Home Gaming The Venture Bros. has been canceled but also sort of not

The Venture Bros. has been canceled but also sort of not

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A while back I did a feature on the ten best cartoons from the 2010s, an era that for the most part treated animation like a Taco Bell toilet after gorging on the most stomach-churning items on the menu. One cartoon that I desperately wish could have made my list if it had been produced just a few years later in the beginnings of the 2010s?

The Venture Bros., Adult Swim’s amazing series that began as a Johnny Quest piss-take and eventually evolved into an entire universe of original characters, willful endangerment of children, and neutral supernatural entities like Dr Henry Killinger. Able to rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe on any given day with its sheer abundance of colourful characters and mad plots, The Venture Bros. is a masterpiece of animation, storytelling, and utter insanity.

If you’re a fan of the show, you also know that the wait between seasons is absolutely torturous. There’s usually a two-year gap between each new season, with season 7 being the most recent delivery of episodes. And that was in 2018. Fast forward to 2020, and the future of The Venture Bros. looks shakier than jelly on the San Andreas fault line.

Series creator Jackson Publick has confirmed that The Venture Bros. has been canceled after an astonishing 16-year run on Adult Swim, just as he and series collaborator Doc Hammer were preparing to get to work on season 8.

It’s the end of the road then. Seven seasons, 81 episodes and no feature-length movie at all. Or is it? In a later tweet from Adult Swim, the channel confirmed that something will be done to continue the story:

What form that takes, is anybody’s guess. The smart money for now would be on one-off specials, an idea that The Venture Bros. has used in the past. Four special episodes have been produced throughout the run of the show, with the most recent one being All This and Gargantua-2 in 2015. Whatever form The Venture Bros. does end up taking, it’s one that has to continue.

Not just a passionate homage to classic animation, the series is a surprisingly mature examination of failure and how cocking up either defines or crushes us. Considering how season 7 ended on the mother of all cliffhangers regarding the future of Team Venture, that’s one story which deserves to finally be told and wrapped up. Even if it takes several lifetimes to do so.

I mean, look how well that approach worked for Samurai Jack.

Last Updated: September 8, 2020

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