I’m in Love with Rick and Morty

So I just got back from my Costa Rica vacation about a day and a half ago, and in two of the blogs I wrote while I was there, I talked about some of the things that my family and I like to do in Costa Rica. All of them were legitimate physical activities like surfing or ziplining, but one of the new things that I discovered on this past trip to Costa Rica is the amazing selection of Costa Rican Netflix.
F0r whatever reason, Netflix in Costa Rica has a waaaaaaaay better selection of movies and TV shows than American Netflix does. They have “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” every single Will Ferrell movie, and a ton of the Seth Rogen/James Franco movies to name a few. What they also have, and what I spent the majority of my downtime watching, is the animated TV show “Rick and Morty.” I’d always heard of this show because of its massive popularity in America, but I’d never been able to watch it because it’s not available on American Netflix and they only have a few episodes available for streaming on Adult Swim’s website. So when I was presented with the opportunity to binge watch the series on Netflix, I took it. And boy did I binge watch.
There are two seasons released so far; each one with about 10 episodes, and each episode runs for a little more than 20 minutes. I watched the entire series in 2 days.
It was such a fucking good show.
The premise of the series is that a teenage boy named Morty is living a normal life with his family, and one day his estranged scientist grandfather, Rick, shows up and starts living with them. Rick is about as genius as a genius can get. He created a portal gun that lets him inter-dimensionally travel through worlds and he has a flying car that he can take anywhere in the universe — he’s also an alcoholic and is always drunk, dirty, and belching throughout every episode. Morty is an unassuming kid that reluctantly gets dragged along on every wild sci-fi adventure that Rick cooks up. From there you get The Adventures of Rick and Morty, possibly the best animated TV show ever made.
The show is absolutely hilarious. Rick and Morty are both voiced by the same guy, and their constant banter in every episode is fantastic. Besides how funny it is, the show is also insanely creative. Each episode is based around some crazy sci-fi idea, but it’s not the usual trite sci-fi stuff that’s been covered in a million nerd shows on the Sci-Fi network. It’s uniquely intelligent sci-fi.
In one episode Morty’s parents go out of town and his older sister, Summer, wants to throw a party. The only problem is that Rick wants to throw a party too. Summer invites all of her high school friends over, and Rick invites all of his alien friends over for what turns out to be a pretty wild party. In the video below, Rick’s just snorted a pink cocaine-like drug and he leads the party in the comically weird “Rick Dance.”
In another episode, Rick uses his inter-dimensional cable to watch TV shows from every dimension that exists. The episode is basically all about those other-dimensional TV shows, and as usual it’s hilarious, but it’s also a perfect example of the show’s brilliant creativity.
Rick and Morty is awesome for so many reasons. It’s funny, it’s visually entertaining, and it’s smart. But after watching every available episode of this show, it became obvious that the level of creativity that these writers go to to come up with novel ideas for each episode is hands down my favorite aspect of this show. As an aspiring creative writer myself, it’s really inspiring to see the wild ideas that the writers come up with for each episode. Writing for a show like Rick and Morty would be a dream come true for me, and much like how a young basketball player is inspired by seeing LeBron pull of wild feats in the NBA, I’m inspired by seeing the writers of this show come up with crazy ideas in each episode.
The best part of all this is that I discovered the show at literally the most perfect time imaginable. After a 2 year hiatus, season 3 of Rick and Morty is coming back on July 30th. I did a little research online and apparently the fans of this show have been pretty pissed about the long wait they’ve endured for more episodes. Luckily for me though, I’ve only gotta wait 8 more days! It really could not have worked out more perfectly than this.
