Rick and Morty

Rick and Morty
Genre	Comic science fiction Black comedy Action-adventure
Created by	Justin Roiland Dan Harmon
Voices of	Justin Roiland Chris Parnell Spencer Grammer Sarah Chalke
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 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 interdimensional travel. Roiland voices the series' eponymous characters, while the series also stars the voice talent of Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, and Sarah Chalke. 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 December 2, 2013, to critical acclaim.^[1] In January 2014, the series was renewed for a second season that began on July 26, 2015. In August 2015, Adult Swim renewed the series for a third season.^[2]

Plot

Rick is an eccentric, elderly, alcoholic scientist who has moved in with the family of his veterinarian daughter, Beth. He spends most of his time taking his young grandson Morty (and later his granddaughter Summer) on dangerous, outlandish adventures throughout the cosmos and alternate universes. Compounded with Morty's already unstable family life, these events cause Morty much distress at home and school.

With the exception of the pilot episode, each episode ends with a post-credits scene.

Characters

• Rick Sanchez (voiced by Justin Roiland^[3]) – A genius scientist who is the father of Beth, and the maternal grandfather of Morty and Summer. His alcoholic tendencies lead his daughter's family to worry about the safety of their son Morty. The series is often retroscripted for Rick's lines. He displays "diagnosable qualities of various mental illnesses." An extremely intellectual character that views his time as valuable,^[4] he eschews the usefulness of many ordinary human conventions such as school, marriage, and even love. His reaction to the mundane requests asked of him by Morty and other family members suggests he considers himself wholly superior to them, though in several instances throughout the series he shows a lonelier side. He frequently 'burp-talks' words in the middle of a sentence while speaking, presumably as a result of his alcoholism. He is identified as being the Rick of Dimension C-137.
• Mortimer "Morty" Smith (voiced by Justin Roiland^[3]) – Rick's good-hearted but easily distressed 14-year-old grandson is frequently dragged into Rick's misadventures. He is often reluctant to follow Rick's plans, and he often ends up traumatized by the unorthodox and morally questionable methods Rick uses to 'fix' situations. The Morty of C-137 is referred to as the "Mortiest Morty" by Rick, due to his courage, which nearly every other Morty lacks due to their main use being makeshift cloaking devices.
• Beth Smith (née Sanchez) (voiced by Sarah Chalke) – Rick's daughter, Summer and Morty's mother, and Jerry's wife. She is a cardiac surgeon for horses. Level-headed and assertive, she struggles with her husband's ego, which thrives in defiance of his proven mediocrity. Several episodes have dealt with Beth's deep dissatisfaction with her life, stemming from her belief that she has "settled" in her marriage, family, and job. She wanted to become a "real" surgeon but became pregnant with Summer at 17. She is the most assertive force in her household, while also displaying traits of selfishness, humor, and intelligence. Beth is unperturbed by her father's destructive and dangerous tendencies around her son, due to the fact that she, from childhood, views Rick more favorably than her mother due to their separation.^[4] Harmon expanded upon this origin in an interview: "Kids can sometimes idolize their worst parent and blame their supportive parent for chasing off the dad with the guts to leave. [...] She believes that Rick, as crazy as he is, is the better of her two parents even though she was raised by her mother and she blames her mother’s unremarkability on her father’s departure and will do anything to keep her father back in her life."^[4]
• Jerry Smith (voiced by Chris Parnell^[3]) – Summer and Morty's insecure father, Beth's husband, and Rick's son-in-law, who strongly disapproves of Rick's influence over Morty. His marriage is sometimes jeopardized by his wife's reactions to his poor relationship with Rick. Jerry worked at a low-level advertising agency until he was fired for incompetence. The episode "Mortynight Run" reveals that one of the Ricks, keenly aware that every Jerry is incapable of surviving off of Earth, created a daycare where every Jerry is dropped off by their Rick and Morty during adventures should he attempt to accompany them.
• Summer Smith (voiced by Spencer Grammer^[3]) – Morty's 17-year-old older sister, a more conventional and often superficial teenager, is obsessed with anything that can improve her status with her peers. Summer is very similar to her mother, as she is often shown to be very smart and humorous, but is much more selfless. She occasionally expresses jealousy that Morty gets to accompany Rick on his inter-dimensional adventures. In the second season, she accompanies Rick and Morty on adventures more frequently and sometimes will even prove herself to be more competent than Morty.

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.^[5] 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.^[5] 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 Adventures of Doc and Mharti, an animated short starring Doc Brown and Marty McFly, characters from the Back to the Future film trilogy.^[6] 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.^[4] 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.^[4][7] 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,^[8] 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.^[7] 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.^[4] Roiland initially wanted the show's run time to consist of one eleven-minute segment, but Adult Swim pushed for a half-hour program.^[8] 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.^[4] 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.^[7]

The first draft was completed in six hours on the Paramount Pictures lot in Dan Harmon's unfurnished Community office.^[9] The duo had broken the story that day, sold the pilot, and then sat down to write.^[7][10] Roiland, while acknowledging a tendency for procrastination, encouraged Harmon to stay and write the entire first draft.^[9] "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.^[7] 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.^[9] 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.^[7]

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.^[4][8] This has led Harmon to describe the series as a cross between The Simpsons and Futurama, balancing family life with heavy science fiction.^[11] 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."^[12]

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.^[11] The writing staff first meets and discusses ideas, which evolve into a story.^[5] Discussions often include anecdotes from personal life as well as thoughts on the science fiction genre.^[7] 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.^[5] 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.^[5] The series is inspired by British-style storytelling, as opposed to traditional American "family TV" stories.^[5] Harmon noted that the writers room at the show's studio bears a striking resemblance to the one used for Community.^[7] 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."^[7]

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.^[9] 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."^[13]

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."^[11]

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.

Cast

Several guest appearances were featured during the first season. Among them were Tom Kenny, Maurice LaMarche, Rob Paulsen, Alfred Molina, John Oliver, David Cross, Rich Fulcher, Claudia Black and Virginia Hey of Farscape fame, Jess Harnell, Phil Hendrie, Dana Carvey, and Aislinn Paul and Cassie Steele of Degrassi fame.^[14] The second season has featured appearances from Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Andy Daly, Jemaine Clement, Christina Hendricks, Patton Oswalt, Alan Tudyk, Tara Strong, Kevin Michael Richardson, Keith David, Matt Walsh, Kurtwood Smith, Werner Herzog, Stephen Colbert, Nathan Fielder, Chelsea Kane, Arin Hanson, and Alex Hirsch as well as the return of several of the season one guest stars such as Kenny, LaMarche, and Paulsen.

Episodes

Release and reception

The series was first announced during Adult Swim's 2012 Upfront presentation.^[15] Adult Swim ordered 10 half-hour episodes (not including the pilot) to comprise the first season.^[16][17] 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.^[18]

Critical reception

The first season of Rick and Morty holds a Metacritic score of 85, 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 compares the series as to having "shades of Futurama, South Park and even Beetlejuice", ultimately opining that its humor felt "entirely original."^[19] 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."^[20] 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."^[21] 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.^[22]

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.^[23] Eleven episodes have also been made available on the series' official website.^[24] The first six episodes were uploaded to YouTube for a short period.^[25][26] The episode "Rixty Minutes" was released early by the network via 109 15-second videos on Instagram.^[27] Some of the episodes are available for free streaming on Adult Swim's website; for the rest a U.S. cable subscription is required.^[28] Season one was made available for on-demand viewing on Hulu in June 2015.^[29]

DVD and Blu-ray release

The complete first season was released on DVD (Region 1) and Blu-ray on October 7, 2014.^[30] Before its release, Roiland had confirmed that it would contain uncensored audio tracks.^[31]

Awards and nominations

Philosophy

It has been suggested by several viewers that Rick and Morty carries some messages in a philosophical vein.^[32][33] The position most often associated with the show is existentialism,^[34][35] as evidenced both by Rick's general behavior and more specifically by particular remarks that can be found throughout the series. Also, it has been argued that Morty too becomes an existentialist to some degree, especially when taking into account his quibble to Summer in Rixty Minutes, from season 1, episode 8:^[36][37]

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.

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.^[35] This aspect is both joked about and discussed in a serious fashion.

Other viewers have pointed out that Rick and Morty can be interpreted as a critique of western attitudes towards science, and of scientism in particular.^[38]

In other media

In popular culture

A 2015 episode of The Simpsons, "Mathlete's Feat" opened with an elaborate couch gag featuring Rick and Morty.^[39] Matt Groening described it as "probably the most ambitious and lengthy couch gag" on The Simpsons to date.^[40]

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.^[41] On April 1, 2015, the series debuted with its first monthly issue, entitled "BAM!"^[42] The series is written by Zac Gorman and illustrated by CJ Cannon.^[43] Artist Tom Fowler wrote a multi-issue story arc that begins in March, 2016.^[44]

Dota 2 announcer pack

On August 10, 2015, a Rick and Morty-themed announcer pack was released for the competitive multiplayer video game Dota 2.^[45] 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

Pocket Mortys is a Pokémon parody game set in the "Rick and Morty Rickstaverse", released on iOS and Android as a free-to-play game from Adult Swim Games, released early^[46] 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.

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Rick and Morty

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rick and Morty.

• Official website
• Rick and Morty at the Internet Movie Database
• Rick and Morty on Twitter