the venture bros

The Venture Bros, one of the most brilliant adult cartoons of the 21st century, was unceremoniously silenced by an abrupt cancellation four years ago. The short of it is AT&T took control of Warner Bros, cancelled The Venture Bros, and then left, but not before running up a huge bill and leaving the building in the care of someone even worse than they were. Until then, the show was doing fine, if bring produced at a pace that even snails would find slow. We would usually get one season of eight or so episodes every three years, and if we were lucky, we’d get some kind of special in between them. Before outside forces started monkeying around with Adult Swim, the channel was content to just let Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick do whatever they wanted, at the pace they wanted, because the end result was that good. In the end seven seasons and 82 episodes of The Venture Bros were made, but the show’s dense plotting never got to

Fans of the Adult Swim TV series The Venture Bros (which is all of you, I’m assuming) watched in horror and extreme nervousness as David Zaslav assumed the Emperor’s Chair at Warner Bros this past summer and started cancelling every animated project he could find. “If he touches The Venture Bros, I swear…” was a frequent comment I saw online. Of course, The Venture Bros. had already been cancelled, and not by Dave — it was AT&T who decided to cancel the show, during their brief period of ownership where they basically ran up a huge bill, partied, and left the mess for someone else to clean up. Despite all this, the management as Adult Swim still believed in The Venture Bros and managed to talk the higher-ups into approving a feature film to tie up all danging plot points from the last season finale. This production had to survive a lot, but it did, and we can now breathe a sigh of relief as we look at ACTUAL FOOTAGE