The thing that always struck me about Jonny Quest is: What kind of parent brings his kid to the Amazon so that yetis can throw boulders at him?
That’s just a sampling of the bizarre quotes you’ll find in this interview with Jackson Publick, one of the creators of The Venture Brothers.
Amy & I discovered this show last summer when we were visiting her family. We clicked around on Sunday night, found Adult Swim, and saw a guy in a butterfly costume confronting man in a one-piece leisure suit, as two butterfly-suited henchmen fiddled with toys like Hulk-Hands and a Magneto helmet:
The Monarch: You f—ing idiot! What are we supposed to do with this crap? Make them laugh so hard they blow malt liquor out of their noses?
Dr. Venture: No, I think you’ll have that covered when you storm the room in butterfly costumes.
The Monarch: Oh, ha ha ha heh heh. Nice onesie, dick. Does it have snaps in the back, so you can make poopies?
Henchman 24: Ohhhhh snap!!
Dr. Venture: This is a speedsuit, mister. Not a ‘onesie’!
The Monarch: Oh hey, maybe they’ll think you’re a 3-year-old with progeria, and take pity on us.
I was hooked. The first season of the show wasn’t fantastic (like all of these Adult Swim shows, it seemed to spend a chunk of its first season trying to find itself, but was way too genre-specific), but the second season’s a blast (and now out on DVD
, hence the interview).
Beyond the non-sequitur insults, one of the aspects of the show that I really dug was the lost promise of the (early) 1960s. Publick talks a little about that, how Dr. Venture “is a boy genius who didn’t grow up to be what he should have been”:
Reason: And I suppose you’re not just talking about the failure of superheroes, because these fantasy science stories were produced by a culture that was high on superscience — beating the Russians to the Moon, curing every disease, etc.
JP: That’s the deeper thing behind it — it’s me voicing my disappointment that we don’t have that kind of magic going on any more, that level of enthusiasm and hope. That extends to the kind of cultural stuff that was going on in the ’60s, a youthful generation thinking they could change the world. I’m voicing my displeasure at having been born in a time when some of that magic, for lack of a better word, is gone, and some of those promises that were made in all of our pop culture were never met. My laptop is the coolest thing that’s come out of that. I’m still waiting on my jet pack.
And Patrick Warburton’s pretty funny as the bodyguard of Venture’s cloned sons.
