Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty
Promotional art for the animated television series Rick and Morty.
Genre
Created by
Voices of
Composer(s) Ryan Elder
Country of origin United States
Original language(s) English
No. of seasons 2
No. of episodes 21 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)
  • Dan Harmon
  • Justin Roiland
  • James A. Fino
  • Joe Russo II
Producer(s)
  • J. Michael Mendel
  • Kenny Micka (pilot)
Running time 22 minutes
Production company(s)
  • Justin Roiland's Solo Vanity Card Productions
  • Harmonious Claptrap
  • Starburns Industries
  • Williams Street
Release
Original network Adult Swim
Picture format 16:9 HDTV
Original release December 2, 2013 (2013-12-02) – present
External links
Website

Rick and Morty is an American adult animated science fiction sitcom created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for Adult Swim. The series follows the misadventures of mad scientist Rick and his fretful, easily influenced grandson Morty, who split their time between domestic family life and interdimensional adventures. Roiland voices the series' eponymous characters, with the voice talent of Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, and Sarah Chalke providing the rest of the family. The series has its origins in an animated parody of Back to the Future created by Roiland for film festival Channel 101. Adult Swim approached Harmon for television show ideas, and he and Roiland developed the program based on the short's two characters.

The series premiered on December 2, 2013, to critical acclaim.[1] In January 2014, the series was renewed for a second season which premiered on July 26, 2015. In August 2015, Adult Swim renewed the series for a 14-episode third season.[2][3]

Plot

Rick Sanchez is an alcoholic scientific genius who has moved in with the family of his daughter Beth, who is a veterinarian and equine cardiac surgeon. He splits his time between developing endless arcane projects and taking his teenage grandson Morty (and, with increasing occurrence, his older teenage granddaughter Summer) on dangerous and surreal adventures throughout the multiverse. Compounded with preexisting tensions within the family, these events cause the sensitive Morty much distress at home and school.

With the exception of the pilot episode, each episode ends with a post-credits scene. Rick and Morty can be considered a cosmic horror, given the callous and inhumane resolutions presented in most episodes.[4]

Characters

Production

Development

Creators Dan Harmon (left) and Justin Roiland

Rick and Morty was created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. The duo first met at Channel 101, a non-profit monthly short film festival in Los Angeles co-founded by Harmon.[7] At Channel 101, participants submit a short film in the format of a pilot, and a live audience decides which pilots continue as a series. Roiland, then a producer on reality programming, began submitting content to the festival a year after its launch, in 2004. His pilots typically consisted of shock value—"sick and twisted" elements that received a confused reaction from the audience.[7] Nevertheless, Harmon took a liking to his humor and the two began collaborating. In 2006, Roiland was fired from working on a television series he regarded as intensely creatively stifling, and funneled his creative energies into creating a webisode for Channel 101. The result was The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, an animated short starring Doc Brown and Marty McFly, characters from the Back to the Future film trilogy.[8] In the short, which Harmon would dub "a bastardization, a pornographic vandalization," Doc Smith urges Mharti that the solution to all of his problems is to give him oral sex.[6] The audience reacted to it wildly, and Roiland began creating more shorts involving the characters, which soon evolved beyond his original intentions and their obvious origin within the film from which it was culled.[6][9] Harmon would later create and produce Community, an NBC sitcom, while Roiland would work primarily in voice acting for Disney's Fish Hooks.

In 2012, Harmon was fired from Community. Adult Swim, searching for a more prime-time, "hit" show,[10] approached Harmon shortly afterward, who initially viewed the channel as unfit for his style. He also was unfamiliar with animation, and his process for creating television focuses more heavily on dialogue, characters, and story.[9] Instead, he phoned Roiland to inquire if he had any ideas for an animated series. Roiland immediately brought up the idea of using the Doc and Mharti characters, renamed Rick and Morty.[6] Roiland initially wanted the show's run time to consist of one eleven-minute segment, but Adult Swim pushed for a half-hour program.[10] Harmon felt the best way to extend the voices into a program would be to build a family around the characters, while Adult Swim development executive Nick Weidenfeld suggested that Rick be Morty's grandfather. Having pitched multiple television programs that did not get off the ground, Roiland was initially very unreceptive to others attempting to give notes on his pitch.[6] Prior to developing Rick and Morty, he had created three failed animated pilots for Fox, and he had begun to feel "burned out" with developing television.[9]

The first draft was completed in six hours on the Paramount Pictures lot in Dan Harmon's unfurnished Community office.[11] The duo had broken the story that day, sold the pilot, and then sat down to write.[9][12] Roiland, while acknowledging a tendency for procrastination, encouraged Harmon to stay and write the entire first draft.[11] "We were sitting on the floor, cross-legged with laptops and I was about to get up and go home and he said, 'Wait, if you go home, it might take us three months to write this thing. Stay here right now and we can write it in six hours.' He just had a premonition about that," recalled Harmon.[9] Adult Swim was initially unsure of Roiland doing both voices, partially due to the undeveloped nature of the character of Morty. Harmon wrote four short premises in which Morty took a more assertive role and sent it to Mike Lazzo.[11] Adult Swim placed a tamer TV-14 rating on the program, which initially was met with reluctance from the show's staff. The network's reason behind the rating was that it would soon begin broadcasting in prime-time, competing with major programs.[9]

Writing

The general formula of Rick and Morty consists of the juxtaposition of two conflicting scenarios: an extremely selfish, alcoholic grandfather dragging his grandson across space for intergalactic and/or interdimensional adventures, intercut with domestic family drama.[6][10] This has led Harmon to describe the series as a cross between Matt Groening's two shows The Simpsons and Futurama, balancing family life with heavy science fiction.[13] Roiland stated his and Harmon's intentions for the series to lack traditional continuity, opting for discontinuous storylines "not bound by rules". In a similar interview session at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con International, he described each episode as being "[its] own point of entry."[14]

The first season writing staff consisted of Roiland, Harmon, Tom Kauffman, Ryan Ridley, Wade Randolph, Eric Acosta, while writer's assistant Mike McMahan was also given writing credit. Described as a "very, very tiny little writers' room with a lot of heavy lifting from everybody," the show's writing staff, like many Adult Swim productions, is not unionized with the Writers' Guild of America.[13] The writing staff first meets and discusses ideas, which evolve into a story.[7] Discussions often include anecdotes from personal life as well as thoughts on the science fiction genre.[9] After breaking the story—which consists of developing its consistency and logical beginning, middle, and conclusion—a writer is assigned to create an outline. Roiland and Harmon do a "pass" on the outline, and from there the episode undergoes several more drafts. The final draft of the script is last approved by either of the co-creators.[7] In producing the series' first season, episodes were occasionally written out of order. For example, "Rick Potion #9" was the second episode written for the series, but was instructed to be animated as the fifth, as it would make more sense within the series' continuity.[7] The series is inspired by British-style storytelling, as opposed to traditional American "family TV" stories.[7] Harmon noted that the writers room at the show's studio bears a striking resemblance to the one used for Community.[9] In comparing the two, he noted that the writing staff of Rick and Morty was significantly smaller, and more "rough and tumble verbally," commenting, "There's a lot more Legos and Nerf guns."[9]

Many episodes are structured with use of a story circle, a Harmon creation based largely on Joseph Campbell's monomyth, or The Hero's Journey. Its two-act structure places it at an odd location in the stages of the monomyth, after The Meeting with the Goddess, instead of Atonement with the Father.[11] Harmon has stated that his inspiration behind much of the concept and humor for the series comes from various British television series, such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Doctor Who. He figures that the audience will only understand developments from Morty's point of view, but stated "we don't want to be the companions. We want to hang out with the Doctor, we idolize the Doctor, but we don't think like him, and that's really interesting, Rick is diseased, he's mentally ill, he's an absolute lunatic because he lives on this larger scale."[15]

Animation

Roiland's cartooning style is heavily indebted to The Simpsons, a factor he acknowledged in a 2013 interview, while also comparing his style to that of Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time) and J.G. Quintel (Regular Show): "You'll notice mouths are kind of similar and teeth are similar, but I think that's also a stylistic thing that... all of us are kind of the same age, and we're all inspired by The Simpsons and all these other shows we're kind of subconsciously tapping into."[13]

According to one of the technical directors, animation is done using Toon Boom Harmony with post production work done in Adobe After Effects. The background art for the show is done in Adobe Photoshop. Production of animation is handled by Bardel Entertainment in Canada.

Episodes

Philosophy

There has been discussion among viewers about the philosophy of Rick and Morty.[16] The show most frequently adopts an existentialist perspective,[4][17] evident both in Rick's general behavior, and from numerous character observations of events. A frequently-cited example is a point Morty makes in the first season episode "Rixty Minutes", where he argues that Summer shouldn't leave home out of anger after learning of alternative realities where her parents were happier without her:[18][19]

On one of our adventures, Rick and I basically destroyed the whole world, so we bailed on that reality and we came to this one, because in this one, the world wasn't destroyed and in this one, we were dead. So we came here, a- a- and we buried ourselves and we took their place. And every morning, Summer, I eat breakfast twenty yards away from my own rotting corpse. [...] Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV?

This statement heavily resembles a quote from French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre:

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Another way in which the show appears to convey existentialist thought are its constant reminders of the insignificance of Earth in relation to the universe.[4]

Release and reception

The series was first announced during Adult Swim's 2012 Upfront presentation.[20] Adult Swim ordered 10 half-hour episodes (not including the pilot) to comprise the first season.[21][22] Matt Roller, a writer for the series, confirmed via Twitter that the network renewed Rick and Morty for a second season, which premiered on July 26, 2015.[23]

Critical reception

As of August 2016 the series has received universal critical acclaim, holding a 100% approval rating by critics on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.[24] Additionally, the first season of Rick and Morty holds a Metacritic score of 85 based on eight reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[1] David Weigand of San Francisco Chronicle described it as "offbeat and occasionally coarse... the take-away here is that it works." He praised the animation direction by James McDermott for being "fresh, colorful and as wacky as the script", and states that the series possesses "shades of Futurama, South Park and even Beetlejuice", ultimately opining that its humor felt "entirely original."[25] Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times praised the series and stated that it was "Grandparenting at its unhinged finest."[26] Todd Spangler of Variety gave the series a lukewarm review; while he found the series was passable, he contrasted it with other Adult Swim series as "often seems overly reliant on simply being frenetic at the expense of being witty" and enjoyed it as "a welcome attempt to dream just a little bigger."[27] David Sims of The A.V. Club gave the series an "A-". In reviewing the first two episodes, he complimented the animation for its "clean, simple style." He stated that while the series has "a dark, sick sensibility," he praised its "effort to give each character a little bit of depth," further applauding Roiland's voice talent for the eponymous characters.[28] IMDb gave the show a warm reception as it described it as "the best animation show that they've seen in a while on any network"[29]

Online distribution

Adult Swim has made the pilot episode available on iTunes, bundled as part of the complete first season, as well as a 37-minute interview between creators Harmon and Roiland at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con International.[30] Eleven episodes have also been made available on the series' official website.[31] The first six episodes were uploaded to YouTube for a short period.[32][33] The episode "Rixty Minutes" was released early by the network via 109 15-second videos on Instagram.[34] Some of the episodes are available for free streaming on Adult Swim's website; for the rest a U.S. cable subscription is required.[35] Season one was made available for on-demand viewing on Hulu in June 2015. Season two is also available as of June 2016.[36] Season one and two is available on Netflix in some countries (e.g. Germany, Austria, Ireland, Israel, Sweden, Spain, Japan and the U.K.) and season two is available on Netflix in some areas such Latin America, Ireland, Sweden, Spain and the U.K.[37]

DVD and Blu-ray release

The complete first season was released on DVD (Region 1) and Blu-ray on October 7, 2014.[38] Before its release, Roiland had confirmed that it would contain uncensored audio tracks.[39] The complete second season was released on DVD (Region 1) and Blu-ray on June 7, 2016.[40]

Awards and nominations

Year Award Category Nominee(s) Result Ref.
2015 Annie Award Best General Audience Animated TV/Broadcast Production Rick and Morty Nominated [41]

In other media

Film and television

The fast food restaurant chain Hardee's/Carl's Jr. released a television commercial in 2015 in which Rick brings several walking, sentient Hardee's/Carl's Jr. burgers into a sleeping Morty's room. The burgers run amok and steal objects.[42]

A 2015 episode of The Simpsons, "Mathlete's Feat", opened with an elaborate couch gag featuring Rick and Morty, written by Harmon and Roiland.[43] Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, described it as "probably the most ambitious and lengthy couch gag" on The Simpsons to date.[44]

Comics

At New York Comic Con 2014, editor-in-chief of Oni Press, James Lucas Jones, announced that a Rick and Morty comic book adaptation would be released in early 2015.[45] On April 1, 2015, the series debuted with its first monthly issue, entitled "BAM!"[46] The series is written by Zac Gorman and illustrated by CJ Cannon.[47] Artist Tom Fowler wrote a multi-issue story arc that began in March, 2016.[48]

Video games

On August 10, 2015, a Rick and Morty-themed announcer pack was released for the competitive multiplayer video game Dota 2.[49] The announcer pack can be purchased by players and replaces the Default announcer and Mega-Kills announcer with characters from Rick and Morty, voiced by Justin Roiland.

Pocket Mortys is a Pokémon parody game set in the "Rick and Morty Rickstaverse",[50] released on iOS and Android as a free-to-play game from Adult Swim Games, released early[51] on January 13, 2016. Coinciding with the many-worlds interpretation, the game follows versions of Rick and Morty that belong to an alternate timeline, rather than the duo followed in the show. The game uses a style and concept similar to the Pokémon games, with catching various "wild" Mortys, battling them with a variety of Aliens, Ricks, and Jerrys. The game features voice acting from Roiland and Harmon.

Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality, announced on July 15, 2016, is an upcoming HTC Vive Virtual Reality game developed by Owlchemy Labs, the developers of Job Simulator.[52][53]

Other

On August 4, 2016, Adult Swim released a video called "State of Georgia Vs. Denver Fenton Allen", featuring the characters reenacting an infamous preliminary hearing from Rome, Georgia.[54] The segment was later animated by fan tiarawhy on October 5 using Toonboom Harmony 14 (the same animation software used by the show).[55][56]

References

  1. 1 2 Metacritic staff (November 22, 2013). "'Rick and Morty' Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved December 26, 2013.
  2. "'Rick And Morty' Season 3 had four exciting episodes which was supposed to premiere in December, 2016.". October 18, 2016.
  3. ""how is season 3 coming along?" / Erica Hayes blog". October 12, 2016.
  4. 1 2 3 Opperman, Alec. "Ep.40: The Philosophy of Rick and Morty". 8-Bit Philosophy. Wisecrack.co. Retrieved August 22, 2016.
  5. 1 2 3 4 SDCC 2013 - Rick and Morty (YouTube). Adult Swim. July 29, 2013.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Sepinwall, Alan (March 24, 2014). "Mega Dan Harmon interview, part 3: 'Rick and Morty'". HitFix. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Cohen, Ivan (January 24, 2014). "Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland on Rick and Morty, How Community Is Like Star Trek, and Puberty". Vulture. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  8. Czajkowski, Elise (November 12, 2013). "Dan Harmon's Rick and Morty Premieres on Adult Swim on Dec. 2". Splitsider. The Awl. Retrieved November 26, 2013.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Villarreal, Yvonne (March 5, 2014). "Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland talk bringing absurd to 'Rick and Morty'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  10. 1 2 3 Topel, Fred (December 2, 2013). "Exclusive Interview: Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on 'Rick and Morty'". CraveOnline. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Harmon, Dan (2014). Commentary for the episode "Pilot". Rick and Morty season 1 (Blu-ray Disc). Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
  12. Roiland, Justin (2014). Commentary for the episode "Pilot". Rick and Morty season 1 (Blu-ray Disc). Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
  13. 1 2 3 Evans, Bradford (December 2, 2013). "Talking to Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland About Their New Adult Swim Show, 'Rick and Morty'". Splitsider. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  14. Dan Harmon (co-creator); Justin Roiland (co-creator) (July 29, 2013). SDCC 2013: Rick and Morty Panel. San Diego Comic-Con International: Turner Broadcasting System.
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  43. Perkins, Dennis (17 May 2015). "The Simpsons: "Mathlete's Feat"". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 2016-01-17.
  44. "'The Simpsons': Couch Gag With 'Rick and Morty' Turns Deadly". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2016-01-17.
  45. Wilson, Matt D. (October 13, 2014). "Oni Brings 'Rick And Morty' To The Universe Of Comics [NYCC] Read More: Oni Brings 'Rick And Morty' To The Universe Of Comics [NYCC]". ComicsAlliance. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  46. "Rick and Morty (2015) - #1". Comicbookdb. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  47. Steinbeiser, Andrew (January 22, 2015). "Rick and Morty Comic Book Preview Revealed". Comicbook.com. Retrieved April 8, 2015.
  48. Thompson, Barry (January 20, 2016). "Exclusive: Incoming Rick and Morty Comic Writer Tom Fowler Takes Series to Sad, Absurd Extremes". Paste.
  49. "Rick and Morty Announcer Pack". Valve Corporation. Retrieved August 10, 2015.
  50. Mufson, Beckett (6 January 2016). "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub! 'Rick and Morty' Becomes a Pokémon-Style Game". The Creators Project. Retrieved 10 July 2016.
  51. "Security Check Required". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 2016-01-15.
  52. Kuchera, Ben (15 July 2016). "Watch the stunning first trailer for the Rick and Morty VR game". Polygon. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  53. Devore, Jordan (15 July 2016). "The HTC Vive is getting an official Rick and Morty simulator". Destructoid. Retrieved 15 July 2016.
  54. Gaither, Tanita (7 August 2016). "Adult Swim spoofs vulgar exchange between GA judge, murder suspect". WTVM. Retrieved 13 November 2016.
  55. Lopez, German (October 6, 2016). "This is the most obscene, vulgar court transcript you'll ever see". Vox. Retrieved October 7, 2016.
  56. Warren, Christina (October 6, 2016). "'Rick and Morty' Re-enact the Most Insane Court Case of All Time". io9. Retrieved October 7, 2016.

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