Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty
Promotional art for the animated television series Rick and Morty; shown, the protagonists Rick and Morty running through an exoplanet
Genre Adult animation
Adventure
Science fiction
Dark comedy
Comedy-drama
Created by Justin Roiland
Dan Harmon
Directed by Pete Michels (supervising)
Jeff Myers
Bryan Newton
John Rice
Justin Roiland
Stephen Sandoval
Voices of Justin Roiland
Chris Parnell
Spencer Grammer
Sarah Chalke
Composer(s) Ryan Elder
Country of origin United States
No. of seasons 1
No. of episodes 11 (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 (2013-2014)
Rick and Morty, LLC. (2015-present)[1][2]
Williams Street
Broadcast
Original channel Adult Swim
Picture format 16:9 HDTV
Original run December 2, 2013 – present
External links
Website

Rick and Morty is an American adult animated television series created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for Adult Swim. The series follows the misadventures of alcoholic scientist Rick and his easily influenced grandson Morty, who split their time between domestic family life and intergalactic space travel. Roiland voices the series' titular characters, while the series also stars the voice talent of Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, and Sarah Chalke. The series has its origins in a crude animated short film 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 December 2, 2013 to critical acclaim.[3] In January 2014, the series was renewed for a second season to air in 2015.

Plot

Rick is an elderly and mentally unbalanced alcoholic who has recently reconnected with his family. He is also a scientific genius. He spends most of his time taking his young grandson Morty and later other family members on dangerous, outlandish adventures throughout our own cosmos and alternate universes. Compounded with Morty's already unstable family life, these events cause Morty much distress at home and school.

Characters

Main

Recurring

Production

Development

Co-creators Dan Harmon (left) and Justin Roiland (right).

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 laid off 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 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 Brown 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, a 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 primetime, "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 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 primetime, competing with major programs.[9]

Writing

The general formula of Rick and Morty consists of the juxtaposition of two conflicting scenarios: a psychopathic, alcoholic grandfather dragging his grandson across space for intergalactic adventures, intercut with domestic family drama.[6][10] This has led Harmon to describe the series as a cross between 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". The pair also stated that they ruled out storylines related to time travel.[5] In a similar interview session at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con International, he described each episode as being "[their] 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]

Production of animation is handled by Bardel Entertainment.

Cast

According to Roiland, multiple guest appearances are slated throughout the season. Among them are Tom Kenny, Maurice LaMarche, Alfred Molina, John Oliver, David Cross, Rich Fulcher, Claudia Black and Virginia Hey of Farscape fame, Rob Paulsen, Jess Harnell, Phil Hendrie, Dana Carvey, and Aislinn Paul and Cassie Steele of Degrassi fame.[16]

Episodes

Release and reception

Executive producer Daniel Weidenfeld at the 2013 New York Comic Con.

The series was first announced during Adult Swim's 2012 Upfront presentation.[17] Adult Swim has ordered 10 half-hour episodes (not including the pilot).[18][19] Matt Roller, a writer for the series, confirmed via Twitter that the network renewed Rick and Morty for a second season.[20]

Critical reception

Since the pilot was made available, the series has received critical acclaim, currently holding a Metacritic score of 85, indicating "universal acclaim".[3] David Weigand of the 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 compares the series as to having "shades of Futurama, South Park and even Beetlejuice", ultimately opining that its humor felt "entirely original".[21] Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times praised the series and compared it to the film Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa; he concluded his review stating: "Grandparenting at its unhinged finest."[22] 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."[23] 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.[24]

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.[25] Eleven episodes have also been made available on the series' official website,[26] The first six episodes were uploaded to YouTube for a short period.[27][28] The episode "Rixty Minutes" was released early by the network via 109 15-second videos on Instagram.[29] All episodes of season 1 are available for free streaming on Adult Swim's website, with no regional lock.[30]

DVD and Blu-ray release

The complete first season was released on DVD (Region 1) and Blu-ray on October 7, 2014, as had been announced on July 11, 2014.[31] Before its release, Roiland had confirmed that it would contain uncensored audio tracks.[32]

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.[33] On April 1, 2015, the series debuted with its first monthly issue, entitled "BAM!"[34] The series is written by Zac Gorman and illustrated by CJ Cannon.[35]

References

  1. ↑ EXCLUSIVE: Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland Tells Us He’s "Not Anti-Union At All"
  2. ↑ Rick and Morty Co-Creator Justin Roiland Fuck the Union
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Metacritic staff (2013-11-22). "'Rick and Morty' Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 2013-12-26.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Adult Swim (July 29, 2013). SDCC 2013 - Rick and Morty - Adult Swim (YOUTUBE).
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Abarca, Justin (2013-11-22). "8 Fun Facts About Dan Harmon's New Animated Show, Rick And Morty". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 Alan Sepinwall (March 24, 2014). "Mega Dan Harmon interview, part 3: 'Rick and Morty'". HitFix. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 Ivan Cohen (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 (2013-11-12). "Dan Harmon's Rick and Morty Premieres on Adult Swim on Dec. 2". Splitsider. The Awl. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 Yvonne Villarreal (March 5, 2014). "Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland talk bringing absurd to 'Rick and Morty'". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Fred Topel (December 2, 2013). "Exclusive Interview: Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on ‘Rick and Morty’". CraveOnline. Retrieved October 18, 2014.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 Dan Harmon (2014). Rick and Morty season 1 Blu-ray commentary for the episode "Pilot" (Blu-ray Disc). Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
  12. ↑ Justin Roiland (2014). Rick and Morty season 1 Blu-ray commentary for the episode "Pilot" (Blu-ray Disc). Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Bradford Evans (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) (2013-07-29). SDCC 2013: Rick and Morty Panel. San Diego Comic-Con International: Turner Broadcasting System. 14:36.
  15. ↑ Schwartz, Terri (2013-11-25). "Dan Harmon: Rick and Morty will be the Doctor Who of Adult Swim cartoons". From Inside the Box. Zap2it. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  16. ↑ Dan Harmon (co-creator); Justin Roiland (co-creator) (2013-07-29). SDCC 2013: Rick and Morty Panel. San Diego Comic-Con International: Turner Broadcasting System. 12:54.
  17. ↑ Rose, Lacey (2012-05-15). "Upfronts 2012: Adult Swim Orders Eight Pilots, Including a Project From Community‍‍ '​‍s Dan Harmon". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  18. ↑ Harnick, Chris (2013-10-29). "Rick And Morty: Dan Harmon's Animated Series Coming To Adult Swim". The Huffington Post. AOL. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  19. ↑ O'Neal, Sean (2012-10-29). "Dan Harmon is still doing just fine, now has an Adult Swim series". The A.V. Club. The Onion, Inc. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  20. ↑ Evans, Bradford (January 29, 2014). "Adult Swim Renews Dan Harmon's Rick and Morty for Season 2". Splitsider. The Awl. Retrieved January 29, 2014.
  21. ↑ Weigand, David (2013-11-26). "Rick and Morty review: Funny and edgy". San Francisco Chronicle (Hearst Corporation). Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  22. ↑ Genzlinger, Neil (2013-12-01). "A Warm and Fuzzy Grandpa? Well, Not Exactly: 'Rick and Morty' on Adult Swim". New York Times. Retrieved 2013-12-07.
  23. ↑ Spangler, Todd (2013-12-01). "TV Review: Rick and Morty". Variety.
  24. ↑ Sims, David (2013-12-02). "Dan Harmon's new series is a warped take on the Doc Brown/Marty McFly dynamic". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 2013-12-03.
  25. ↑ "Rick and Morty, Season 1". Apple Inc. 2013-11-08. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  26. ↑ "Rick and Morty – Premieres December 2nd at 10:30p on Adult Swim". AdultSwim.com. Turner Broadcasting System. 2013-11-22. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  27. ↑ Harris, Aisha (2013-11-27). "Watch the Pilot for Dan Harmon’s New Animated Series". Slate. Retrieved 2013-11-27.
  28. ↑ Evans, Bradford (2013-11-27). "You Can Watch the Pilot for Dan Harmon's New Adult Swim Show Online Now". Splitsider. The Awl. Retrieved 2013-11-27.
  29. ↑ Adult Swim splits up 'Rick and Morty' episode into 109 Instagram videos | The Verge
  30. ↑ http://www.adultswim.com/videos/rick-and-morty/
  31. ↑ Lambert, David (July 11, 2013). "Rick and Morty - 'The Complete 1st Season' on DVD, Blu-ray: Date, Cost, Extras". TVShowsOnDVD.com. Retrieved July 12, 2013.
  32. ↑ Twitter / JustinRoiland: The Rick and Morty DVD and
  33. ↑ Wilson, Matt D. (13 October 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 8 April 2015.
  34. ↑ "Rick and Morty (2015) - #1". Comicbookdb. Retrieved 8 April 2015.
  35. ↑ Steinbeiser, Andrew (22 January 2015). "Rick and Morty Comic Book Preview Revealed". Comicbook.com. Retrieved 8 April 2015.

External links

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