The Dawn is Your Enemy was a sign-off bump that was shown on Adult Swim between 2005 and 2010. The point of the bumper was to scare children as a punishment for staying up too late and watching the block, hence why it would appear early in the morning.
The bumper shows a pencil sketch style image of a pair of human-like eyes gazing over a field covered with flowers, trees and in the distance a sun with a face is seen.
The bumper was introduced on March 29, 2005, the same day Adult Swim and Cartoon Network were separated from each other for Nielsen ratings. On that day, Adult Swim expanded to 6:00 A.M. and several new Bumps were introduced, including this one. It continued to appear in this time slot along with the other 5:00 A.M. bumps until January 31, 2010, when a new set of bumps was introduced.
Sometime around May 2020, a decade after, it made a return in the form of a text bumper called The Dawn is Your Frenemy, which begins with a text that reads we're going to be more positive to see if it makes us feel better before cutting to the original clip, eventually a red balloon floats up into the air followed by upbeat piano music, before cutting to an onscreen text that reads Not sure it's working and the advert ends.
Trivia[]
- Rumors say that the bump even appeared post-2010 (Even in-between commercial breaks), albeit on extremely rare occasions. However, due to the unpredictable nature of Adult Swim's Bumps, there is not much proof to support this claim.
- The image was displayed during the tweets segment of the June 6th 2021 broadcast when a Twitter user asked to see what the bump would look like in widescreen, with the image shown and original sound effect with added scream sound effects played for a few seconds.
- For a short time during September 2021, this bump was used as a Sign-Off, in honor of Adult Swim's 20th anniversary.
- The music used in the bump was unknown until 2022, when it was found to be taken from the first 10 seconds of the song Violence is a Menace by Bola Adekimi.
- The bumper was shown in the introduction of the [adult swim] Latin America channel as something that also happened along with the Boston Bomb Scare, to update the audience on the history of the block.
- The art of the landscape, without the faces or text, was used in 2 albums in 1981, Rijzende Zon by De Piratenboys and Droomwals by De Benjamins, however, the origin of the painting itself is still unknown