At NYCC, Venture Bros.' Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer regaled hundreds at the Friday night panel. But the real action was in Saturday's press room, where the writers of TV's funniest show fired off quips like some quip-firing machine gun.
Here were the pertinent spoilers from Friday night's panel:
— Molotov and Hunter Gathers will be back for more, and the guys seemed to suggest there will be two more moppets, though that may have been them fucking with us. They suggested the relationship with Brock and Gathers will be tested, and it somehow involves someone getting an extra hand.
— Jackson was afraid the last episode was a shark jumper, and he and Doc had bet $5 that the NYCC audiences would hate or love it. Doc won, as the audience seemed to really like last week's noirishness.
— Doc Hammer confirmed there's a very good chance that, now Venture Bros. action figures finally exist, they will show up on Robot Chicken soon.
But the details didn't stop there; at Saturday's press room, Publick and Hammer were 100% unscripted, often going to town on whatever topic they damned well pleased. Normally, press rooms are a simple back-and-forth exchange. This was more like an impromptu performance of The 2000 Year Old Man.
1.) Doc Hammer on Dr. Girlfriend's nip slip:
I'm surprised it took people that long to see it. When we were setting it up for a DVD release, I was taking bars off of penises, penises, penises. And I realized that we didn't have anything for the other side, so we added a one-frame shot of a nipple. That was just for the DVD; it wasn't on TV. I love nipples, I love breasts, not penises so much. […] It probably took 3 minutes.
2.) Doc Hammer on Dean perhaps losing his virginity:
It will be a big teary-eyed affair. That's not going to go well. He'll want to get married.
3.) The guys discuss why they're so obsessed with Shore Leave:
Doc Hammer: He's awesome! We want you to love him.
Jackson Publick: It's a voice we did around Astrobase a lot. It was a voice Doc would do with a sock puppet like five years ago.
DH: I did a sock puppet thing for cable access. It became a voice I could speak easily in. I cannot do voices, some of them are really difficult. It was also the voice we used when we writing Doctor Venture.
DH: We tried to do the voices of [OSI agents] Cardholder and Doe, and I had to redo the voice because it sounded exactly like Dr. Girlfriend. I had to come in the next day and do it.
JP: I once had to do Hunter Gathers, Sgt. Hatred, and the Pirate Captain all in the same episode. It was really hard because they all go dooown.
DH: I slip into Yiddish a lot, every time I try to do a German guy […] Dr. Girlfriend makes me cough. It's in a deep register. I'm a heavy smoker who suffers from allergies. I might have cancer, I don't know. If anybody wants to palpate my regions, go for it.
4.) Doc on his vision of the Phantom Limb action figure:
I wanted Phantom Limb to be just a torso in a box. There's not even a stand to hold him up. […] It looks like a broken Bo Duke doll, right out of the box. "It's crappy already, Mom!"
5.) On the genesis of Sgt. Hatred and how fans are proper creeped out by him:
DH: Sgt. Hatred was a reference to an episode when someone was talking about "a bad touch." So in the first reference, he was "bad touch." That was the baggage that he brought with him. So he's recovered, he's an ex-pedophile. In this cartoon world, where there can be ex-pedophiles, he's been forgiven. Maybe he touched a cartoon fake kid, I don't know. Hank said that there was a bad touch involved, that could mean anything. You'd think someone would care, maybe Mothers Against Fake Pedophile Cartoon Characters.
JP: Three years from now, that's what will happen. It will be rediscovered in a different political climate and then it will become a problem. It'll be like South Park thing with Muhammad, everyone forgets that they already drew him once.
DH: I wouldn't mind me and the guy from Twisted Sister going in front of Congress. I'm fine with that.
6.) I ask the guys about the prospect of seeing Dr. Phineas Phage again:
JP: He was a one-off, we needed a super-easy-to-grasp supervillain worthy of arching.
DH: [lying] But you are going to see the Pro-Teens!
JP: Now that we know you like him, we'll think of him of being in the stable. We'll use him in the background of the yard sale episodes.
7.) After fielding a slew of questions concerning spoilers about episodes that have yet to be written, I ask the guys whether we will learn the final destiny of the recently "killed" Ghost Robot. This spurs a five-minute, stream-of-consciousness tangent in which nobody from the press got in a word edgewise:
DH: Moootherfucker! We just told we can't do that! I'll tell you this though, I've been reading a lot of people [upset] about how Ghost Robot is dead. He had one line in one other episode. And he's a ghost! Living in a robot!
JP: It's one thing that's not alive and one thing that's alive forever! And why are people worried about it? […] Ghost Robot was in my notebook for years, when I was doing comic stuff. I think I was goofing on the Vision [from the Avengers] in my mind. I realized he's a ghost robot, what the hell is that? That's the dumbest thing in the world! My secret origin for him? He was a robot who didn't become sentient until he died.
DH: And since he's dead, I wouldn't worry about him being dead. That seems ridiculous to me, worrying about Ghost Robot. "Oh no, Ghost Robot's dead!" That seems silly. They should be worried about the pedophile thing […] We have two voices that are almost the same voice, [Ghost Robot] and the guy from the Council of 13, [monotone] "The One Who Speaks Like This." They're really long horrible voices, I want to do a whole episode that is just those two guys talking and just excruciate everyone around them not having a good time. [Ghost Robot voice] "THIS IS GREAT I'M GLAD WE ALL DECIDED TO GO OUT TOGETHER. HERE IS A GOOD ONE. DID I TELL YOU THIS JOKE YET?
JP: "A GUY….A HORSE…AND A JEW GO INTO A BAR…BAD JOKE."
DH: "A HORSE HAS A LONG FACE...THEREFORE IT IS FUNNY. LET'S PLAY KARAOKE? LOVE...IS...A...BATTLEFIELD."
JP: "WHO WANTS HOT WINGS?"
8.) Someone asks a question about the show's penchant for comic book allusions, and whether there's anybody they'd like to allude to:
DH: You just heard my wish list of having two robots ruin an episode. I forgot that there was such thing as Marvel, I just want to bore you guys with two robots. It's all fetishized at this point.
9.) I ask Publick and Hammer about their typical Venture Bros. writing session:
DH: We write alone.
JP: We accidentally brainstorm together. We end up talking in character usually.
DH: When we write an episode, it's written alone, and we're lucky that we share a sense of humor. When we write together, it's creepy and cold, and it's really hard to write with somebody because you have to make a jerk of yourself. It's like you, "I HAVE A GREAT IDEA!" And then you say it, and it isn't a great idea at all. It's like, "I sound like a douchebag saying how great my idea was!" What we do is we write our ideas out and email them across the room from each other.
JP: We instant-message them.
DH: And then we instant-message back edits. We write like ex-lovers.
10.) Doc Hammer recounts role-playing as a young'un:
I played with the neighborhood dingleberries. I was a ranger. Why not? I wanted to be a magic user but I also wanted to fight, so I had no idea what I was going to do. It was just the luck of the dice. [Everybody laugh-groans.] I waited a long time to have sex, besides myself. I was very thin then, now I've beefed up. At the time, I was very uncomfortable, I didn't have this hulking mass you see before you. [NOTE: Doc looks like this, link contains NSFW artwork.] My tattoos? I got these in Azkaban. You just have to get tatted up or they kick your ass...with magic.
11.) I ask them about their celebrity fans:
JP: Jonah Hill said he'd do a voice, but he might've just been being polite.
DH: We don't know any celebrities, they're probably afraid of my masculinity I was speaking of earlier. I'm kind of intimidating through bulk.
12.) Doc talks his fashion sense:
I'm a bit of a bon vivant. I spend my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention.
[Silence]
I'm quoting Adam Ant for you.
13.) Doc on being recognized as "the Venture Bros. guy":
It's like Where's Waldo but in a world of purple people and I'm the only the guy with the striped hat.
14.) On the network reaction to the first season:
DH: The boys were "gay-ass." That was the notice we got. The network notice!
JP: They initially thought Doc Venture's nasal voice was annoying and that he talked too much, but we haven't gotten a note since the first script of Season Two. The only other thing they wanted to change was "Could you make the boys better?" But we were going to do that anyway. They were initially like "Golly!" but then we started introducing "Crazy Hank" in the Batman outfit and so on.
DH: We were too busy breaking Brock to fix the boys. They warned us about Billy and Pete White for [being too geeky].
15.) The hour-long season finale will have to do with a prom and, according to Doc, "contains the most beeps you'll ever have to endure on Adult Swim."
Panel reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.