Or, in Dan Harmon’s more poetic, hyperbolic words: Roiland himself admitted as much in an interview with The Attack: “I wanted to just make people shocked and make something horrible.” However, while even the most casual Rick and Morty fan would be able to recognize the titular characters, and their distinctive voices, that short was a multiverse away from the show as we know it today.īuilt around a plot line involving Mharti having to repeatedly lick Doc’s balls, it was really just a showcase for Roiland’s beautifully absurd sense of humor: The now-cult favorite Rick and Morty all started as a short called “The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti” that Justin Roiland, voicing both characters, screened at Channel 101 a monthly short-film festival in Los Angeles co-founded by Dan Harmon back in 2006. In a nice bit of cosmic irony, Rick and Morty exists solely because its creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland had to make a bomb…
And we’re gonna drop it down there, and get a whole fresh start.īut what Rick couldn’t have known - though as the creator of his own self-serving universe would certainly appreciate - is that the bomb had already gone off.Īll of his brilliant discoveries and (debatably) noble exploits, all his hopes and dreams, were actually the byproduct of a Big Bang-esque explosion, lifetimes in the making, initiated by benevolent (if not twisted) greater forces who needed to create their own whole fresh start. In the opening segment of Rick and Morty’s pilot episode, Rick Sanchez drunkenly stumbles into his grandson Morty’s bedroom and drags him into a flying space car to make an inebriated confession: Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere.