The first season of "The Venture Bros." contained a lot of what felt like throwaway jokes, like the legendary story of "Movie Night," a frightening tale of murder on the space station Gargantua-1, and the "Phantom Spaceman" responsible. But six seasons later — as happens often on "The Venture Bros." — series creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer have brought back that seemingly throwaway joke and turned it into a deeper piece of lore.
Back in Season 1, the tale of Movie Night seemed like a dumb ghost story to get the show's titular Venture brothers, Hank (Jackson Public) and Dean (Michael Sinterniklaas), to solve a made-up mystery in the vein of the characters they were parodying. Built by the brothers' grandfather, Dr. Jonas Venture Sr. when Hank and Dean's father, Rusty (James Urbaniak) was a kid, Gargantua-1 was basically an orbital city with a huge crew. But by the events of season 1, the station had only two astronauts running it, and one, Bud Manstrong (Terrence Fleming), tells the boys the ghost story.
Manstrong says that he was a paper boy on the station years earlier, and that a janitor on the station snapped. He invited everyone he could into the cargo hold for "Movie Night," playing the Burt Reynolds movie "Sharky's Machine." While everyone was watching the film, the janitor opened the cargo bay doors to space. Most of the crew was killed, he says, and the phantom spirit of the janitor still roams the halls of Gargantua-1.
