Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Adult Swim's gleefully nonsensical cartoon about three anthropomorphic fast-food items — a milkshake, a box of fries, and a wad of meat — sharing a house in New Jersey. It made no sense on purpose, and it accidentally shut down Boston.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force premiered with a pilot in December 2000 and became part of Adult Swim's launch lineup in September 2001. Created by Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro, it followed the loudmouth Master Shake, the sensible floating Frylock, and the childlike Meatwad, whose plots dissolved into surreal non-sequiturs alongside their long-suffering human neighbor Carl.
In January 2007, a guerrilla-marketing campaign turned it into national news: LED signs depicting the show's Mooninite characters were planted around several cities, and in Boston authorities mistook them for explosive devices, triggering a bomb-squad response that shut down roads and bridges. Turner Broadcasting apologized and paid $2 million; a movie, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, followed that April.
The show became an Adult Swim cornerstone, running through several "final" seasons and revivals for well over a decade. Its anything-goes absurdism helped define the entire late-night Adult Swim sensibility.
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Adult Swim
Cartoon Network's late-night block launched in 2001 as a joke about pool rules — and became a proving ground for surreal, irreverent animation that refused to fit anywhere else. Deadpan bumpers over footage of elderly swimmers announced shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman to an audience that had grown up with the network and wasn't ready to turn in.
Space Ghost Coast to Coast
A 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero, recycled into a late-night talk-show host who interviews real celebrities on a monitor and rarely understands their answers. Space Ghost Coast to Coast was one of Cartoon Network's first original series, the precursor to Adult Swim, and the reason a generation of teenagers stayed up past 11 on Friday nights.
Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law
The washed-up 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero who traded crime-fighting for a law degree and spent twelve minutes a week defending Fred Flintstone, Shaggy and the rest of the Saturday-morning gang in court. Adult Swim's surreal legal sitcom premiered the night the block launched in 2001, with Stephen Colbert voicing both the deranged boss of the law firm and a paranoid prosecutor.
The Venture Bros.
Adult Swim's saga of a failed super-scientist, his two dim teenage sons, their secret-agent bodyguard Brock Samson and a butterfly-themed archnemesis who gets his arching assignments from a villains' guild. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's riff on Jonny Quest grew from a 2003 pilot into seven seasons of comics-nerd world-building, all of it, as Hammer put it, about "beautiful sublime failure."