Cartoon Network is on a roll. Its Adult Swim is the go-to place for college students and lovers of irony. Space Ghost and Harvey Birdman © Cartoon Network.

Adult animation means something different depending on who you’re talking to — or what channel you’re watching. On Cartoon Network, it’s an attention-getting late night block that makes the network more than a kids’ destination; for Comedy Central, it all springs from the show that helped the channel establish its identity, while at Fox TV adult animation is a Sunday night franchise starring wacky families that `put the fun in dysfunctional.’ But for just about everyone else, the genre remains one tough nut to crack. In the year since AWN last visited the subject, ballyhooed shows have come and gone while many new efforts line up to take their own shot at success.

Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim is on a roll. The nightly (except for Friday) six-hour block of originals, acquisitions and anime has arguably become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. Aided by ultra-laid back, title-card-set-to-stock-music interstitials, Adult Swim is the college crowd’s go-to place for a late-night fix of attitude-driven and irony-laden animation.

Cartoon Network’s Keith Crofford was one of the architects of Adult Swim. He took old Hanna-Barbera shows and put a bizarre spin on them, as with Sealab 2021. Courtesy of Cartoon Network.

“It’s kind of taken off — we never dreamed it would grow into this,” says Keith Crofford, Cartoon Network’s vp of production. Adult Swim’s roots go back to 1994, when the network was little more than a year old and still dominated by reruns from Ted Turner’s various animation libraries. Crofford, then Cartoon Network’s senior producer together with Mike Lazzo, Khaki Jones and Andy Merrill, took one of Hanna-Barbera’s countless Saturday morning heroes and turned him into the befuddled host of a surreal late-night talk show. In the years since, Space Ghost Coast to Coast has welcomed everyone from The Ramones to Jerry Springer and paved the way for a series of equally bizarre re-imaginings of old H-B shows, including Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and Sealab 2021.

The late night block took on the Adult Swim name in 2001, but it was the addition of Futurama and Family Guy reruns in 2003 that brought audiences in to sample the original shows — and turned them into hits in their own right.

Reruns of Futurama (above) and Family Guy brought viewers to the fledgling Adult Swim in 2003 and paved the way to original series for the Cartoon Network. © and ™ 1999 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.