Primal
Executive producers Genndy Tartakovsky, Brian A. Miller, Jennifer Pelphrey, Rob Sorcher, Mike Lazzo, Keith Crofford
Producer Shareena Carlson
Samurai Jack meets Alley-Oop. Spear is your typical comic strip Neanderthal, about 5 foot tall, low sloping forehead, heavily muscled, and about 400 pounds. Legs like sequoias, lots of hair pretty much everywhere. He has a companion, Fang, who is a young female tyrannosaurus rex (tyrannosaurus regina?). Spear and Fang are unlikely friends (usually each is intent on eating members of the other species) who meet cute when a alpha male tyrannosaurus eats their respective families. They team up to kill the alpha male, and a beautiful friendship (or at least a non-predatory relationship) is formed.
Sounds stupid as hell, doesn’t it? While good movies and shows about prehistory exist, the minute you have dinosaurs from 130 million years ago teaming up with hominids from 45,000 years ago, you know it’s going to be, at best, funny, and at worst, utter rubbish. Primal is neither of those things.
This is done by Genndy Tartakovsky, the genius behind Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory, and dozens of other children’s films and series.
As a result, Primal has the same slow and suspenseful pace of SJ, the same stylized and wildly varying backgrounds, the brilliant animation, and while non-verbal, both Fang and Spear show an amazing range of emotions and thought processes just by stance and pose. There were episodes of Samurai Jack where Jack hardly needed to speak (and a couple where he didn’t) and the artwork and animation let the viewer know what was going on. Jack was something unheard of in children’s cartoons: a thoughtful and contemplative adult.
Primal is a lot darker than any of Tartakovsky’s other work, made for older audiences on Adult Swim. It’s bloody, violent, and too scary for younger kids. The characters are serious, even severe, which serves to deepen the essential silliness of their environment. While Spear rarely smiles and never laughs, you can see him perhaps developing those abilities as time carries on.
In the tenth and final episode of the first season, he meets an escaped slave named Mira. While the series already has more than its share of anachronisms, Mira is bound in iron shackles and speaks modern Arabic with a Lebanese accent. I doubt it’s just happenstance.
In the final scene of the show, an oared galley is seen moving across the ocean to the west, and Spear utters his first and only word of the series: Mira.
A second season is planned. The first was worth watching, and Tartakovsky still has his mojo.
Now on Adult Swim.