Chapo Trap House - BONUS: Go Team Venture! feat. Doc Hammer & Jackson Publick

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

Chris talks to the creators of The Venture Bros. about their new series-finale movie, and two decades of creating one of the best, funniest & most unique shows on TV. The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart is out on Digital today, 7/21, and coming to Blu-ray on 7/25. This interview was conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike.

What up everyone, Chris here with another kind of producers choice bonus episode. You know, one of the benefits of this job is using the general popularity of this show to convince people we really admire to talk to us. And these two gentlemen are no exception for me. Doc Hammer and Jackson Public are the creators of The Venture Brothers. Premiering as a one-off pilot on adult swim in February 2003, over the course of 20 years, seven seasons, four specials, and now one feature-length film, the show has grown from a loving

a parody of Johnny Quests to one of the most sprawling, ambitious, hilarious, and often touching animated programs to ever grace the small screen. The Venture Brothers touches on and spoofs on themes of masculinity, arrested development, belonging, and to quote another fave of the show, how the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. All of this fed through Doc and Jackson's hyper-specific pop culture

reference blender and formed into insanely tight joke filled an action packed 22 minute episodes. So I love this show. I remember staying up late, sneaking adult swim in 2003 and catching the pilot as it aired and getting that feeling like will likes to describe like a diamond bullet of something broadcast out of the void made directly and exclusively for me. I've grown up with the venture brothers.

It's been a huge touchstone of my sense of humor. And my first solo interview podcast that I ever put together was an interview with Doc and Jackson that I convinced slate to let me do back when I worked with them in 2013. So this one is kind of a full circle interview for me and why I'm giving you my whole deal with the show up top. If you like the Venture Brothers, I hope you enjoy hearing from Doc and Jackson. And if you don't know the show,

they give you a very concise pitch of how to start watching in this very interview. Oh, and just coming over the transom last night, apparently Max, the place for HBO, is removing the whole series from streaming on August 12, which docking Jackson themselves apparently learned from on Twitter last night. So you've got like 20 days to binge this great show, or if not, you can like, I don't

know, borrow my DVD box set if you just ask. I don't know, folks, it's a bad time for our beloved programs and content, huh? But without further ado, here's the interview with Doc Hammer and Jackson Public. Go team venture. I'm gonna record a little spiel before this to introduce, so I'll just hop right into the questions. Okay, and I'm gonna say I like your couch.

Oh, thank you. It's quite lovely. Is that a pinker? Is it a play of the light? It's pink. It's kind of got a, I don't know what you call that, like a clam clamshell or cornpink, something like that. Yeah.

Yeah, we call it soft rose, but it's not a solid pink. Soft rose. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm, yeah, rose blush. I'm in a summer sublet right now, so I can't take credit for anything behind me, but you know, it is, it is nice to be here. All right. So the last time I podcasted with you two, almost exactly a decade ago, I let off asking about the, yeah, I know, the then consensus wisdom about the show that venture brothers was a show about failure.

And you push back against that with me then, and I think since then you've talked about how you're kind of sick of answering that question. So I promise I'm just using it to frame now because two seasons is special. And now this finale movie later, I would say looking at the totality of venture brothers, it doesn't look like it's about failure at all. It looks like it's about change in growth

and breaking cycles, closure, vengeance and redemption. So what happened? Well, what can you speak to the arc of the show as a total? Who wants it? Go ahead, jump in. Yeah, you're better at this. Yeah, failure is something that we always embrace, but we never embraced it as this kind of clarion call

between the two of us. We never just woke up one day and he calls me. He's like, I've cracked the code. We're about failure. It's just, it's just, it's part of life. And we wrote about life. And I know it's a cartoon, and I know it's about superheroes and super science and villains. But for us, it was about life. It was about relationships, it was about existence, it was about growing up in society, with toxic masculinity. It's about everything that we experienced, and we just threw it into a show and hoped it was funny. And failure is one of the things that we think is funny and inevitable and absolutely beautiful.

But so is tiny successes, so is the rise of 21. These are absolutely beautiful things. And I think, you know, a show was never about failure, but we embrace the beauty of failure. Right. Well, failure is not to quote the bear. Failure is not a destination. You know? The Yogi bear said that?

Yeah, the TV show, the bear, I just binge- Oh, you did. Is that about a chef? Yeah. I tried to watch it. It's so stylized I just gave up. It's very stressful, but it's great. Yeah.

It had so much like slickness. Yeah, I've always wanted more shows about food process and it scratches that itch to me. But when talking about the failure growth dynamic, you brought up 21 and one of the things I was thinking about watching the finale is that from the beginning, this show and 21 was a big conduit of this.

The show has been kind of a send up of nerd culture as we might have called it back in the OOs. Right. And before it was just culture. Yeah, well, that's what I, okay, that's what I was gonna ask and we need to, like, you're gonna say Doc. And so they sent up of nerd culture and these, these kind of like genre fictions

that were, you know, kind of neat, more niche at the time. But the way that I always thought the show approaches that the obsessiveness always more or less doomed the obsessive nerds to eternal stunted growth and kind of an emasculated adulthood. I was just wondering how you feel about that now that 20 years later that became the culture. Yeah, arrest and development was definitely a theme and I guess I never linked it to the nerddom myself, but I think you're absolutely right. Talks about to completely disagree with you.

I think you're a broadster. I'm eager to hear this. I think you're wrong about counts. The first premise that it's to send up on nerd culture and we're not big bang theory. We're not guessing about nerd culture. We are nerds writing a show about culture. So it's not a send up at all.

It is, it is, I think it's finally. Oh, we're goofing on things we love. Yeah, that's the difference between our show is we're not guessing what is nerdy. We just write about what we love and we write it with love and we write it with understanding. And if there's any critiquets,

the same critique you give when you watch your kid fall off a bike and go, that's my son. That's what he does. He tries so hard. And the other idea is that like it has become culture. I don't think the rise of the superhero movie is not... The nerds didn't win. All we did is turn Marvel into a sound of music. You know, it's like... You're acting like Serpico happened. It isn't. They took something that is precious to us, and turned it into a giant, stinky, Hollywood

thing. And if we keep consuming it, that's on us, man. But although comics do that to themselves all the time, they're always way too many comics. And they're not all good. Yeah. I agree with this. And this is just the way entertainment is made. It just goes through these wonderful cycles until somebody puts out a heavens gate and they have to reboot the cycle. Yeah. Which I, the heavens gates a fine movie.

I think that's something else there could be a cabal. I don't know. Call some stupid ebert. Get that back. Well, along those lines of like, you know, that everything from the show comes from a place of passion. You know, I think one of the pleasures of watching the show for a long time fan

and for such a long period at this time is the pleasure of like feeling like you're not just living in one person's head, but kind of living in the friendship between you guys, like it's such a perfect manifestation of your guys' relationship. And one of the very few things that is like only two people's perspectives on things. Well, our relationship is the show. Right.

And it's longer than most relationships. It's more fruitful than most marriages. It's a weird thing. So you're watching our entire relationship. We didn't spend a lot of time outside of the show together. That being said, we spent every day together. It was a deep form of our relationship. So it's weird. There are no precedents for this. I don't know what it would be like to just know, Jack, I do know what it would be like to know. When I first met him, all we did is talk in a unit like a language that we invented immediately.

I met him at a party, the entire entire party went and we just started talking and creating and you know, frightening everybody around us. Wishing for Noah. Yeah, we really, people didn't like us that night. Yeah, it was, yeah. It was anti-social. Yeah, and if there is an intellectual love affair, you know, at that party, I'm like, oh my God.

You know, I found him, but it didn't feel like that. It literally was just rescuing Ben's crappy party with somebody like, could talk to. Well, I think fans of this particular podcast will definitely understand the joy of having a kind of a secret coded language that you understand you're humor in. But I want to talk a little bit about the creative process here because I think fans of Venture Brothers

will know the feeling that there's this kind of amazing tension that drives the show between kind of planning and discovery. And you'll have the whole seasons or specific episodes that are kind of these amazingly intricate clockwork plots with these insane payoffs, but then there's also this element of cure discovery of something that was a toss-off joke or somebody who happened to be a background character in one scene because they were a background character in that scene having to become a main character three seasons later.

So I was just wondering, you know, and again, you're just coming off planning what is ostensibly the end of the show. Could you speak to that that tension between planning and discovery as you more discovery than planning and then just having a dumb memory and ticking on stupid things like, you know And always like from day one every the least important background character where I I Insisted that everybody look a little interesting. You know, that everybody's appearance implied a story we weren't telling you. And that paid off a few times. We got a few main characters, that ultimately.

You know, like White and Billy, we're just two weirdos at a science convention. And Doc was like, I want to write for the little live patch, Metal Hand Guy. Where'd he have that, you know? And then once you start doing that, you're like, I want to write for the little light patch, Metal Hand Guy, where'd he have that, you know? And then once you start doing that, you're like, I gotta tell the story of how he got his Metal Hand because I got nothing else.

So yeah, mostly discovery and accident and then mental catalog of everything. Yeah, and this is what? That sits in the back of your memory for years and these molecules just bounce off of each other. Yeah, and we is what this is what? That sits in the back of your memory for years and these molecules just bounce off of each other. Yeah, and we talk about these characters. We spoke in their voices for literally every day at the expense of every relationship we've ever been in.

Yeah. When we invented Sergeant Hatred's voice, the guy was the deli. The guy at the deli was like, what is wrong with your voice? Yeah, I'll be yeah the black and white yeah and a slap a little smidge and the mustard on that would yeah yeah

and it was this this you know through the voice we developed the character and that's everything came from that and since we're obsessive about these voices and these characters we lived them We can have a conversation for more than 10 minutes without doing an impression of one of our characters And usually ones we don't do yeah, you get to hear like our horrible impressions of each other Yeah, that is just the way we we thought or James or maniac mostly we do a lot of talking like doc anytime We're just not eat each and we use it as a fucking shield, like an emotional shield, like if you gotta say something a little shitty to the other guy, you know, well,

yeah. Well, nice, nice try anyway. My doc impression was so bad it became shore leave So I just did it my my shore leave and a price impression of doc venture by So when you're doesn't do good and we got the last time I was in New York before we got canceled We nightdicked ourselves horse We talked we talked about six hours straight, chain smoking, talking like nitic. Yeah, and before that, when we were cleaning out the astro base,

we did never to be produced baby aquaman and black manta. We just did this show, we're black manta and aquaman, we're kids, and it were kids that it was played for you. Black Manta, yeah. Right. Come on Aquaman, we could use my BMX bike. It was, we did it for hours.

It was a combination of that and kind of derm it. Yeah. You're Black Manta voice. Oh, man. Aquaman, we're kids are coming. How'd you break? Yeah. There was a, based on Aquaman being Black Mantis cool older friend that didn't really like him

that much. And Black Mantis was like this kid. He was a kid who looked, or I brought firecrackers. And you know, he's never welcomed anywhere. You know, and we'll do that till our throat's hurt. So you just listening to this, I feel like gives as much insight about the creative process that any specific question or answer, you know, this is what I, this is what the show is. Yeah, to be clear, to be clear, we have almost never consciously Collaborated and tried to write a thing together. It only happened by accident. Yeah, really when we have to do a special like this

We actually have to talk about what a whole plot is. Oh, okay. Before we split it up, but like, that's it. The rest of the time, it's just rifting and somebody remembered to write it down and then it shows up and the other guy's scripting, like, shit, I was gonna use it. Yeah.

Yeah, I just create these things between each other that will disperse through the series. All right, so I wanna talk about gender and sex and the venture brothers, which is you guys play a lot, play around with gender a lot in a way that I think takes it seriously, but it's also funny. I mean, we have men growing and losing tits, hypermasculine women in several different forms. Some of the most enthusiastically gay characters on TV, and I won't give too much away, but the final image of the whole show is one of the most

gleefully shocking gender inversions I've seen on TV or movies recently, so. And it's always, always depicted in a very celebratory way. So I guess just like broadly, what is funny about gender and playing around with it to you guys? Well, what is, look, I'm gonna talk to this one. All right, let me just say one sentence about it. To me, what's funny about it is how uncomfortable

it makes straight people. That's when he's been my favorite thing about dealing with any characters on our show was how uncomfortable the other guys are, like, oh, there's two together, is that a guy? You know? But go on. For me, it's very different. I mean, I grew up, if you look at pictures of me in high school, there's nothing that defies gender neutrality. I have a dress on. I, David Bowie's God, like I did not grow up thinking that these are weird concepts.

So, matter of fact, anybody that had these concepts was just lame. And I was called every 20 minutes, somebody called me a fag or a fag. That was just it. To the point where I stopped hearing it, you just stopped hearing it. And I grew up in a old music scene

where you escaped this kind of place where people just insulted you by calling you Either guessing your your sexuality or guessing what you like. I was literally called hey, divo Like there's a big stretch like is it do I like divo word like you can't think of anything but divo So I was just so pigeonholed that the idea of gender to me was just not a thing. It just so anytime we I'm dealt with gender I'm like this is a part of life. It's as funny as any part of life. And honestly I can't believe it's a topic. I can't believe that people are afraid of it. I mean I can't believe because people will just latch onto these weird words and go,

woe, baaaaaah, you know, hippie, baaaaaah, socialist, baaaaaah. Like people just find a word to bristle at. They don't understand it. They're not thinking. So I think our candidness with just going forward and going, their topics. We're not trying to say anything except this is a topic you shouldn't be afraid of. It is both beautiful and funny

and it's everything that every topic is. Just embrace it, come the fuck down. It's calm down. Yeah, I mean, I was gonna follow with that is that like the, you know, this has always been a topic of kind of fascination, but it made off-handed fascination. There's a casualness to it that I always think is,

is part of the core funniness to the way that you approach gender and sexuality jokes in venture brothers, but, you know, obviously over the last, you know, little arc of American history, it's become a much more fraught and contested topic. Yeah. In, you know in popular consciousness. And I was just wondering if that affected

how you thought about it at all within the venture universe. Now we got canceled before. We thought we were going to answer for that. Yeah. We canceled the old fashioned way. We didn't get more in canceled. Yes, classic.

We got classic TV canceled. Anytime I tell somebody I was canceled, I'm like, oh,ing like oh we got canceling like what'd you do? I know what you say yeah, yeah, somehow I failed somebody To me it's just a it's a moment in time that we're dealing with and people have politicized this and I think it's I can't wait for the day We look back and giggle on it. And I think we'll be looking back and giggling on it, wearing a good looking short skirt. Again, just fucking stop fighting these kind of things.

Didn't David Bowie solve this a long time ago? Why? Why are we talking about it? All right, I think I have to move on to my last question here. You know, I grew up with venture brothers my entire life. It's definitely changed the way that I see the world and my sense of humor in a very core way. So I guess my final question is,

how has venture brothers changed you two? I mean, other than materially it being your job for two decades, how has doing the show changed the way you see or are in the world, your lives? I can't answer that. Like I got a house. I got a house and I get to like 5,000 people at Comic Con being excited to meet me, which is Will always be bizarre because we're just like these idiots making a thing and going I don't know how to do anything else. I don't know how to not care way too much about this to the Determine everything else in my life

We're cartoon famous. It's not like I'm not getting Frontline and I'm still Doc who it's so I literally make friends And then have a six-month relationship and then finally we get to this point of like oh, what do you do? And I go I made the venture brothers like what? No way no way I can't tell from your voice I'm like you never googled who does Dr. Girlfriend? I mean, that would be like my first thing to do is like,

what, where does that voice come from? What ed issues that horrible sound? But a lot of people don't, so it's like a footnote in my life. But I have great pride in what we've done. And I'll sell you the Venture Brothers. It goes like this. Oh, have you seen it? No, it's a horrible looking icon of a fun little family

and I've ever clicked on it. And I go, OK, forget the icon. We can't control that. This is how we want you to watch it. Forgive the first season, we were kids who didn't know what they were doing, but developing a relationship. The last two episodes, we thought we're gonna get fired

and we made great TV and came back. We came back going, we know what we're doing now and we made a great show. So forgive season one for everything it's about it and enjoy everything later. And know the show was not canceled after season three. I mean, so many people, it went to seven seasons. I'm like, yes, and they're better than the first stuff. Just get out there. Every single one better than last one. Okay, I think this is all the time that I have with you guys

today. I'll just ask one yes or no question on the way out. Is the techno remix of shallow gravy's jacket going to be available? Oh, you know what? Maybe I was just talking to Colino last night. He's like, you know what does well because we're talking about merchandising ideas. He's like, vinyl does really well. And I was like, maybe we should reissue the jacket EP as a vinyl. Oh, I think you'd have a market.

I'll tell you that those are recorded in the wrong software for that, man. That's a garage band. Yeah, I gotta bring that back into logic, but call me. I got the files. Yeah. All right. Well, I think we've got to sign off.

Dock and Jackson. It's an honor to talk to you. Congratulations. What a tremendous work. Thank you so much, Chris. I wish you seen it already. Yeah, we got to spend our last night. It's awesome.

It rocks. Wow. If you don't give spoilers, yeah. I'm all careful about that. Looted to the last image. Yeah, you're all professional, but I am so afraid that people are going to want to find out and they're going to just blow it like wait. Don't don't masturbate this one. Wait for Koitus. It's beautiful. The last image though. Isn't it? Yeah. Isn't it beautiful? It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect. I was, I fell off my couch.

Yeah, when recommendations come up and hide most of the image, and it'll like, it'll think going four, three, two, one for the credits, oh streaming media, you suck. All right, thank you guys so much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chris. The Venture Brothers finale movie, Radiant is the blood of the Baboon Heart is available today on digital and is out on Blu-ray on July 25th.

Go watch it now. Thanks, guys. Check it out, double breasted check it out. The coke's for rare, no devil's word Every Tuesday, the check wheels are everywhere On my hourware, my special gold We're loud and damn, the check is Foreverware You can't get it