Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Another One of Those Boy and His Dinosaur Stories

2025-May-19

The blog post we have for today is in fact about a show that was produced and broadcast through Adult Swim. I had mentioned that I would be theming several blog posts around Adult Swim. This has come true in this case, but not for intentional reasons. I had finally got around to finishing the second season of Primal. How I think of Primal is worlds apart from the likes of Sealab 2021 or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, despite all the shows mentioned being cartoons produced by Adult Swim. What separates them is genre for one. Primal is far from a comedy. To my recollection I had not watched any dramatic series on Adult Swim.

Another separation between them is time. I watched Adult Swim throughout the 2000s, with a special fervor in the mid 2000s. By the 2010s there were not any new shows for me to glob onto, nor were there compelling new seasons of the shows I did like. In 2011 I did not think there was too much need for even more Squidbillies episodes. The Venture Brothers was the one standout that kept me watching whenever a new season was released. For that series, that was very few and far between releases.

The Venture Brothers do border on the edge of dramatic. My appreciation for that show has already been reported on here at the blog. Please refer to those for my more specific biographical appreciations of that series that took twenty years to complete.

Primal is not a bizarre or zany comedy in the slightest. There is also no dialogue. I suppose I am glad Adult Swim exists to put something like this show together. A very painstakingly animated feature that has no spoken lines, only two characters, a meandering plot, and an almost disgusting level of violence. Putting those things together does equate to a bizarreness that is on par with the weird shit of Adult Swim’s mid 2000’s creative heydey.

When I think of Primal, I think of the forebears of barbarian art. This show has a caveman and a dinosaur as the protagonists. Their prehistoric setting slips into a general fantasy world that echoes several stories from sword-and-sorcery stories. This meandering plot of two wronged people finding life after getting revenge against evil dinosaurs finds them meeting super gorillas, vampires, hive-mind hyenas, woolly mammoths, zombie dinosaurs, and that’s just the first season!

I do not care much for spoilers. I will warn that the second season keeps going wider in locales in which you’d want to see a caveman and his dinosaur friend massacre combatants. The second season shows the two main characters that the world is much, much bigger than their own travels on one single continent. There’s so much more out there beyond the seas. The spine between the end of the first season and the start of the second season springboarded this show in my mind from mere ultimate animation violence fest into the hall-of-fame level of storytelling- with dynamite animation.

The medium that I found on this show was all above board. A paid for streaming service. It was not discovered on a torrent of other cartoons. It was not watched on somebody else’s cable subscription. A very boring story as far as media discovery stories go on this blog. HBO Max was a bundled offer with my level of wireless service. The show was advertised on the app. I found it. Watched it. No muss no fuss.

Although I knew nothing about it except the in-app graphics of dinosaurs and cavemen duking it out, I did see Gendy Tartakovsky’s name. The name brings my ass into the seats. At first I did not care for his basic figures. When I mean ‘at first’, I mean decades ago when his creation Dexter’s Lab was one of the first original shows on Cartoon Network. It was the mid-90s. At the time I had wanted more sophisticated cartoons than what I immediately perceived from the odd shapes Gendy made his characters from. The creators of that show seemed to be intentionally aping the crude design of Hanna-Barberra cartoons, which were the main content of Cartoon Network before these originals started petering in.

The show Tartakovsky made after Dexter’s Lab was somewhat targeted to a more adult audience. Hearing mainstream appeal put upon this show from regular publications like Newsweek or Entertainment Weekly, put this show into my zone of interest. Once again I was put off by the cheapness of the simple figures. The zany limits of what the animators did with other dimensions in animation besides the level of detail in its figures overcame my bristling. Each episode usually delivered some animation gimmick or novelty that the director would exploit throughout the episode. There were a ton of multi-panel shots that looked very Kurasawa-ish to me.The episode I remember really putting me over into Samurai Jack fandom was the episode where Jack competes with the bearded spy from Lupin The Third to retrieve some treasure held inside a tomb protected by traps. Jack uses only his cunning and sword. The spy uses his cunning and a bag of gadgets that solved any problem he encountered.

This blog post itself should not be a schmooze fest for Samurai Jack. This blog post is for Primal! I can emphatically say I enjoyed it more than Samurai Jack. A caveat I should mention is that Primal has the advantage of having me see all episodes in order and in a span of a few years. What I know of Samurai Jack comes from seeing about half of the episodes over the decades. Perhaps it's due for a rewatch to compare.

What I like about both is they are super-violent features that have a laconic hero travelling across worlds, encountering allies and villains that are pulled right out of the pages of pulp novels and comic books I’ve read. Each episode is a chance to point at the screen and say, “oooh, that’s from Conan!” or “Holy Shit! That’s the same story as a Roger Zelazny novel!” Primal takes a step further into the story of a wandering combatant seeking revenge. To my knowledge, Samurai Jack eventually gets his due justice against his series defining villain, Aku. In Primal, that revenge happens in the first episode. Everything after that is the story of two people who have lost everything, got violent justice, and now have to move on.

They don’t have to, but they do. With no words. We get to see a caveman and a predator theropod eventually form a partnership made out of just surviving next to one another, and having a somewhat one-sided trauma bonding relationship. I say one-sided because there is a very limited range of what the writers can do to show how much a dinosaur cares for a human. Something I say they did successfully, with careful writing of each character’s decisions and skilled animated production of their emotions in the heat of battle or the warmth of a bonfire.

Eventually this stumbling, expertly disguised as a multi-episode plotline, has them encounter at least one more consistent character, to include villains. The characters grow, encounter new challenges that give them purpose in their post-revenge world. Ultimately I say the series comes to a very poignant end after the twentieth episode. I hear there are rumours of a third; something I find to be unnecessary. If the same writers and animators are working on it, then my indifference to a third season jumps to curiosity.

I’m the patient type. It will show up when it shows up. Until then I have Robert E. Howard novels I read as a child I ought to revisit as an adult. Find more things that I can point to on screen when I watch Primal or Samurai Jack.