Adult Swim Trivia
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42 free Adult Swim trivia questions with answers. Adult Swim started as a late-night experiment on Cartoon Network in September 2001, with a lifeguard yelling 'all kids out of the pool' between shows built from recycled Hanna-Barbera footage. A quarter-century later it has launched Rick and Morty, revived Family Guy and Toonami, terrified Boston with LED Mooninites and made April Fools' Day a national holiday for insomniacs. This Adult Swim trivia quiz covers the block's origins, the Williams Street shows from Space Ghost Coast to Coast to Smiling Friends, the anime, the bumps and the pranks. The 42 questions run from easy for anyone who watched in college to hard for people who remember stealth premieres at 4 a.m., so it suits a solo run or a TV round at trivia night. Every answer is checked against the documented history of the block and its shows.
30 of 42 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Adult Swim's original bumpers, what did the lifeguard shout through a megaphone?
All kids out of the pool
'All kids out of the pool'. An adult swim is the slot when a public pool is reserved for grown-ups, and the first bumpers pushed the joke with footage of pensioners swimming and exercising.
Q 02Adult Swim's logo writes the name in lowercase inside which punctuation marks?
Square brackets
Square brackets. The name itself is fair game for jokes: for April Fools' Day 2021 the block posed as Adult Swim Junior and aired a Rick and Morty episode re-voiced by children.
Q 03Which head programmer conceived Adult Swim?
Mike Lazzo
Mike Lazzo. A high-school dropout, he started in Turner's shipping and receiving department and worked his way up to run Cartoon Network's programming.
Q 04Williams Street, the studio behind Adult Swim, takes its name from its address in which US city?
Atlanta
Atlanta. The studio has been at 1065 Williams Street in Midtown since 1992, in the city where Ted Turner built the cable group that owned Cartoon Network.
Q 05Which 1960s cartoon superhero was recast as a talk-show host in the 1994 series that paved the way for Adult Swim?
Space Ghost
Space Ghost. Space Ghost Coast to Coast put the old hero behind a desk to interview live-action guests, and the studio that made it was then called Ghost Planet Industries.
Q 06Which show opened Adult Swim on launch night with an episode that its original network, UPN, had shelved?
Home Movies
Home Movies. UPN had cancelled it after five episodes, but Cartoon Network bought those, ordered more, and kept the cartoon about an eight-year-old filmmaker going for four seasons.
Q 07Which anime was the first broadcast on Adult Swim, on the night it launched?
Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop. It went out at midnight on launch night, and three of its episodes were held back from that first run because their violence sat too close to the September 11 attacks.
Q 08In Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a milkshake, some fries and a meatball live next door to which long-suffering human?
Carl
Carl. He wants nothing more than to be left alone with his sports and his car, and most of his grief comes from finding the three of them in his swimming pool.
Q 09How did Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Sealab 2021 first reach the air in December 2000?
In unannounced pre-dawn airings
In unannounced pre-dawn airings. Cartoon Network slipped the pilots out with no promotion, more than eight months before the block that would turn them into hits even existed.
Q 10Sealab 2021 recycled animation from a 1970s environmental cartoon by which studio?
Hanna-Barbera
Hanna-Barbera. Adam Reed and Matt Thompson found a tape of its 1972 series Sealab 2020 while working as production assistants, wrote new dialogue over it, and were turned down the first time they pitched it.
Q 11Which actor voices the title character in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law?
Gary Cole
Gary Cole. His Birdman, a washed-up 1960s superhero, defends other vintage cartoon characters in court, among them Shaggy and Scooby-Doo on a drugs charge, with Stephen Colbert as his boss.
Q 12Which cancelled Fox sitcom did strong Adult Swim rerun ratings help revive in 2004?
Family Guy
Family Guy. Fox had cancelled it in 2002, but strong DVD sales and the ratings for its late-night reruns changed the network's mind, and new episodes began in May 2005.
Q 13Robot Chicken, co-created by Seth Green, is animated using what?
Stop-motion with toys
Q 21Which cult 2003 film did Adult Swim air, sex scenes blacked out, as a 2009 April Fools' prank?
The Room
The Room. Adult Swim followed it with a Tim and Eric episode guest-starring its director Tommy Wiseau, then aired the film again on the next two April Fools' nights.
Q 22Which defunct anime block did Adult Swim revive as a 2012 April Fools' stunt, then permanently?
Toonami
Toonami. Six weeks after the one-night prank, Adult Swim announced on Twitter that the block, shut down in 2008, was coming back for real, and it returned on Saturday nights that May.
Q 23Which comedian co-hosted The Eric Andre Show for its first four seasons?
Hannibal Buress
Stop-motion with toys. Its animators pose action figures frame by frame for short sketches, and George Lucas lent his own voice to its Star Wars special.
Q 14Which Adult Swim series about the Cuyler family of north Georgia ran for 13 seasons?
Squidbillies
Squidbillies. The Cuylers are hillbilly mud squids in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and after twelve seasons voiced by country singer Unknown Hinson, patriarch Early was played by Tracy Morgan for the last.
Q 15Metalocalypse centres on which fictional death metal band?
Dethklok
Dethklok is so popular that the show calls it the world's seventh-largest economy; creator Brendon Small wrote and played the band's music.
Q 16Which Adult Swim series, created by Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, ran seven seasons over fifteen years?
The Venture Bros.
The Venture Bros. ran from 2003 to 2018, was cancelled in 2020, and wrapped up with the 2023 film Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart.
Q 17Which Adult Swim series is based on Aaron McGruder's comic strip about the Freeman family?
The Boondocks
The Boondocks. Regina King voiced both brothers, ten-year-old Huey and eight-year-old Riley, and the fourth and final season was made without McGruder.
Q 18On January 31, 2007, Boston police mistook LED signs of which Aqua Teen characters for bombs?
The Mooninites
The Mooninites, Ignignokt and Err, were on LED placards promoting the Aqua Teen movie; Cartoon Network general manager Jim Samples resigned over the scare.
Q 19How much did Turner Broadcasting and its marketing firm agree to pay after the 2007 Boston bomb scare?
$2 million
$2 million: half repaid the agencies that responded and half went to homeland security programs, though the same signs had hung in nine other cities for weeks without alarm.
Q 20Which 2007 sketch series brought Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's anti-humour to the block?
Awesome Show, Great Job!
Awesome Show, Great Job! ran for five seasons of public-access-style sketches, and John C. Reilly's clueless Dr. Steve Brule proved popular enough to get a spin-off of his own.
Hannibal Buress was Eric Andre's deadpan co-host from the 2012 debut; he stepped back in season 5 and was briefly replaced by a lookalike, 'Blannibal'.
Q 24Who created Rick and Morty?
Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon
Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. The show grew out of Roiland's crude Back to the Future parody, made for a short-film festival Harmon co-founded, which is why its leads echo Doc and Marty.
Q 25Which Adult Swim comedy from Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack follows Pim and Charlie, who work at a small charity?
Smiling Friends
Smiling Friends. Its pilot was slipped out without warning on April Fools' night 2020, almost two years before the series proper began in January 2022.
Q 26Which McDonald's item came back because of a Rick and Morty joke?
Szechuan sauce
Szechuan sauce. The 1998 Mulan tie-in is what Rick says he is really after in the season 3 premiere, an episode Adult Swim sprang on viewers without warning on April Fools' Day 2017.
Q 27Which episode won Rick and Morty its first Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program?
Pickle Rick
Pickle Rick. Rick turns himself into a pickle to get out of family therapy, then has to fight his way home through a sewer full of rats; the episode won the 2018 Emmy.
Q 28Which 2014 parody of sitcom opening credits went viral after airing at 4 a.m. on Adult Swim?
Too Many Cooks
Too Many Cooks. Casper Kelly's eleven-minute short keeps adding grinning cast members to a cheery theme song until a killer starts stalking the credits.
Q 29Which 2010 browser game from Adult Swim Games was set to Erasure's song 'Always'?
Robot Unicorn Attack
Robot Unicorn Attack. Its follow-ups kept the game and swapped the song: German metal band Blind Guardian for the Heavy Metal edition, and The Darkness's festive single for the Christmas one.
Q 30Primal, the dialogue-free series about a caveman and a T. rex, was created by which animator?
Genndy Tartakovsky
Genndy Tartakovsky, creator of Dexter's Laboratory, made Primal; Spear and Fang each lose their families in the opening episode, which is what turns hunter and dinosaur into partners.