LA Weekly Interview with The Venture Bros.

It’s been a while since the team behind Adult Swim’s popular comedy The Venture Bros. released a short, “six or seven years” by creator Jackson Publick’s estimates. (The last, and only other, abbreviated episode is the Krampus-filled holiday special, “A Very Venture Christmas.”) Sunday night, though, fans of the series will be treated to just over eleven minutes of hilarity with the between-season special, “From the Ladle to the Grave: The Shallow Gravy Story.” The pint-sized, documentary-style episode follows the young career of Hank Venture and friend Dermott Fictel’s rockin’ band, Shallow Gravy. This special comes less than a year after the hour-long finale for the series’ fourth season.

“We had a little less to say,” says Publick of his work with Venture Bros. partner Doc Hammer. “A documentary history of a band with one song and one performance to their credit is a little easier to write than an epic season finale.”

He adds, “It was originally just supposed to be a music video, but I guess we overwrote it, like we do everything.”

The initial idea was to do a live action video, to shoot themselves in the style of ’80s New Romantic bands. That eventually morphed into something they could incorporate into the series itself with the introduction of the band Shallow Gravy.

» Read The Venture Bros. Unleashes ‘From the Ladle to the Grave: The Shallow Gravy Story’

Written by Liz Ohanesian with photos by Shannon Cottrell for LA Weekly