The Mantis-Eye Experiment

Just a reminder, tonight from 5:30 to 9:30 (EST) in New York City will be the Adult Swim upfront presentation. Expect fine dining, uh, presenting... stuff... and show renewal, acquisition and scheduling news. And Venture Bros. news, right? RIGHT?! I'll have another update tonight as soon as I find out the news, be it good or bad. Just to reiterate on a couple points at the expense of looking like an ass if I turn out to be wrong:

• Creative director at CN, Ed Murrieta, has said VB will be renewed.
• Jackson Publick, on his livejournal, has said "Everyone wants it, it's just not official until it's official, hence no official announcement. All that is what's happening now, and as I mentioned last time, things are looking good."
• Adult Swim bumps have aired stating that they are "close to greenlighting season 2" followed by some of their wonderful humor about skipping season 2 and going right into season 3.
• A few other sources at Turner have heard inklings that the show is coming back for a second season.
• The ratings of the show have been very strong, including nearly 700k viewers on a recent Sunday 12:30am viewing. The show has also been on at least once a week (often two, and up to four times) since it premiered, and AS continues to advertise for it. All of those facts point to the show doing well at the very least.

So there you have it. I predict good news tonight, though I am fully prepared to eat my words if I'm wrong. Here's a recent Turner press release about AS. See you in a few hours!

Thursday. The Adult Swim upfront is then, which will finally end all the waiting and bring forth an official Venture Brothers announcement. I hope. Here's a write-up from the 2004 AS upfront if you want to be nostalgic or something. The paragraph about Venture Bros. is near the bottom of page two. Enjoy!

Okay, before I run off to dreamland for the night, I just want to touch on a couple things I forgot to get into last update. First off, the DVD of Season 1 appears to now be in the works, though the release date is not final, but estimations put it happening sometime in early 2006, though very early CN projections said October, but that seems unlikely at this point. So it will be a nice compliment to an already in-progress season 2, or something to cry and get drunk over if the show is canceled.

Nextly, and I didn't even notice this until an hour or two ago, the showing of 104 last Sunday (the 6th) managed to pull in a whopping 698k viewers (males between 18 and 34 anyway) which are the highest weekend ratings the show has ever gotten. Not too shabby for 12:30am on Sunday.

And finally I have all the screencaps for the full-length episodes done, which means I only have the Christmas episode left. Note to anyone who hasn't seen Return to Spider-Skull Island, you might not want to look at the last image as it's pretty spoiler-tastic. I figure it's aired enough times by now that it's okay, but fair warning I suppose.

I was actually going to write an update around two hours ago about how I had nothing to update about, but I thought that was kind of stupid, so I put it off. Turns out I did have something to update about all along. After over a month Mr. Publick hath updated:

I know, I know...there's a white elephant in the room that no one is talking about. The Adult Swim "Up-fronts"--a gala affair in which Adult Swim announces to potential advertisers and the world at large their upcoming scheduling and development plans for the next year--are in a couple of weeks. Expect official news then!

So hey, you've already waited this long, why not a few more weeks? Also I was slacking on the images for the last couple of days, but I do have up to Past Tense up, and the remaining three episodes will follow in the next couple of days.

One great thing about the SA Forums is that there's always somebody who has gone to some big and interesting thing. In this case the man only known as 'The Jizzer' attended the AS Q&A I mentioned in the last update; so here's some of the same Venture Bros. news:

• Coming out soon on DVD (1st 13 episodes)
  
• [AS] is still contemplating renewing the show -- so WRITE SOME GODDAMN LETTERS AND SUPPORT IT, ASSWADS.

Sooooo... yeah. I gotta say, I'm starting to get worried here. At any rate, you can e-mail AS at adultswim@turner.com, which I believe will be forwarded to a number of people. Let them know (nicely) that you really, really like the Venture Bros. and you'd really appreciate it if they renewed it. They do read their e-mail (or so I'm told), so go ahead and do it, and tell anybody else who's a fan of the show to do it too.

Site news? Screencaps are actually easier to put together than I thought (since I don't mind watching each episode again), so I have up to Mid-Life Chrysalis done, and I may do the next episode later tonight. Enjoy, and send out an e-mail!

I've got, uh, almost news. For any of you guys or gals in the SoCal area, there's an Adult Swim panel (scroll down a little) at the upcoming (actually it started today) Television Festival. The AS part, in specific, is on the 4th. Short notice, I know, but maybe you could get tickets off a scalper if you really want to go. No Venture folks are attending, however, but the Robot Chicken, Tom Goes to the Mayor and ATHF dudes will be there if you somehow happen to like more than one television show.

In site news, I'll be adding screencaps to the episode capsules over the next couple of weeks. There will be around 15 per episode, and I've already got them up for episodes 101 and 102. It's a lot less work than writing the capsules, I'll tell you that. Oh, and many thanks to team-venture.net for the nice plug (I know that sounds dirty, but it's not, you perv). If you haven't already, you ought to check that place out. Just don't download too many sounds.

Still no news about anything. AS ran information-packed but very quick sequence of bumps for shows currently in production (many still in the pilot or early stages), and yes, as you've probably guessed by now, there was no Venture Bros. mention. I also can't say I'm really a fan of the art style for most of those new shows. The whole ugly design thing really needs to go, but I digress. You can check out the bumps for yourself at ASF.com, or right here, though the versions I mirrored are half-size. That's it for now.

Oh those wacky Adult Swim bumps. "We are close to greenlighting season 2" which is more or less official confirmation of season 2. Then there was some random blathering about skipping season 2 and going right to season 3 or something, I don't really know. More as it develops of course, but as I have mentioned, there won't actually be new episodes until October at the earliest most likely. Enjoy the snow if you're in the northeast like I am.

Huh? News about that breakfast is that there is no news. There's a small bit of AS info here, but it's incomplete since AS will be having their own upfront some other day. As of right now I don't know when it will be, but I'll be sure to mention here if I do know. Not much else, so check out some cosplay nerds and more here. Yeah. Careers in Science will be on tomorrow as well. Also, Constantine wasn't too great. Not awful, but not good either. That is all.

Whew, monster update follows. First off, I finally noticed a pretty bad bug in the registration code (good going whoever made that... oh wait) which was preventing people from registering, thus rendering the feature useless. I fixed that problem, so if you tried to register within the last 12 days but you got an error saying your e-mail was already registered (which it wasn't), then try again because you can actually register now. Related note, I added the ability to post anonymous comments, so you can do that if you don't feel like registering. Note that if you do make an anonymous comment then your IP will be displayed (which isn't a huge deal unless you're mega paranoid).

With that crap out of the way, I have some Venture Bros. and Adult Swim related news. First off HooverFan on the SA forums pointed out that a new VB t-shirt is available. It's red with a picture of Brock fighting the alligator in the pilot. As for Adult Swim news, here's an article on how AS and CN are going to do a Neilson split (the article explains what that is). Thanks to livingfruitvirus for that. You know you love him, folks. Also here's some news that Midway will be developing some Adult Swim games. No Venture Bros. game yet. I say 'yet' because it's probably inevitable.

And finally, I updated the ratings since I missed getting them on Sunday and I just forgot to add them yesterday. Last Saturday's showing of Dia de los Dangerous! grabbed 480k viewers. The Sunday showing of 111 didn't place in the top three, probably due to the Super Bowl, which, despite being very close the whole game, was not very exciting. And that's that. I'll have news on that breakfast tomorrow if there is any to be had, but I still have no confirmation if or not AS will be making any announcements there (but my money is on 'no').