Venture Toons
Venture Toons is a modestly sized animation studio based in Los Angeles that is owned by Jack Kelley and Nicky Nickolich (né Zlatko).
Jack and Nicky met working for Disney in the late ‘50s. They broke out on their own in 1962. Poor timing: MGM had just closed shop, followed by Warner Brothers. A lot of people looking for work. But they busted ass, pulled a lot of all-nighters, did all sorts of local commercial work under the trade name “Kelley-Nicholson.” By ‘68, they’d done well enough to formally incorporate as Venture Toons and relocate to new office space in Tarzana.
The secret to their success? As Nicky confessed during his meeting with Marshall and Archie:
"We used Yugoslavian animators between 1962 and 1968. My family had connections there from World War II and I hired the cream of the crop from the Zagreb School of Animated Films for pennies on the dollar."
Under their informal pre-Venture label, the core group of animators who make up Venture produced a couple of one-season syndicated cartoon series (“The Challengers,” ‘66; “Monster Planet,” ‘67). Venture’s first acknowledged credits under its current brand name were a couple of low-rent animated spots for local LA businesses. In 1973, Venture spearheaded a new marketing campaign for Beale Farms, a subsidiary of Agrigenics, Inc. In so doing, they unwittingly cast a memetic fishing line calculated to attract a certain type of predator. Instead they caught URIEL.
Venture was recently acquired by by a cable television conglomerate based in Pennsylvania called Special Receptor. “They're buying up all kinds of little media companies in the hopes for cheap programming as cable TV takes off,” Jack told Marshall and Archie under the influence of NLP.
Venture Toons is headquartered in a 6-floor modernist building in Tarzana, on Ventura Boulevard. Tarzana is out in the 'burbs; Ventura Boulevard out there is chock full of those new-fangled shopping plazas where you can visit six different businesses in a little parking lot. There's a diner next door and a bank on the other side of the building and Venture Toons's logo sits both above the front door on Ventura and on a vinyl placard on the windowless side of the Venture Toons building. Venture doesn't have a mascot — no Bullwinkle and Rocky statue or collegial Mickey Mouse in sorcerer robes here — just their Googie-inspired original mid-‘60s style logotype that looks increasingly dated in the early ‘70s. The billboard on top of the building advertises Jim Croce’s new album Life & Times.
