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Primal Season 3 Teaser Intros Zombie Spear; Not a Reboot: Tartakovsky

With Season 3 set for January 2026, Genndy Tartakovsky offered a look at Adult Swim's Primal, which is set to focus on Zombie Spear's journey.

During this past summer's Annecy International Animation Festival, Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, Heist Safari) put the word out that we should be hearing and seeing a lot more about the third season of Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal later this year. "There will be news about it this year, but I don't know if they want me to talk about it before they actually release this. It's coming," he shared at the time. In August, we learned that "later this year" meant the first full day of New York Comic Con (NYCC) 2025, with Tartakovsky set to offer a first look at the acclaimed animated series' upcoming third run, produced by Cartoon Network Studios – and it caught a lot of folks by surprise.

With the animated series set to return in January 2026, the teaser offers a look at Zombie Spear in action in some pretty brutal and horrific ways. With the series taking such a dramatic turn, should fans assume it's not set in the same universe as the first two seasons? "No, no. What's great about it is it flows right to the next. So it's in the same world, same everything," Tartakovsky shared with EW. "There's dinosaur and man, then there's different civilizations, and then now there's this thing happening. I imagine this world has a lot of different parts, and some parts aren't discovered. Some people don't go into other parts because they know [not to]. So it's this f***ed up world that's really crazy, and now we've entered this part, but you feel like it's the same show. It's amped up and the story's crazy, but it feels like you're watching a 'Primal' episode. It's not a reboot, it's none of those things."

Teaming once again with animation studio Studio La Cachette, Tartakovsky didn't hold back expressing his excitement and pride in how the season is coming together during the animation festival earlier this summer. "It's a new level. Everything that we did in the first season, we upped a bit in the second season, and the third season is even more. I can't say anything without giving everything away, but it's just more, and it's shocking, and it's unstoppable. At some point, you're like, 'I can't believe I'm watching this.' Quality-wise, animation-wise, story-wise, emotionally, I don't want to oversell it, but rarely have I been proud of a project like this," he shared. "At the end of the day, we'll have these 30 episodes, and thinking back to 'Dexter' and 'Powerpuff Girls' and even 'Samurai Jack,' how much our quality wavered just because of the process and everything, this is just so solid. And to have 30 solid, incredible [episodes] for a modest budget, I'm really proud of it."

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