It's hard to be a mad scientist, but even harder to create an animated series that's
beloved by millions of fans around the world.
We're taking a portal to the universe behind Rick and Morty to discover little-known facts
about the show.
Strap in.
"Oh yeaaaah."
While the pop culture references on Rick and Morty abound, so do allusions to the voice
actors' most famous roles.
Actor and comedian David Cross plays an alien who can't handle nudity, almost as if he's
a "never nude," like his character Tobias on Arrested Development.
"Oh I'm sorry, I need you to be completely undressed.
I am completely undressed."
Then there's Snowball, a cute dog who wants to take over the world and is assisted by
an accountant.
They're played by Rob Paulsen and Maurice LaMarche, the actors who voiced the title
roles on Pinky and the Brain, a show about two lab mice with designs on world domination.
Actress Sarah Chalke voices Beth Smith, Rick's daughter and Morty's mother.
Beth is a horse surgeon, which makes Rick and Morty the third time Chalke has played
a blonde doctor on TV, following her years on Scrubs and a recurring role on How I Met
Your Mother.
As part of the promotional blitz for the 1998 Disney movie Mulan, McDonald's briefly offered
a Szechuan dipping sauce for its Chicken McNuggets.
In 2017, in the Rick and Morty season 3 premiere, Rick rants that getting more of that sauce
is essentially his reason for living.
"I'm driven by finding that McNugget sauce.
I want that Mulan McNugget sauce, Morty.
That's my series arc, Morty.
If it takes nine seasons."
Consequently, the reference inspired a frenzied response from Rick and Morty fans, leading
to petitions at Change.org to persuade McDonald's to bring back Szechuan sauce.
Leading up to the premiere of the third season of Rick and Morty, McDonald's came through.
The company posted a picture of three giant jugs of Szechuan sauce on its Facebook page,
along with an announcement that it would be giving them all away.
In addition to some lucky fans, one other person got a very special delivery of the
sauce: Rick and Morty's own Justin Roiland.
He tweeted out a photo of his newly acquired stash along with a personal letter from McDonald's.
The point of a TV show's writers' room is to brainstorm ideas, work them out, and turn
them into usable stories.
That's how Rick and Morty writers got the nugget for "Pickle Rick," the famous episode
in which Rick turns himself into a pickle and has to grapple with all kinds of challenges
to get to a family therapy appointment.
Co-creator Dan Harmon told Fast Company:
"I think it was a case of somebody just saying, 'What if we started the episode this way,
with him turning himself into a pickle?'"
But why?
Harmon says it's because "Rick is his own worst enemy and he'd want to prove himself."
"Stop digging for hidden layers and just be impressed.
I'm a pickle.
I'm just trying to figure out why you would do this."
That's when Harmon and his staff realized they could find inspiration from a second-season
episode of Breaking Bad in which Walt and Jesse's Winnebago breaks down out in the desert.
Harmon explained:
"We get to see Walter White up against primal forces instead of watching him negotiate and
bluff with street dealers and kingpins.
It was interesting to watch him trapped in a hot van, about to die, and having to fall
back on his basic science knowledge."
Similarly, Rick has all sorts of tech at his disposal, but he can rely on only his wits
to endure life as a pickle.
Each episode of Rick and Morty begins with one of the most recognizable opening sequences
in modern television.
As the camera soars through space and then transitions into scenes of Rick and Morty
and their family avoiding all sorts of dangers, it's accompanied by a haunting electronic
score, driven by what sounds like synthesizers and a theremin, a classic sci-fi combo.
"I heard sci-fi noises.
Did you make a breakthrough?"
Those elements sound familiar, but so does the final product, which might be because
Rick and Morty composer Ryan Elder pulled from three famous sci-fi theme songs in particular...although
it wasn't actually written for this show.
Elder explained:
"That main theme was written for another pilot that Justin Roiland and I were working on.
It was called Dog World, and I guess the elevator pitch would be 'a planet where dogs evolved
from men,' but it was more kid-oriented."
Roiland asked Elder to some up with a song that was "adventurous," not unlike the themes
from Invader Zim, Farscape, and Doctor Who.
You can't get any more direct than that, so that's just what Elder did.
He said:
"I kinda put all those in a blender and came up with something that I felt had a nice adventurous
build to it, a sense of anticipation, and forward momentum."
When they later needed a theme song for the pilot episode of Rick & Morty, Elder took
that track he'd made for Dog World and stuck it in as a temporary fix.
The rest is history.
"And as time went on we just were like, you know what?
Everybody likes it.
Let's go with this.
I barely changed it from one to the other."
Rick and Morty is one of Adult Swim's biggest hits of all time, and it inspired a fanbase
so devoted it was willing to wage war against a major fast food chain.
It's a successful series by most any metric, and yet it went on an incredibly long hiatus
after the final episode of season three aired in October 2017, the first episode of season
four wasn't scheduled to hit the air until November 2019, more than two years later.
Just why and how did it take co-creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon to get more episodes
in the can?
"See you for season 4 in like, a really long time."
The simple answer: contract negotiations dragged on.
According to Justin Roiland in GQ, the creators wanted enough money so Harmon wouldn't, quote,
"have to take 12 other jobs while we're working on season four."
However, the wait appears to have been well worth it.
In 2018, Rick and Morty, a show that had only aired 31 episodes at that point, was officially
renewed for a fourth season and beyond, landing a huge 70-episode order from Adult Swim.
It's not quite forever and ever, but it's a good start.
"Rick and Morty forever and forever 100 years Rick and Morty and some things.
Me and Rick and Morty running around, and Rick and Morty time.
All day long forever."
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