In 2013, Rick and Morty premiered on Adult Swim, and quickly amassed a huge following of fans who became obsessed with the show’s dark humor and sci-fi plots. Created by Dan Harmon (Community) and Justin Roiland, the show focuses on the outlandish adventures of crazy super-genius Rick Sanchez and his timid grandson Morty Smith, both of whom are voiced by Roiland. Here are 13 facts about the Adult Swim animated series, Facts you may not be aware of.
1. It all started with Bill Cosby
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What do you think were the differences between the animated world of Rick and Morty without the familiarity of its creators, Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland? Definitely this animation, according to Rick, came out of the water very schwifty. In 2005, Roiland produced the animated series House of Cosbys, which depicts an interesting world of Bill Cosby’s life; Roiland unveiled the animation at the Channel 101 event. He never thought that making this animation would change his life. The animation he produced was by no means a successful product, and many who watched it thought it was not worth watching at all. “I had a lot of weird plans to make this animation, and each of them sparked an argument between me and the board of directors of Channel 101,” he said. I just wanted people to be shocked and surprised to watch this show; “It was quite the opposite, and many viewers of that show closed their eyes and shouted what a ridiculous animation we were watching.”
While many in the movie and TV industry considered the House of Cosby’s animation an annoying product, Dan Harmon believes it was a work with new and very entertaining ideas, and after watching it, he intended to work with Roiland in the future. Long after Adult Swim asked him to make a program for them, he immediately thought of working with Roiland. “As soon as I heard their offer, I was convinced that if I was going to make an Adult Swim program, I would have to work with him (Roiland),” Harmon said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. I knew for sure that our cooperation would be very successful. I was confident because Roiland is a great example of the mindset that this network is pursuing. “He is very patient like me and always has great ideas.” He was absolutely right; The collaboration started because of Bill Cosby and the result was nothing but Rick and Morty animated series!
2. Writing the script of the experimental part took only a few hours
There is a famous proverb that points out that the city of Rome was not built in one day. This means that not every success comes overnight, but the production of Rick and Morty’s series well violates this proverb. It took only a few hours to write the script for the pilot part of the series. When Roiland and Harmon signed a contract to make this animation with Nick Weidenfeld. The head of the development department of the Adult Swim network decided to start working quickly to produce this animation series. Harmon was simultaneously working on a comedy product called Community on NBC at the time, and was tasked with starting work on his new project with Roiland as soon as possible. They knew they would have very little time, and the longer the script for the trial part of the series, the longer it would take to get canceled. So after signing the contract, they started writing the script and after only 6 hours, they handed it over to the Adult Swim network manager.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Harmon gave an interesting account of those six hours: “Justin and I were in a completely empty room with Nick to give him our idea of the animated storyline. Nick left the room after hearing the idea without any feedback. Justin and I were sitting on the floor, stretching our legs and staring at our laptops. At that moment, I decided to go home, but Justin told me that if I went home, I would not finish writing the script for the next three months; He was absolutely right! Justin told me very seriously to sit back and we would finish this damn script in the next 6 hours. At that moment, I laughed, can I? Are you kidding? “I sat down and after six hours I could not believe at all that I was looking at the full script of Rick and Morty’s experimental part.”
3. Rick’s burping habit has Its origin in a recording room blooper
Burping is a big part of Rick’s shtick, but Roiland told Entertainment Weekly that the inspiration for it was a complete accident:
“In 2006, or something, I was recording the voices for this short The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti. I was having fun doing these really crappy Doc Brown and Marty McFly impressions. During the middle of a line a burp came out naturally. It was just so funny and gross. I was like, ‘Well, let’s see if I can do that again for a couple more lines.’ Then, with Rick and Morty, Dan [Harmon, the show’s co-creator] was like, ‘Hey, Adult Swim wants to do a show, do you have any ideas?’ I said, ‘Well, what about these two voices?’ Right out of the gate, the burping was part of it.”
Though Rick punctuates many a conversation with a trademark burp, Roiland actually has a tough time getting quite so gassy. He basically tells the audio engineer to keep the tapes rolling as he drinks “a low-calorie beer and a bottle of water” to get the effect right.
4. Rick’s famous sentence was created randomly
Roiland and Harmon have repeatedly stated that they did not intend the animated series to have sentences that would later be referred to as the series’ lasting sentences. No matter how hard they tried, they failed to keep it at absolute zero, and the series has some very funny and famous sentences. Perhaps the most famous sentence of this animation is Rick’s sentence in which he says “wubba lubba dub dub”. This sentence became one of the most symbolic sentences of this program, especially in the early chapters, and its fans have expressed many doubts about its meanings. Rick often used this phrase when he wanted to emphasize an important joke or phrase. Later, in the “Ricksy Business” episode, it became clear that the meaning of this sentence was: “I am in a lot of pain, please help me”, but in reality, the birth of this sentence was quite a coincidence and the creators of the series did not use this sentence in the script.
We did not intend to have such a sentence in the program at all,” Roiland said in an interview. The birth of this sentence actually took place in a scene that had the phrase “wub wub wub wub” in the script, in which the sequence of Rick falling down had to say this sentence. As a voice actor, Rick, when I wanted to say this sentence, I realized that this sentence was not well printed and I had no idea what it was and I did not understand at all what phrase I was looking at. “At that moment, in order not to spoil the recording of the sequence, I made a strange sentence out of myself, and I just wanted to joke about the bad print of the script, but Harmon liked that sentence and added it to Rick’s character script.”
5. The show’s theme song owes a lot to DOCTOR WHO and FARSCAPE.
Rick and Morty’s opening theme song is quintessential sci-fi, and to achieve the familiar, otherworldly synth vibe of the genre, the creators looked to both Doctor Who and Farscape for inspiration. When asked about the show’s music in an interview with TVOvermind, Roiland said:
“The theme song is written by the guy who wrote the Wizards of Waverly Place theme song, who is a very good friend of mine. I told him I was a big fan of Farscape and that I wanted to combine Farscape’s theme with Doctor Who’s theme, and that’s basically what our theme song is. It’s this amazing original piece that takes the best aspects of those two themes and mashes them together. Super Sci-Fi.”
An earlier version of the theme can be heard in Roiland’s first stab at an Adult Swim cartoon called Dog World.
6. One of the show’s most acclaimed episodes almost “Broke” the creators.
The success of Rick and Morty’s first season surprised everyone, so when it came time for more episodes, there was plenty of pressure to deliver. When the second season premiered, it did so with an experimental episode that was a direct continuation of the first season finale.
When the debut season ended, Rick had just frozen time in an attempt to help Morty and Summer clean up the mess from the high school/intergalactic alien house party they just threw. While shades of The Cat in the Hat abound, the cleanup does not go well, as the effects of stopping time has split reality into near-countless distinct timelines in the season two premiere, “A Rickle in Time.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Roiland said the episode “was just brutal and it broke us to a certain extent. We were so close to something amazing and we never really got there from a structural standpoint.” Harmon agreed, saying “It went off the deep end conceptually and got really over-complicated.”
In the Blu-ray commentary, it’s explained that the main issues came from the writers and directors figuring out what the actual effects of freezing time would be, in addition to animating all of the different timelines and how they interact. Cracking the difficult premise and redoing the opening multiple times even put the entire second season behind schedule. Though Harmon and Roiland were convinced the episode was their worst, “A Rickle in Time” is highly regarded by fans as one of the best of the series.
7. The main root of Rick and Morty animation series
The basic foundation of Rick and Morty spun out of one of Roiland’s earlier Channel 101 ideas called The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti. The relationship between Rick and Morty has always taken cues from Doc Brown and Marty McFly from Back to the Future, but Roiland’s earlier stab at the idea really drove this point home with a lurid twist. At this point in his career, Roiland was simply daring lawyers to come after him, and nothing exemplified his mindset more than his X-rated Doc and Marty:
“I actually made this as a way to poke fun at the idea of getting cease and desist letters. At the time (October 2006) I had nothing to lose and my original intention was to call this ‘back to the future: the new official universal studios cartoon featuring the new Doc Brown and Marty McFly’ and then I’d just sit back and wait for a letter from their lawyers to arrive. That’s actually why it’s so filthy. I was just looking to ‘troll’ a big studio.”
Though Rick and Morty’s final form is safely removed from the litigious (and public relations) nightmare that Roiland’s original cartoon was, he says, “some of the raw energy behind the voice performances is sort of still intact, especially for Rick. That’s the beginning of it.”
8. Making the whole series with only three softwares
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this article is that the whole series is produced by only three relatively simple software. It will be amazing to see the results obtained from just a few simple designs and the use of three common software. Rick and Morty’s popular and very successful animated series has been produced using three animation and design software. The first software used by the developer was the Toon Boom Harmony software; Relatively simple software for making animations and computer images. The second software is Adobe Photoshop; One of the most popular photo and image editing programs, which was responsible for designing everything we watch. Finally, the third and last software used to make this series is Adobe After Effects software, which used to make the final editing of the series. It may be hard to believe, but a series with all its success and popularity has been produced by these three softwares; Software that is very common and can be easily developed. So if you have these three softwares on your system, you can most likely create a work similar to the Rick and Morty series.
9. Rick’s character and his voice
As you know, Justin Roiland was in charge of voicing Rick’s character; Not only did he voice Rick, but Morty was also voiced by Justin Roiland himself, and he really did it in the best way possible. Voicing the two main characters of the series by one person is not really an easy task that Roiland has done well. Writing a screenplay for Rick’s character, which we have seen throughout the series with very strange and sometimes complicated sentences, is considered one of the most sensitive tasks of the series’ production team, after which Roiland had to add its contents to Rick’s character. To do this, he made many changes to Rick’s voice while voicing his character; According to Roiland, many of Rick’s sentences were too dry, and he tried to make them a little funnier.This went so far that in many scenes, Roiland uttered Rick’s character sentences completely improvised and did not use the pre-written script at all. His work was initially opposed by Harmon and the rest of the series, but they agreed to Roiland after seeing the results and the popularity of Rick. Roiland said in an interview that he sometimes laughed at the ridiculous remarks he made about Rick’s character and did not realize how popular they were.
However, the result of Roiland’s decision was very successful, and we all enjoyed Rick’s character and the words he uttered.
10. Morty’s character
There is a theory among Rick and Morty fans that the Rick character intends to correct his past work throughout the series.
Why is Rick so obsessed with Morty? Why does he insist that Morty must always accompany him on his bizarre adventures? All fans of the series know that Morty is a consistent and believable character who makes him the opposite half of Rick, but almost all viewers of the series do not know that Rick may be on a mission throughout the series to make up for his past mistakes. There is a theory among die-hard fans of the animation that Rick may have killed the main character Morty, traveled to a parallel world, and brought another Morty with him. That’s why Rick never distances himself from Morty and always keeps an eye on him. This bittersweet theory could also justify Rick’s excessive use of alcohol, which he does because he is upset. In one of the episodes of the series called Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind, we meet a character named “Evil Morty”; A character who is distinguished from the original Morty by a blindfold. Many fans believe that the evil Morty is the real Morty who Rick thinks killed him, but in fact he survived and has now come to seek revenge on Rick. However, all of these issues are just speculations that may be true and may be the only product of the fans of the series.
11. Dan Harmon has a theory on what’s in rick’s flask, but we’ll never know why he drinks.
There are plenty of fan theories regarding what Rick’s drink of choice is (including some otherworldly cocktails), but Harmon has a much simpler theory: “I tend to assume vodka,” he said during a Reddit AMA. Though he understands that Rick’s intellect could lead him to have virtually any sort of intergalactic concoction in his flask, he believes Rick’s old-fashioned booze of choice “anchors his identity.”
So that’s the what in Rick’s alcohol, but what about the why? Well that’s something Harmon and the team are never going to delve into. In an interview with The A.V. Club, Harmon explained his reasoning:
“Justin was really smart about that, saying, ‘No, we don’t want to reveal that Rick started drinking when blah blah blah,’ because then there’s something very shark-jump-y about that, like where you learn that the Fonz didn’t always wear leather jackets. Because people aren’t like that.”
12. Buffy The Vampire Sayer inspired one of the series’ most beloved episodes.
Though the episode “Total Rickall” would have you believe the show was going to do an adaptation of Total Recall, the creators had something much different in mind. In the Blu-ray commentary track for the episode, the creators revealed that the initial inspiration for the episode came from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show.
In the show’s fifth season, it’s suddenly revealed that Buffy had a sister named Dawn, and the show’s characters blindly accept her into the fold as if she has existed the entire time. One of Rick and Morty‘s writers, Ryan Ridley, elaborated on this in the Y Combinator podcast, saying “Everyone’s pretending—I mean, they’re not pretending—they’re treating her like she’s always been there. But you know that, as a viewer, [Buffy] hasn’t had a sister for the first four seasons. So you find out the supernatural explanation for why that is.”
Shades of this can be seen in the “Total Rickall” opening, when viewers are introduced to “Uncle Steve,” who the family believes has been living with them for years. Without much hesitation, Rick shoots Uncle Steve through the head, revealing it to be a parasite that infected the family’s mind to artificially implant memories.
13. Miscellaneous facts of the series
- Rick and Morty, voiced by Justin Roiland, has also voiced half of the show’s supporting characters; Isn’t it amazing?
- Brian Cranston, who played Walter White in Breaking Bad, was set to take on the role of Jerry Smith, but this was canceled for some reason.
- All the characters in the series use their seat belts at least once when they are in vehicles, but Rick never, not even once.
- The production process of this animation has been done in the Canadian studio Bardel Entertainment; The director of this studio is called Rick. The studio has been tasked with creating other successful animations such as Ninja Turtles.
- Rick’s character has not spent much time with his family; He only lived in their house just a month before the show’s main story begins, which well justifies his bad relationship with Jerry.
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- Prior to the third season, the series’ writing team consisted of only male writers, which changed in the third season and several female writers were added. Rowland and Harmon cited this as one of the most important reasons for the series ‘success, as the writers’ focus on all the characters in the series was evenly distributed from that moment on.
What do you, the regular companions of Plushng site, think about the Rick and Morty series? If you know something interesting about this animated series that is not mentioned in this article, share it with us and other audiences in the comment section.
