How Genndy Tartakovsky Brought Primal Back From The Dead
“It came from a joke. Like, oh yeah, maybe Spear could be a zombie, ha ha ha.”
Genndy Tartakovsky thought he was done with Primal. And by all accounts, he was. The second season of his acclaimed Adult Swim animated series — which had earned universal praise for its wildly imaginative (and wildly gory) story of a Neanderthal named Spear who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a Tyrannosaurus rex named Fang — ended on a pretty definitive note: Spear had perished, having sacrificed himself in a climactic battle with a vengeful Viking spirit. But his story lived on in the shape of his daughter with Mira, who we see setting off on adventures on the back of one of Fang’s children.
“I thought it was done.”
It seemed like the perfect place to end Primal, a bold and bloody horror-fantasy series that felt like the culmination of Tartakovsky’s groundbreaking work in 2D animation. After putting his mark on the medium with iconic works like Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Clone Wars, Tartakovsky effectively got a blank check from Adult Swim to make Primal, a richly animated and nearly dialogue-free animated series that tested the limits of animation — and of Tartakovsky’s own stamina.
“It takes almost two years to make a season. So, I live with it for two years and then we release it and then you live with it for a week, maybe two weeks,” Tartakovksy tells Inverse. “Meanwhile, I'm like, oh my God, that was so much work. I need a break. And so, I thought it was done.”
And Tartakovsky took his break, pivoting to make a raunchy animal comedy for Netflix before putting his mind back to Primal. He didn’t want to axe the show completely; he just planned to turn it into an anthology series. But then an idea sparked: What if he brought Spear back to life?
“It came from a joke,” Tartakovsky says. “Like, oh yeah, maybe Spear could be a zombie, ha ha ha. And I was like, wait, hold on a second. That sounds right.”
Turning Spear into a zombie wasn’t outside the realm of possibility for the show, after all. An early Season 1 episode saw Spear and Fang encountering a zombie dinosaur; one of the early instances of the show — which had always flirted with the pulp genre — going full horror. “The idea of a naked zombie caveman wondering the jungle in search for who he is, that sealed it,” Tartakovsky says.
“The idea of a naked zombie caveman wondering the jungle in search for who he is, that sealed it.”
Tartakovsky immediately wrote 10 episodes and started to pitch his team on the idea. Soon, they had the green light and began production. Now, four years after the second season aired, Primal returns with a zombified Spear at the center of story. But Spear is not the same Neanderthal he used to be. Resurrected by a vengeful shaman, Spear is a shadow of his former self, with no memories of his life nor the people he fought so hard to protect, except for hazy flashes. He silently wanders through dangerous lands, once again encountering monsters and beasts that he violently rips apart. In many ways, it’s a return to the standalone adventure structure of the first season, except this time Spear’s got a little bit of brain hanging out of his skull.
“We were always afraid in the first season to make it feel like a monster of the week,” Tartakovsky says. “Because there's the progression of the characters, but they don't have a goal to go anywhere. And that's what Season 2 introduced was we got to rescue Mira. And now Season 3, it's can Spear find himself again?”
Zombie Spear gazes out into the unknown.
As the season progresses and Spear gains more his memories, which are activated with each new battle he fights, he starts to become less like a zombie, and more like, well, Spear. “We're starting him pure zombie. And as soon as he starts getting little flashes of memory, then he feels things more,” Tartakovsky says.
But before that gradual transformation happens, count on the early episodes of Primal Season 3 to top the brutality we’d seen in the first two seasons. After all, now you’ve got a zombie protagonist, with the aforementioned leaking brain, fighting beasts. Now he fights on “pure instinct,” Taratakovsky says. “He's just flailing his arms really and it's just brutal.”
“We're starting him pure zombie.”
Tartakovsky relished getting to change up the action animation in Season 3, with zombie Spear giving the animator a chance to change up his fight choreography. “My formula of doing a [Spear] fight... I could do 6,000 of them, no problem,” Tartakovsky says. “This is just a brutal baby coming back to life and figuring out how to survive. And so, the choreography is even more raw and savage.”
The refresh in formula has given Tartakovsky a new excitement for Primal, which the showrunner hopes to continue doing for as long as he’s able. But he declares he’s “finishing this story” of Spear and Fang. But he has ideas for a potential fourth season, which would pivot to his initial anthology series idea, with “brand new characters, brand new vibe, but it's still raw, low dialogue, no dialogue, and emotional and visual,” Tartakovsky teases.
Spear encounters yet another deadly beast in his travels.
Tartakovsky is keenly aware that he’s articulating these hopes as Warner Bros. Discovery is on the cusp of a historic merger with Netflix. But this isn’t his first rodeo. “I think it's going to be my sixth or seventh merger,” Tartakovksy says wrly, listing off the various corporate banners he’s been under, from Hanna-Barbera, to Cartoon Network, and AT&T and Warner Brothers.
“At the end of the day, you always hope that the people that I have relationships with survive, that's number one. And then, at the end of the day, I make stuff and everybody's always going to need stuff. And I just hope it's the stuff I make they're going to need.”
