Wednesday, August 3, 2016

RR Rick and Morty


The outside world is our enemy, Morty! We're the only f-friends we got, Morty! It's just Rick and Morty! R-Rick and Morty and their adventures, Morty! Rick and Morty forever and forever, 100 years, Rick and Morty's things!



Me and Rick and Morty running around and... Rick and Morty time! All day long, forever... all- a hundred days! Rick and Morty forever a hundred times! Over and over, rickandmortyadventures.com. www.rickandmorty.com. www.rickandmortyadventures. All 100 years. Every minute, rickandmorty.com!!


Name: Rick and Morty: The Complete First Season
Created by Justin Roiland & Dan Harmon
Original run 2013-2014
Genre Science-fiction/Parody/Comedy animated series

"Rick and Morty, forever, 100 years"!

Rick and Morty is a co-creation from animator Justin Roiland and Community's Dan Harmon. Originally born from a crass Back to the Future parody, Rick and Morty is now one of [adult swim]'s most beloved series.

The show was launched on December 2013 and it has been going on strong ever since.


The initial pitch of the series was a parody of Back to the Future right down to its main characters. The show revolves around this scientist and parody of Doc Brown, Rick, taking his grandson, a spoof of Marty McFly, Morty, going on all sorts of science-fiction adventures through time and space! 

The show also follows their family life and is riffs on scifi parodies, themes and pop culture.

At the start of the show Rick just came back to return living with the family of his daughter, Beth, an horse veterinarian who "settled" for this marriage with this very insecure husband, Jerry, who really disapproves of Rick's influence on his perfectly ordinary family. 

Rick has a distaste for the mundane everyday life and starts taking Morty on all sorts of misadventures, often traumatizing him. And slowly he even starts to get Morty's sister, who appears to be a pretty superficial teenager at first.

More and more their life will get increasingly more bizarre as Morty learns more about Rick's experiments and the cosmic side mankind is not really aware of...


Rick and Morty is a great scifi cartoon that perfectly captures the genre and parodies its tropes at the same time!

Most episodes bend toward cosmic-scale horror, really. With a lot of body horror elements and grotesque creature designs.

It's a fun deconstruction on what you expect from the genre and a love letter to scifi.

Plus it's hilarious!


Rick and Morty is a creation of Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, a joint-production between Justin Roiland's Solo Vanity Card Productions, Harmonious Claptrap and Starburns Industries. The two initially met during Channel 101's monthly short film festival in Los Angeles, which was co-founded by Dan Harmon. The idea was to use this regular festival as a way to test pilots in front of a live audience, to turn some of those shorts into full series. Justin Roiland had been submitting content regularly, he made a lot of weird shocking graphic shorts, just to have fun off the reaction of the audience including an infamous Cosby Show parody, House of Cosbys, which got him a cease and desist warrant from the Cosby estate.

Originally Rick and Morty began life as a very crass short that since then received a lot of attention through the internet - The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, an animated short starring Doc and Mharty McFly.

Dan Harmon's Community was coming to an end so he was already looking for new shows... when NBC ended up firing him in that last season! 

Both were now available so they decided to turn Doc and Mharti into a full series. After a quick retooling of the show's end game, Rick and Morty was finally born! [adult swim] was also looking for new shows at the time so it all ended up lining up perfect for the creation of this series!

The show is heavily inspired by classic The Simpsons, as well as taking some cues from contemporary cartoons Pendleton Ward's Adventure Time and J.G. Quintel's Regular Show, similar art styles, animation and even mouths! All these cartoons are from animators from the same generation so they kind of had the same inspirations growing up. 

Animation is done in Canada, at Bardel Entertainment using Toon Boom Harmony!

The series features Justin Roiland playing both Rick and Morty, as well as the voices of Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer and even Scrubs' Sarah Chalke! And many more famous guests!


And speaking of, in a way Rick and Morty is sort of the perfect mix between Matt Groening's two shows The Simpsons and Futurama, using a similar familial drama as a backdrop for the more outlandish elements, the science-fiction adventures!

And this show loves heading head straight into science-fiction tropes. Each episode can be seen as its own little mini scifi tale. Carefully plotted by a pretty small staff of regular writers for the show.

Each episode follows a 20-minute format, taking Rick and Morty into a different scifi conundrum. And the episodes usually end on a fun hidden post-credits scene.

The first season ran for 11 episodes, from December 2013 to April 2014.

During the course of this first season, they explored a lot of familiar genre situations.

After a first episode that probably wasn't the show's best, it got a ton better. It's a really great premise that is open to endless possibilities. Rick and Morty travel through time and space, always bickering. Getting into 80s blockbusters-style scenarios. The random nature of the show allows to start off with Morty asking for a love potion and ending with an infestation of "Cronenbergs" (named after David Cronenberg!). The family appears at first semi-functional and a normal counterpoint to the crazy adventures, but they quickly end up tangled in all this as well. Jerry gets abducted by aliens and put into a (better) simulation of Earth. Episodes are based around references to Jurassic Park, Fantastic Voyage, Predator, Nightmare on Elm St. to Inception and many more! There's even a whole episode around the characters simply flipping (alien) channels on TV!


Rick and Morty is kind of the reason why Cartoon Network's Adult Swim was created!

It's a really great, smart and hilarious show!

This whole silly premise allows for some great storytelling and explorations of the genre!

It covers all kinds of science-fiction genres. It's well structured. And some times flat out gross.

The series has been receiving a lot of great critical acclaim throughout its run so far.

And let's not forget a word on the great music on the show, going for this crazy, zany, stereotypical vintage science-fiction films, brilliantly composed by Ryan Elder.



Overall, Rick and Morty is definitively one of my favorite animated shows to ever come out of Adult Swim. I already rank it up next to The Venture Bros. It comes Highly Recommended for any fans of science-fiction and horror. It's a Must Watch!

The DVD home release even came out with a fun little bonus in the form of the book of "The Good Morty", a pamphlet around a fake religion of Mortys across time and space. Like the show itself, it's hilarious and definitively worth a look!


Since the success of this first Season, a second and even more brilliant 2nd Season aired and we're all currently highly awaiting for the third Season in production which is expected to hit fall 2016.

Rick and Morty even had a sort of crossover with a sister-series of sort of which happens to be Disney's now defunct-Gravity Falls where Justin Roiland voiced a memorable time-traveling character. In fact Alex Hirsch managed to tie a little loose thread left by one of Rick's portal on that show on another channel! (Fans will know what I'm talking about...)

Rick and Morty is great! And the series already built a place in our pop culture, the duo even appeared for a cough gag on a 2015 episode of The Simpsons! 

Enjoying some succss, Rick and Morty have started spreading across other mediums. A comic book series was launched and it's being published through Oni Press as well as a first couple of video games, Pocket Mortys - a Pokémon parody for smartphones, and there's an upcoming Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality, a VR game just announced this past Comic-Con.

I give it:
3 / 3 Felixes!

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