jacksonpublick

After a long absence, Hollywood screenwriter and Friend of Venture Todd Alcott is back at his old game of analyzing episodes of The Venture Bros., and, completist that he is, he's hell-bent on catching up with everything he missed. Starting with, weirdly enough, 2003's pilot episode, "The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay." Check out his website HERE.

We Love You,
JP

P.S. Shirt Club. Soon...

Hello again…

A belated "Merry Christmas" to you all, and a preemptive "Happy New Year." Apologies for not offering up a Venture Christmas song this season, but we converted to Mayanism earlier this year, so we no longer believed in Christmas and fully believed the world would end on December 21st. Also, we were super-busy with post-production on The Venture Bros. Season 5, as well as with decorating our giant stone calendar and practicing human head soccer.

So now it's back to post-production. Here's where we currently stand with the season: We've already delivered half of the fully finished episodes to the network, and the rest are in various states of post-production. This week we received the rough cut of the final episode from Korea (which is actually the second half of what will be our premiere episode) so I'm spending the day scouring it for errors and typing up retakes notes. Then tonight I'm headed to a final sound mix session for the 6th episode. We'll finish the picture edit for the 7th episode a day or two into the new year and turn it over to our sound engineer, then move on to editing the 8th episode.

Since we're idiots who decided to write and produce our hour-long premiere episode last, we can't start airing until the last episode is finished. I don't currently know exactly when our premiere date is. I've heard it could be as soon as mid-March or as late as early May, but we're racing to get that premiere special done in time for March.

And now that I've seen all of the episodes in one form or another, I can truthfully say it's going to be a great season. The crew in every department of the production really stepped up their game (and new crew members brought new game)--the show's never looked or sounded better. And as writers, Doc and I hit a really great, confident stride that, I think, combines some of the best qualities of seasons past with a uniquely season 5 freshness. A good mix of new characters and old (some of which haven't been seen in quite a while), high adventure in exotic locations and internal strife on the home front. You will like it!

(Incidentally, the guest voices this season include J.K. Simmons, Larry Murphy, Paget Brewster, John Hodgman, Wyatt Cenac, Tim Meadows, Gillian Jacobs, Bill Hader, and the kicking-ass-on-SNL-this-season Kate McKinnon!)

We're also looking ahead to next season. Doc and I have big plans for season 6 and are champing at the bit to get started writing it. But first we have to write the script for our proposed long-form Venture Bros. special. We've got a pretty epic story planned, involving an epic number of cast members in an epic setting, so it's a pretty epic task ahead of us. The story will bridge seasons 5 & 6, so our mission is to tie up a lot of threads from season 5 (and 4, and 3…) and start a few new ones in the process. The sooner we write that, the sooner we'll write season 6--and the sooner we do all this writing, the sooner we'll be back on the air. My hope, as always, is to tighten that interminable gap between seasons--because I don't like waiting to show you new Venture Bros. any more than you like waiting to see new Venture Bros. So wish us luck…

Anyway, I posted a bunch of season 5 screen grabs on my Tumblr, but here's a few more for you LJ loyalists…






















We Love You,

JP

P.S. Thanks for all the cookies.

P.P.S. Happy New Year!!!

Too Art For TV is an annual pop-up gallery exhibition in Brooklyn, NY, celebrating the personal, art-for-art's sake work of dozens of animation industry professionals. You've probably seen me blog about the shows every year. The openings are fun and jam-packed, the community really rallies around them, and the work is always dazzling.

The Bunnycutlet Gallery was founded by Liz Artinian, Color Supervisor for The Venture Bros., and close personal super-friend. And this year she's launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to keep the gallery open year-round, in hopes of curating more exhibitions and building a hub for an even bigger, more energized animation art community in New York.

Many Venture Bros. artists are exhibiting, as well as artists from such varied animated favorites as Ugly Americans, SuperJail!, Metalocalypse, and China, Illinois. Some of them even created that stuff! So if you're a fan of any of those shows, or just neato art in general, click on the image above and check it out. and maybe give them some money. I'm unfortunately not personally exhibiting a piece in this year's show, but I've got a couple of prints available as pledge rewards.


Thanks...

We Love You,

JP

So I have one of THOSE TUMBLR THINGIES now...

Never had one before, don't know how much I'll use it, but click the bold blue words above, check it out/follow it/whatever you people do with these things...

Just a few season 5 screen grabs to whet your electronic whistle.

We Love You,

JP

The Thrilling Adventure Hour is a super-fun live stage show in the style of old timey radio that throws down every month in Los Angeles. I've been lucky enough to see it maybe half a dozen times, even luckier to have befriended its creators, Ben Acker & Ben Blacker, and double-plus lucky to be a guest star in last week's sold-out shows here in Brooklyn. Your TV pal and mine, James "Dr. Venture" Urbaniak is just one member of the incredibly talented cast, the rest of whom I've slowly been poaching all year for Venture Bros. voices. Those of you who don't live in LA should check out their podcasts.

And now they're trying to raise funds to publish a hardcover graphic novelization of said thrilling adventures. Which maybe I'll get to do some art for.



Check out their Kickstarter page HERE, give 'em a bit of money, and get some cool schwag.

We Love You,

JP

Hello...

Have just returned from Dragon Con. Many thanks to those of you who attended our panel and/or dressed up as our most obscure characters and/or stopped by our signing to offer praise and gifts of cookies and robot heads. It is always a sincere and profound pleasure to meet you guys and suck up your groovy kind of love.

For those of you who did not attend, here's a small peek at some of the clips from the Venture Bros. Halloween special we showed at the panel, albeit a non-moving, non-speaking peek with no music or sound effects:







Over at Titmouse East, we're just wrapping up pre-production on season 5 of The Venture Bros. We ship our last episode (which is actually the second half of what will be the premiere episode) to Korea this week. All other episodes have shipped, and all of the art staff (except for few stragglers in the Color department) have gone home. We're received take one rough cuts of the first two episodes from the overseas studio already and are expecting the third this week. Which means we're about to start post-production. The Halloween episode is obviously the first one we'll edit and deliver, since it has to make it's October airdate (the official date has yet to be determined). JG Thirlwell has already completed his genuinely spooky score (we drew some inspiration from the soundtrack to Klute when we first met about this episode a few months ago) and we're just waiting on some animation retakes from Korea before Doc works his magic on the titling and transitions and adds his special sauce to select sequences.

Doc's currently on a train back from Atlanta, but when he returns to the AstroBase, we'll no doubt start talking more earnestly about writing our planned long form special, to be produced some time between seasons 5 and 6. We've already had a lot of "big idea" discussions about season 6 as well, so I'm hoping we get to work on all of this stuff sooner rather than later and we don't make you people wait 2 years between seasons again. Though, having begun season 5 production in January (having written day and night for several months prior), and having had maybe half a dozen days off in all that time, I'm sorely overdue for a vacation.

Hopefully this relative downtime means I can post some more updates on here in the next month or so, as we get closer to the release of the Halloween special and Season 5. Plenty of sweet art to show you, but it must be carefully reviewed for spoiler content.

We Love You,

JP

P.S. Also: thank you to all the adultswim folks who took good care of us while we were in town. And apologies to the ProV folks. I meant to come see your doubtlessly lovely table but had no idea where it was--nobody ever seems to think I might find a convention program or map handy when I come to these things.

Please take a moment to check out a Kickstarter video from my pal (and occasional mentor) Howard Bloom, a real-life scientist, author and idea man who encouraged and inspired me while I was making the rounds with my Venture Bros. pitch book, some ten or twelve years ago (so this isn't entirely unrelated to The Venture Bros.)

Thanks!
We Love You,
JP

And if the link/video that's supposed to be above doesn't work, kindly go HERE:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1870526265/the-god-problem-how-a-godless-cosmos-creates-book

...so am I, briefly. And I'll be participating in this tomorrow:



...and We Still Love You,

JP

(CLICK ME...then scroll down for our newest musical masterpiece)


We Love You,
JP