The Venture Bros.

Jackson Publick, a writer on the Saturday-morning cartoon The Tick, had the idea before 2000, first as a comic story for the anthology Monkeysuit, then as a pilot script drafted in the spring of 2000. Comedy Central turned it down, and Publick had not even considered Cartoon Network because he "didn't want to tone The Venture Bros. down" and did not know its late-night Adult Swim block existed. Adult Swim greenlit it around the summer of 2002; the pilot aired on February 16, 2003, and the first season premiered on August 7, 2004.

The setup was conceived as a satire of early-1960s boy-adventurer fiction. Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture was what a kid like Jonny Quest might have grown into after a childhood of bizarre, life-threatening escapades: emotionally insecure, unethical and underachieving. His fraternal twins Hank and Dean were modeled on the Hardy Boys, bodyguard Brock Samson on Race Bannon, and their archnemesis The Monarch drew his assignments from the Guild of Calamitous Intent, an organization that had become an ad hoc placement agency matching villains with appropriate heroes. Warner Bros. restricted the real Quest characters, so Jonny appeared as "Action Johnny" and Dr. Zin as "Dr. Z." James Urbaniak voiced Dr. Venture, Patrick Warburton was Brock, Michael Sinterniklaas was Dean, Chris McCulloch voiced Hank and The Monarch, and Hammer voiced Dr. Mrs. The Monarch, Billy Quizboy and Henchman 21. One newspaper critic wrote that if Woody Allen and Sam Peckinpah had collaborated on Jonny Quest, "it would have come out a lot like this."

The show was drawn and inked in the traditional style, if digitally, so episodes were slow to make and Adult Swim was slow to renew: the second season did not arrive until June 2006, the third in June 2008, and the fourth was split across the falls of 2009 and 2010. The season-one DVD, with packaging by comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz, hit number one on Amazon's DVD chart the day after its May 2006 release. Later seasons came in 2013, 2016 and 2018, and critics kept ranking it among the best animated series on television; Slate called it "one of the best shows on television" in 2013. The run ended on October 7, 2018, after 81 episodes and four specials. Publick announced the cancellation in September 2020, and the story got its finale as the direct-to-video film Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart in July 2023.