Some suitably weird, terrifying new Adult Swim idents

As anyone who’s seen pretty much anything to emerge from the Adult Swim network will testify, its output is pretty darned weird. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a help-I-feel-sick way, but perhaps that’s because I never have been and never will be a teenage boy. For its no-holds-barred bonkersness and gross-out mentality, it must surely be a dream for many animators to work for the brand. So Treat Studios, which has created the latest Adult Swim trailers, were understandably chuffed to be commissioned for the project “completely out of the blue.”

“It’s something they do a lot I guess – they consistently commission new material via independent animators from all over the place. It’s a very fine and noble act on their part,” says Treat Studios director Alex Robinson. He tells us the studio was given totally free rein on what to create, as long as there was “no religious stuff,” and that it wasn’t any closer to the bone than one ident currently in production. Which is, well, pretty close. “Apparently it involved a pregnant woman being trapped in a cave and her baby being ripped out and thrown against a wall by a horde of goblins. That was our watershed,” says Alex.

So what did we get, if not infanticide? Well, there’s a man taking a selfie, who undergoes a disturbing metamorphosis, a creepy nan “pretty much just lifted from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey " and a few other surprises we won’t spoil for you. “The idents help brand Adult Swim as the home of the weird and wonderful,” says Alex. "The structure for all of the idents was to start off fairly normal, get weird and intense, then at the climax come to an abrupt halt, resulting in the Adult Swim logo. I guess in essence we were trying to say ‘when things get a bit surreal, that’s Adult Swim.’”