Primal first look with Genndy Tartakovsky

If you're a fan of Dexter's Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Hotel Transylvania or Samurai Jack, you know the ingenious work of Genndy Tartakovsky. What you might not know is that he feels Primal is the slowest show he's ever done — at least compared to superhumans zooming across the screen at warp speed.

Primal is everything its title suggests. You can't really get more primal than a caveman and a dinosaur.

"Everything we’ve done in this series, we always wanted to relate it back to the title, Primal," Tartakovsky told SYFY WIRE. "So it's raw, it's savage, it's brutal."

Never mind that the whole thing with a caveman riding a dinosaur could have never really happened because humans and monster lizards didn't share the same era. Besides that, Tartakovsky wanted to make the world of Primal "as real as possible" so you can almost feel the heat of the sun and even the savage instincts of the creatures.

Don't say it doesn't make you shudder when one enormous reptile rips another's head off.

In the rawness of an unforgiving world, you have two characters who rely on each other after a horrible tragedy. They just happen to be a human and a dinosaur. Spear and Fang still have what Tartakovsky calls an "instant empathy for each other" even though he still refers to them both as beasts. So how do two beasts survive in a place where either one could be a meal for another monster? It's eat or be eaten.

By the way, Fang is no pet. She and Spear are equals (they can certainly kill with equal ferocity) and watch out for each other with a surprising humanity. The more chaotic things get, the stronger their bond.

Primal premieres October 7 at midnight on Adult Swim.

This article was contributed to by Elizabeth Rayne.