Rick and Morty: Why you should watch this series and take it seriously + Best Animated Science Fiction Sitcoms

If you’re looking for the most wildly inventive and mind-blowing science fiction ideas on television, then you should probably stay up past your bedtime, tune in to Adult Swim, and watch “Rick and Morty“.

What is the story of Rick and Morty?

“Rick and Morty,” which just started its second season, asks the question no one has ever dared to ask: What if Doc Brown from “Back to the Future” was a raging alcoholic?

As the title suggests, “Rick and Morty” centers around Rick (Justin Roiland), an alcoholic scientist with a lot of crazy ideas, and Morty (Justin Roiland), Rick’s awkward teenage grandson. Rick, who works out of the garage, is always inventing something new and dragging Morty along with him for crazy sci-fi inspired adventures that always cause trouble. Sometimes, they make Morty’s parents mad. Other times, they accidentally open a rift in the universe.

“Rick and Morty” falls on the right side of a balancing act. With animation, you have at your disposal no limits in terms of your imagination. However, you have to make sure to ground the story somehow so we can still relate to it. There are shows like “BoJack Horseman,” where the anthropomorphic animals share the same fears and sadness as most humans do. Then, there are also shows like “King of the Hill” that could have been live action and lost nothing.

What are the themes of this series? 

At its heart, “Rick and Morty” is a show about a dysfunctional family who just can’t figure out how to be normal. Adult Swim
“Rick and Morty” is a challenging show in that regard, in that it goes far beyond the initial premise of a twisted version of “Back to the Future.”

In fact, it touches on almost every science-fictional premise which has ever been explored in pop culture. In one episode, Rick and Morty plan to incept one of Morty’s teachers. As they go deeper and deeper through dream layers and a knockoff Freddy Krueger appears, it is abundantly clear that the show is not just borrowing this concept, but riffing on and exploring it.

Rick and Morty refrences

“Rick and Morty” borrows from other movies and TV shows, such as their take on “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” Adult Swim via YouTube
“Rick and Morty” was co-created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland. Harmon is the embattled showrunner of the brilliant “Community,” which jumped from NBC to Yahoo and was in danger of cancellation several times during its run (it is still up in the air whether or not it will return for a seventh season). Like “Community”, “Rick and Morty” tackles some crazily ambitious subjects, but its characters are so good that true emotional stakes are created no matter how ridiculous it may bet.

Rick and Morty dig their own graves. Adult Swim via YouTube
Later, when explaining this incident to his older sister Summer (Spencer Grammer), Morty exclaims, “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV?”

This is the dark philosophy of the show in a nutshell: It takes every beloved science fiction concept you can think of and fleshes out the consequences. Rick and Morty is what would happen if Marty McFly couldn’t get his parents back together, or if Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) could never escape the dream world in “Inception.” “The Magic School Bus,” this is not.

And while this is all happening, the show delves into the absurd and then comes up with some of the most imaginative results you’ll see on television.

You Need to Be Watching Rick and Morty Seriously

It’s a Back to the Future Parody That Started as a Filthy Cartoon

So how did a Back to the Future parody become a cult favorite Adult Swim show? It all started with Channel 101, the short-film festival co-founded by Harmon for which Roiland made a “really filthy cartoon” [link NSFW] that involved him doing rather poor impressions of Doc and Marty that he eventually grew to love. “Over the years, I kept trying to plug them into different projects, and when Dan called me and said Adult Swim wanted to make a show, it was the first thing I pitched him,” Roiland says. “But [Rick and Morty] is a complete departure from the original short I made … We didn’t want to just think of this as a Back to the Future thing. I was like, ‘No time travel.’ The designs are reminiscent, but psychologically, I perceive them as something completely different from their origins.”

Yet, No Matter How Dark It Gets, Its Characters Still Seem Human

Part of the pleasure (and shock) of Rick and Morty is the jet-black humor that runs through the veins of the series. (In one episode, for example, Morty’s parents explore their own alternate lives with VR helmets to discover whether they’d be happier if they’d aborted their eldest child.) But as the show goes on, what really makes it gel are the unexpectedly human relationships that emerge around those moments of horror and pathos. Dishing out too much darkness without an glimpse of humanity would be “an abuse of the senses,” says Harmon. “It’s not realistic to watch [a show] for so much of your time without seeing evidence of something that you have inside you, something that connects us all,” he continues. “People are horrible to each other, and we have the capacity to think thoughts so big that they dwarf us. We can react to that in really animalistic ways and become even crueler than when we woke up, or we can unexpectedly find ourselves doing really selfless, strange things because something inside of us wants other people to be happy. It’s all part of the human psychosis.”

Rick’s (Possibly) Sociopathic Behavior

The most disturbing moments in the show tend to revolve around Rick, and the seemingly callous and occasionally murderous things he does during his adventures with Morty. (Within the first minute of the pilot, for example, we find him drunkenly flying over a city in a hovercraft, threatening to drop a neutrino bomb that will wipe out humanity.) Admittedly, when you’re constantly flitting between infinite realities and killing alternate versions of yourself and your loved ones, human life can start to seem a little cheap. So, is Rick actually a sociopath, or just a big picture kinda guy?

Dan Harmon at this year’s ComicCon International

“I’m not a qualified professional, but we’ve seen several instances of Rick reacting instantly on an empathic level,” Harmon says. “If [his granddaughter] Summer were mauled to death by aliens, I don’t picture Rick falling to his knees and cradling her eviscerated body and crying to the sky, ‘Why, dear God, why?’ I picture him kind of staring blankly at her corpse and doing whatever he can to replace her so her parents don’t notice. Sociopaths are playing life like a videogame, and they don’t really know the difference between right and wrong. I think Rick is a very convicted anarchist, and he plays in a much bigger world that makes individual life and individual people’s emotions feel justifiably meaningless to him.”

The Suicidal Character They Keep Trying to Add to the Series

One of the most popular characters of the first season is Mr. Meeseeks, a smiling, blue creature summoned by a wish-granting box that desires only to fulfill its assigned task—and then blink out of existence forever. (If it can’t, well, let’s just say things go horribly awry.) But Harmon says there’s another self-destructive secondary character they keep trying to fit into the show. “There’s a guy we keep joking about putting in the show, because he made us laugh so hard, called Mr. Always Wants to Be Hunted—he’s got a target on his chest and he runs around saying, ‘Somebody hunt me!'” says Harmon. “He’s the bane of a galaxy full of rich people who hunt people for sport. When he shows up to those places, he gets kicked out, because it’s no fun if the guy actually wants to be hunted.”

The Great Mystery of Morty’s Grandmother

Over the course of the series, We’ve met nearly every member of the Smith family—except for Rick’s wife. So where is Morty’s grandmother? According to Harmon, it’s something they’ve given a lot of thought, but not something they’re ready to reveal any time soon. “We don’t want to willfully withhold, but I think that characters need to be real for you to be invested. In real life, you find out these little details about the people you know in no specific order,” he says. “I do think it would be a mistake to reveal at some point that his heart was broken. We’ve touched on that whole Mr. Freeze concept, that his wife is tied up in his origins. But the problem with that is that once you say, ‘Oh the reason he’s like this is because of that old spaghetti incident’—then he’s the spaghetti guy forever, he’s not Rick.”

The Second Season Will Be More Sci-Fi Than Suburban

Although the first season was largely split between sci-fi adventures (like the fantastic Inception parody episode, “Lawnmower Dog”) and familial squabbles, Harmon says Season 2 will focus more on the former—simply because it’s more entertaining. “We’re going to be 10 to 15 percent more galactic this season, and less pure domestic B-stories,” he says. “For better or for worse, we started to have more fun in the writers’ room when we started talking about … sci-fi stuff. It’s still domestic in a moral or thematic way, though. [Morty’s parents] go to couples therapy in space. There, I said it. [Laughs] The show will be a little more vast, and less once upon a time, there was a house and one guy in the house was always up to something. It’s more like, the universe is a really big place. And we’ll find out if it’s a good or bad thing.”

 

Best-Animated Science Fiction Sitcoms

Science fiction is adorned by thousands worldwide.

Animated science fiction is liked by children and adults alike. In this article, the five best-animated television shows that can blend science fiction with the magic of fantasies are listed.

 

Avatar: The Last Airbender

This animated series is counted as the best-animated sci-fi series. The first episode was premiered in 2005. With three seasons that comprise of sixty-one chapter, this American cartoon could win the hearts of many. It features the art of ‘bending,’ which is a Chinese martial art. The last one in the row premiered in 2008. The cartoon comes under multiple genres that include action, adventure, fantasy and comedy-drama.

Futurama

The second best one in the row is the American animated science fiction sitcom, Futurama. The first season of this cartoon was premiered on 28th March 1999. It was aired on Fox, and Matt Groening is the creator of this television show. With seven seasons that composes of 140 episodes, the sitcom has won the hearts of many. The protagonist is Philip J Fry, whose adventures are what adds the essence to the storyline.

Gravity Falls

The fourth best-animated television show is the Gravity falls created by Alex Hirsch. The series started on 15th June 2012 and was premiered on Disney XD and Disney channel. It is counted as a sitcom mystery that amused the people worldwide. With two seasons that composes of forty numbers of episodes, the series had been a hit. The series highlights the adventures of Dipper Pines and his twin sister, Mabel, who spent their summer with their uncle at a mysterious town called Gravity.

The Dragon Prince

It has been on Netflix since the year 2018. The dragon prince is An American-Canadian animated fantasy series created by Aaron Ehasz. With three seasons that comprise of27 episodes, the creators were able to entertain a large group of people with this series.

 

 

Also read:

• Kanye West Gave Julia Fox and All Her Friends Hermès Birkin bags for Her Birthday
• Shia LaBeouf Expecting his first child from his ex-wife or present wife?
• The Tinder Swinder Is Active On Instagram: Where Is Simon Leviev Now?
• Marilyn Manson and All Abuse Allegations Against him
• Madonna Fashion Icon: How does her style change in these years?
• Top Free OnlyFans Accounts + Best Popular Girls to Follow
• Katy Perry and her post-baby body. How to Fix Postpartum Body?