladle To The Grave: The Shallow Gravy Story". However, confession time, music videos are not my forte. In fact they are not even something I am vaguely familiar with since I spent my childhood playing Doom instead of watching MTV. So while I was able to notice a few of the references in the "Jacket" video (for example the Bob Dylan one; one everyone should know) I still need your help! Use the comments (or send me email if you're shy) to tell me what I missed. Also it was very late when I wrote it so feel free to correct any typos. Fly, my editors, fly!

Update (Aug 30, 12:55pm): Adult Swim is also airing the special every night this week at 12:30am, so if you missed it that's probably the best way to catch it. Adult Swim Video also has just the music video, "Jacket", if you want to watch it a few more times.

Original Story: For those of you with $1.99 to spare and a desire for more Shallow Gravy head on over to iTunes for an uncut version of last night's episode. It's 11:46 which is only slightly longer than the 11:18 version that aired last night but if you want as much Venture Bros. as you can handle (especially since it will be quite a while until there's more) then it's worth checking out.

On top of that for those of you with Adult Swim Gold access, the episode is currently up in full HD on that service. That is the standard cut of the episode, but if you want to watch it again (or missed it last night) then it's there for you! For the free, standard quality version Adult Swim will probably have it up next week as is the custom for new episodes.

And don't forget to check out the discussion thread to see what fellow Venture fans think and pop on over to the capsule page to vote on the episode.

Welcome, friends! As is custom with a new Venture Bros. episode comes a new discussion thread. This one is going up a little early thanks to the Venture Bros. marathon preceding the new 11-minute special "From the Ladle to the Grave: The Story of Shallow Gravy". Use the comments of this post to talk about the episode (or episodes) or just the show in general. For people who haven't seen the episode yet note that the comments will contain spoilers so if you don't enjoy that sort of thing then wait until you've seen it to start reading. Enjoy the episode!

MTV Geek! has a pre-special interview with Jackson and Doc that delves into the reason for the special, the reason Shallow Gravy exists, themes of the show, production on season five and more:

Yeah, it’s been a very long time since a whole story kind of popped into my head and that only happens when you are already super-focused on the writing and have immersed yourself in the world. I was writing a totally different story and have all of these characters in my head, and all of the interactions, and the things that will affect other people in my head and that just triggers new stuff.