Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal Wakes the Dead

Fans of teeth-gnashing, spine-shattering prehistoric violence may have questions as they watch the new Primal season-three trailer. Who is this scary zombie? Didn’t perpetually enraged caveman Spear meet his end at the hands of a demonic giant made of fire? And didn’t last season close with a flash-forward to a future without him? Didn’t acclaimed creator and action animator Genndy Tartakovsky say this was the end of the story for Spear and Tyrannosaurus bestie Fang?

“I thought I was done. I wanted to move on” from Spear and Fang, Tartakovsky told Vulture. He’d initially sought to refocus the show on new characters, anthology style — “Primal: Creation or something,” he said. But as he grew unhappy with the pivot he was developing, he returned to their story. “Maybe 20 episodes was too short,” he thought. “Wow, I killed Spear. Can we bring him back to life?” He wasn’t interested in doing a prequel and needed the next approach to feel, well, Primal enough. Then someone on his team joked they could make him a zombie.

“I was like, Whoa, hold on,” Tartakovsky said. “Zombies are super-pulpy. We’ve never really seen, I don’t think, a zombie you cheer for. So it’s a zombie hero. And the idea that he’s searching for his life or his humanity through death — that’s the one that made it great.” Season three, which debuts January 11 and airs weekly on Adult Swim with episodes to hit HBO Max the next day, will follow Zombie Spear as he fights his way through hordes of carnivorous fauna, angry villagers, and flesh-eating mutants. As the new trailer, which we can exclusively premiere, shows, that fire demon is back too.

Season three also gave Tartakovsky and his animators an opportunity to redesign Spear from the top down. The undead version of the character walks differently, grunts differently, and looks like death itself. His mouth is slack-jawed, his gray matter and other internal organs are often exposed, and his body attracts flies. He fights more brutally than ever and is undeterred by any mortal wound or loss of limb. If the zombified Neanderthal’s new look feels like a lot, Tartakovsky makes no apologies.

“You’re watching Primal, so it’s going to be visceral and hardcore,” he said of the new design. “You also care for Spear, so that gives us the freedom to push it.”