The minds behind Adult Swim hit show The Venture Bros. — Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer — decided to meet their adoring fans differently for their Dragon*Con 2010 panel by setting up some comfy chairs, a coffee table and cheesy ’70’s music that played whenever the pair wasn’t speaking.

Call it convention fatigue or boredom, but Publick and Hammer thought it would be better to treat the scheduled time as an old school talkshow — Maury Povich style. They took turns running through the crowded ballroom allowing fans to ask questions and receive a rose if it was deemed worthy of answering.

We captured the whole thing on a shaky, amateurishly handled FlipCam and have subsequently uploaded the videos to YouTube, which you can watch below.

Some of the high points include Bill Hader replacing the voice of Stephen Cobert as Professor Richard Impossible, why a Venture Bros. feature-length film is probably a bad idea and lots of news regarding who will be back for the last part of the season.

Check out the embedded video after the jump.

The cast of Paul, the upcoming sci-fi comedy by Superbad director Greg Mottola and written by the film’s stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, took to the stage at 2010 San Diego Comic-Con to debut a special clip reel made specifically for the fans in attendance. This can be somewhat verified by the fact that it wasn’t censored for the general viewing audience due to the few instances of well-timed cursing.

The video opened with a loud pop from the crowd as they showed fanboys Clive Gollings (Frost) and Graeme Willy (Pegg) in the San Diego Convention Center for Comic-Con. The two are on a journey to Roswell, New Mexico, where they encounter a classic-style gray alien named Paul, voiced by Seth Rogen. The trio are being chased by Special Agent Lorenzo Zoil (Jason Bateman) and Agent Haggard (Bill Hader) and accidentally kidnap Ruth Buggs, played by Kristen Wiig.

With the exception of Wiig, the aforementioned actors sat on the panel along with Sigourney Weaver, Jeffrey Tambor, and Joe Lo Truglio — who actually stood in during the portions of the film that contained the CGI Paul.

Sigourney Weaver hosted last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live, where in her monologue the actress talked about her father, Pat Weaver, who created The Tonight Show while he was the President of NBC. With this revelation, she took the opportunity to get in a jab about the current controversy with Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien and their respective late night talk shows.

But, as expected, the comedy sketch show also took the opportunity to poke some fun at Weaver’s latest release Avatar, the scifi box office smash directed by James Cameron. There’s a skit on the true nature of the film’s missing sex scene, as well as a digital short for Cameron’s next proposed feature, Laser Cats 5, which sees Weaver’s return as Ripley from the Alien movies and has a bunch of familiar shout-outs to the director’s previous films.

The digital short, which opens with Cameron himself making a pitch for Laser Cats 5 to SNL creator Lorne Michaels, stars Weaver, Bill Hader, and Andy Samberg in a truly ridiculous, yet highly comical story about a futuristic world where cats — you guessed it — shoot lasers out of their mouths.

You can watch the video for all the aforementioned segments here below.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
Blu-ray Edition
Directed by Shawn Levy
Starring Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Owen Wilson, Hank Azaria, Christopher Guest
Fox Home Entertainment
Release Date: December 1, 2009

I’ll be honest, when I found out the exhibits at the Museum of Natural History would be coming to life on screen once more in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian I wasn’t all that enthusiastic. I figured the “magic” was already revealed in the first movie and that this sequel would just be more of the same. Let’s face it, the first film, which starred Ben Stiller as Larry Daley, a night guard at the Museum of Natural History in New York, was a hit, so why mess with a perfect formula? That’s why screenwriters Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant were smart enough to stick with what drew audiences in initially — the inanimate exhibit figures coming to life at sundown and Larry fighting villains attempting to gain control of a powerful object — while making it much more than just a simple repeat of its predecessor.

The sequel finds Larry out of his museum night guard duds and into the role of CEO of Daley Devices, the company founded to sell his inventions, like the The Glow-In-The-Dark Flashlight and The Unloseable Keyring. The successful Larry decides to visit his old place of employment, the Museum of Natural History, the setting of 2006’s Night at the Museum, which is now closed for renovations and its famous exhibits packed away in crates to be sent to permanent storage at the Smithsonian Institute’s Federal Archives in Washington DC. After hours, the figures come to life and Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams) explains that the Pharaoh Ahkmenrah’s Tablet, which is what animates the figures at sundown, won’t be going to the Archives with everyone else. While the situation is dire for his friends, Larry is distracted by his phone’s incoming messages and all of his business ventures to do anything about it.

For those who are uninformed, Paul is a new movie from director Greg Motolla (Superbad and Adventureland) which stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame. The movie follows two super-geeks on a road trip to Comic Con, and a side-trip to Area 51 afterwards, which sees them finding a little alien named Paul who asks them to help him escape the government and get to his home planet.

If that wasn’t already the greatest thing ever, the supporting cast has been announced and it is pleasantly awesome. Joining Pegg and Frost will be: Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, and Kristen Wiig. Rogen is the main casting here, as he will be voicing the title character Paul — who is said to have a fairly filthy mouth in this expected R-rated comedy. No specific word on who the others will be playing, but they will surely add some humor along this comedic adventure.