Adult Swim April Fools: The History of an Ever-Evolving Prank
Television engagement is a tricky thing, especially on cable, and especially in this day and age. Sure, people still loyally tune in to new episodes of Better Call Saul on AMC and zone out to reliable reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond every night on TVLand, but few things on cable in this day and age feel like an EVENT, feel like something you HAVE to see live. Enter Adult Swim and its yearly holiday tradition.
Beginning all the way back in 2004, Adult Swim began their yearly tradition of unexpectedly messing with their schedule in unique ways when the clock strikes midnight as March 31st turns into April. The very first one of these pranks was fairly innocuous: mustaches crudely drawn on to the characters.
A reoccurring tease around the mid-oughts' era of Adult Swim was the existence of the show Squidbillies. Constantly teased during the commercial bumpers, with it’s scheduled premiere being replaced with the premiere of Perfect Hair Forever followed by a talk show of Adult Swim characters discussing what they had just seen, Squidbillies seemed destined to never be released. Enter April 1, 2005, when Adult Swim aired the rough, unfinished pilot of Squidbillies instead of the scheduled episode of Robot Chicken, with accompanying bumps.
Squidbillies wasn’t a lie after all! It just needed a few more weeks of editing, thank you April Fools. Next up, in 2006, Adult Swim tried something a bit more dynamic. Adult Swim began airing 90’s kids cartoons Mister T and Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos, followed up by their usual night’s anime with fart noises added to the dialogue, both serving as an April Fool’s Day prank and another way to mess with anime fans, which 2000’s Adult Swim loved doing.
In 2007, Adult Swim did their most ambitious and iconic prank yet. April 1st was two weeks away from their first feature film release, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, and they had been cooking up a movie related prank. First off, on the night of March 31st, they began airing VHS fansubs of anime parody Perfect Hair Forever, with the subtitles being intentionally wrong and even at one point, being subtitles for an Aqua Teen episode. However, for the first time in its history, Adult Swim did a rare double prank, and the following night aired the first few minutes of the Aqua Teen movie, before minimizing it to the corner screen with audio only available on a different track. The entire night, they obnoxiously played ads advertising the film over the actual shows playing, just so you wouldn’t forget what was happening.
After the iconic 2007 double prank, 2008 brought us a sweet surprise: unfinished episodes and sneak peeks of new seasons and pilots for the network, including the premiere of Superjail and sneak peeks at new episodes of The Venture Bros and Moral Orel. 2009 started a famous 3-year streak of pranks: every year when the clock struck midnight, they aired Tommy Wiseau’s unintentional masterpiece The Room, with slight additions each year. 2010 gave us Space Ghost interviewing Wiseau during the bumps, and 2011 gave us the premiere of Earth Ghost, an 11 minute special following around Space Ghost actor George Lowe in his daily life, with Lowe replaced by a CGI replica of Space Ghost.
During these years, an essential aspect of the Cartoon Network/Adult Swim family had been lost. Toonami, an anime/action cartoon block that aired on Cartoon Network had shut down in 2008, and despite fan outcry, it looked like it was going to stay that way. Until the clock struck midnight on April Fools. The first few seconds of The Room played, before cutting to T.O.M., the CGI robotic host of Toonami, who proclaimed “Oh, hi Adult Swim. Got the results of the test back. I definitely have April Fools.” The rest of the night’s programming was Toonami hosted by T.O.M., and within a few months, Toonami had been revived for good on Adult Swim, where it has stayed, dominating Adult Swim’s Saturday nights for the last 10 years.
2013 brought a simpler prank. Live action shows had actor’s heads replaced with images of cats, and every bumper was cat-themed. Adult Swim’s channel bug was replaced with a simple [meow meow].
2014 brought one of my personal favorite pranks. After being off the air for 7 years, Adult Swim revived Perfect Hair Forever for two episodes, including the iconic C. Martin Croker’s final appearance as Space Ghost’s co-host Zorak, before his death in 2016. The rest of the night was a Space Ghost Coast to Coast marathon handpicked by the show’s staff, with bumps featuring the staff’s reasoning for the picks and animated bloopers.
In-between April 2014 and April 2015, Adult Swim launched their live stream division, and the flagship show was FishCenter Live, a call-in talk show featuring digital coins superimposed over the fish in Williams Street’s fish tank, whenever a fish crossed the coin, it would gain however many points the coin was worth. 2015 would also see the (now temporary) end of mainstay Aqua Teen Hunger Force, so 2015’s prank involved having the Fishcenter coins superimposed over a marathon of Aqua Teen, with score being kept and shown in bumpers for the main characters. Alongside the marathon on cable, the hosts of FishCenter streamed live on the website and took callers all night.
2016 brought a cruel prank that most of us should have seen coming. Adult Swim advertised the notion of a prank all week, only for the night to come and go with nothing, as the joke was that this year there was no prank.
However, Adult Swim would return to its pranks the next year with its most iconic and rage-inspiring prank yet. In April 2017, Adult Swim was in the middle of airing the fifth and final season of Samurai Jack, a Cartoon Network show with an unresolved plot that had been cancelled in 2004, before being revived for adult audiences to finish its story on Adult Swim. Samurai Jack’s long awaited fifth season was one of the biggest things on television, but so was another Adult Swim show, Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty had exploded in popularity and was currently in the midst of it’s longest hiatus, with fans complaining on every platform they could. When the clock struck midnight on April 1st, Adult Swim aired its regular programming with laugh tracks, sound effects and scene transitions spliced in. Then, on it’s first double prank in 10 years, they replaced everything from 8:00 through Midnight on April 1st with the first episode of season 3 of Rick and Morty, aired 8 times in a row. The Samurai Jack episode scheduled to air that night was pushed back to the next week, and the rage this inspired in fans on every comment section and social media post for the next week was a sight to behold.
2018’s prank fell on a Saturday, so naturally it was a Toonami-themed prank. The block, which normally played English-dubbed anime, instead played anime in the original Japanese with English subtitles, including the anime movie Mind Game and a sneak peek at new episodes of the Adult Swim original Fooly Cooly. The following night they did another double prank, by airing Michael Cusack (creator of YOLO Crystal Fantasy and co-creator of Smiling Friends)’s Australia-themed Rick and Morty parody Bushworld Adventures on repeat all night, with accompanying Australia-themed bumps.
2019 brought something unlike the network had ever seen before. Executives approached Maxime Simonet, co-host of FishCenter Live and related crosswords-solving streaming show Bloodfeast, as well as co-creator of animated Bloodfeast spin-off Tender Touches and asked if he could create a six-hour epic in 8 months. He pulled it off, and the result is Gemusetto Machu Picchu, an anime parody about sportsman/ancient relic thief Makasu(played by Simonet) as he challenges the Incan gods to Tennis. It was surreal and hilarious, and one of the best examples of the network’s creativity.
2020 began with the promise of a second season of Gemusetto, but before it could get going, it was interrupted by musician and friend of the network Post Malone and his friends playing beer-pong, and all night the network premiered new episodes, pilots and sneak peeks, including new episodes of Primal, Dream Corp LLC, Tigtone, The Shivering Truth, Robot Chicken, 12 oz mouse and Tender Touches, a sneak peek of new Rick and Morty episodes alongside a Rick and Morty anime short, and the premieres of JJ Villard’s Fairy Tales and YOLO Crystal Fantasy, as well as the pilot of Smiling Friends which went viral and led to the pickup of the popular series. One of the network’s best content bombs. Oh, and Post Malone was digitally edited into every show that night.
In 2021, Adult Swim treated us to the premiere of Adult Swim Jr. Adult Swim Jr had been a long running joke between the network and fans, and the prank consisted of an episode of Rick and Morty Babies and an episode of Aqua Child Hunger Force (both were full episodes of their respective shows dubbed by children). Accompanying this were promos featuring various Adult Swim characters and shows reimagined in a Muppet Babies or Pup Named Scooby Doo type format, alongside bumps featuring drawings and ramblings from toddlers.
At the time of writing, 2021 was the most recent prank. But we’re about two weeks out from another March 31st, and you can bet I’ll be watching, because nothing else on TV can create a holiday/appointment viewing like Adult Swim can.
