At this point almost everybody at least has heard word-of-mouth praise about the Adult Swim animated series ‘Rick and Morty’. The show – now into its third season – has gained quite the rabid fan base as its popularity continues to soar. And honestly, it’s really difficult not to love this show. It’s got a solid combination of raunchy humor, adventure, burping and heart mixed together to form an incredibly entertaining show.
‘Rick and Morty’ follows the adventures of the alcoholic scientist Rick teamed up with his awkward and slow grandson Morty, both characters voiced by Justin Roiland. The second season ended on a fairly downer note, but despite the hard times that have befallen the lead characters, there’s plenty more madness to ensue in the upcoming episodes.
Co-creators Dan Harmond and Justin Roiland, along with co-writer/producer/voice actor Ryan Ridley, sat down and spoke with a select few journalists (including ShockYa) about what other surprises that could be in store for the upcoming season.
Will you be doing another sequel to intergalactic television?
Justin Roiland: Possibly yeah. We’re figuring it out. It’s a very rough on production. It’s not an easy episode to make.
Ryan Ridley: We might have also introduced a new reoccuring franchise that’s very similar.
Justin Roiland: We’re introducing something kind of amazing. We can’t really say much about it that we’re doing this season, but there’s probably room for both ultimately. I’d be down to do it. We’ll ask the panel.
Ryan Ridley: You know my perspective is like James Cameron. If we’re going to do a sequel, unlike 2, you’ve got to make 3 really —
Justin Roiland: It’s gonna be different. The connective tissue has to be different, and Ridley has a good pitch that you haven’t heard yet so we can’t talk about it here because that’s, you know, too much. Too much. That’s spoiler alert territory.
Before you were hesitant to bring out a lot of call backs or bring back a lot of characters like Mr. Meeseeks back. Is that something that kind of changed for season 3 knowing that season 2 was successful and it kind of stood on its own? Are you more willing to bring those kinds of things back?
Dan Harmon: It did because for me I would say Justin was very receptive to it, I was very alarmist about callbacks because of ‘Community’ getting a reputation so early on for being insular and you’ve got to have a relationship with the show in order to decode it, which I never wanted to have that reputation. And so I was extra going into season 2 of ‘Rick and Morty’, if we don’t have to do another Meeseeks episode then let’s not do it. Then this time that next year, I was like we should’ve done another Mr. Meeseeks episode, but Justin is probably like yeah, but if we had to had a great idea we would’ve done it, and that’s true. I will say that this season, going into it because of that experience I was more like yeah, can we bring back such and such? Can we do another episode with such-and-such? I would love — we still haven’t done it yet, but I really wanna see another episode of Keith David’s character as the president, because that was specifically designed to be a thing and that was another option for the show to do–
Justin Roiland: A whole different type of narrative.
Dan Harmon: Definitely inspired by the ‘Doctor Who’ lieutenant who I remember in the Tom Baker years he would get called back to Earth to help the British government with something in between traveling the cosmos.
Justin Roiland: It’s funny cause throughout the course of season 3 we’ve had Meeseeks in like two or three episodes and ultimately we cut it because it’s just like a background — it’s not really servicing it. It feels too cutesy, and also structurally it’s bigger if like the scene —
Ryan Ridley: I’ve always thought it was cool — if there’s an episode where it’s like a Meeseeks and it’s like cue the Borg from Next Generation mythology where this Meeseeks is different. This Meeseeks doesn’t want —
Justin Roiland: Spoiler alert, we might do that!
Ryan Ridley: I’m not saying that we’re doing that.
Justin Roiland: We might do that dude.
Ryan Ridley: I’m just saying that —
Justin Roiland: It has to have an amazing —
Ryan Ridley: It should be motivated by what do we know about the Meeseeks and what can we learn — how can we open up that mythology without just having Justin going “I’m Mr. Meeseeks!” again.
Justin Roiland: It has to be a new thing.
Dan Harmon: Or, however, it could also be an episode where it’s not about them as the topic and have it like Dr. Seuss, use them as a tool. As long as it tracks as a first-time viewer. You have to imagine what if some random person is watching this show that’s never heard of it. Are they gonna be able to understand what’s going on.
Are we going to actually see the Cthulhu monster from the opening of the show in the third season?
Justin Roiland: No comment! I plead the 5th on that one!
Ryan Ridley: You’re going to be seeing some things that people have been wanting to see.
Justin Roiland: But you’ll never be able to unsee.
You guys are in season 3 now. I’m sure going into season 1 you’ve got to hope that it’s gonna stick to that landing with the audience. But now that you’re in 3, it’s a little more comfortable cause you know that the audience is there. Is it harder or easier to do these episodes?
Ryan Ridley: Much, much harder.
Justin Roiland: Yeah, I think it’s harder yeah, definitely.
Dan Harmon: It’s been really hard this season.
Justin Roiland: I mean it’s just because the expectations and what we’ve done, looking at what we’ve done, looking at how it’s been received —
Ryan Ridley: I think it’s more like what’s the potential of this show and therefore what’s the potential of every episode, creating the best possible version that it could be. There’s so many potential that internally, without ever reading Reddit or anything, I wouldn’t even think that that’s an influence. I think we’re oh my god we can do anything we want because the network lets us do anything we want, so it’s our own standards and now we’re like now we can make every episode a masterpiece. And if it’s not a masterpiece we freak out and try to make it a masterpiece.
Justin Roiland: Yeah, like internally the bar is very high so that’s very true. But it’s a good thing because ultimately it’s like, it’s going to result in really, really good episodes across the board. We don’t want to have a bad episode that’s universally considered oh, that’s Rick and Morty’s — that may arguably exist already but I dunno.
Ryan Ridley: What, a bad episode?
Justin Roiland: Our worst episodes are contested — there are people who fight for those episodes. They’re like that’s my favorite episode, that’s the one — we don’t want one that’s universally like where everyone’s like okay, that was a stinker. I don’t think that’ll ever happen.
Dan Harmon: I do. I think this season is a stinker.
Ryan Ridley: Really? Cause so far there hasn’t been a stinker. This season we were behind schedule and Ryan came over to my house on a weekend and I watched the animatic, which is a far as you can go —
Ryan Ridley: No it was a thumb. It’s thumbs.
Dan Harmon: I was trying to be more dramatic, but the thumbnail animatic of episode 304, and I had — I was ready to move forward with it and then Ryan said him and the others talked to Justin about it and we wanted to see your reaction to it. I had to pull it out of him where they said no, we’re not satisfied with it. We wanna start over, and we were already way behind schedule and those guys are the ones who bear the brunt of being behind schedule. They have to work weekends, but they are the ones that wanted to do it. There’s a weird higher calling there, and it’s not an endless perfectionism because you know when something finally clicks and you go “This is a good episode of TV,” but it’s not just me. I was happy to find that out, either that I had infected people or that it’s not just me that’s left to my own devices. You go look, it’s going to be on TV and it’s gonna have our names on it.
Justin Roiland: Yeah, we just wanna make the best season 3 we can and do the fans right I guess by —
Ryan Ridley: And ourselves.
Justin Roiland: And ourselves!
‘Rick and Morty’ Season 3 is set to air on Adult Swim later this year.
