Wubba Lubba Dub Dub! This week Adult Swim is releasing the complete first season of Rick and Morty on another one of their masterful Williams Street Blu-rays.
The best way I can describe Rick and Morty is that it’s a near-perfect combination of the shows Futurama, Family Guy, and Adventure Time. In the show, mild-mannered teenager Morty is frequently recruited by his genius grandpa Rick Sanchez for some sort of inter-dimensional adventure. Morty’s caring nature often clashes with Rick’s inability to care about anything besides the success of his own wild endeavors.
It’s hard for me to pin down exactly a rating for the quality of the show. On one hand, Rick and Morty is a terrific sci-fi animated sitcom. The show takes a considerate yet hilarious look at such far-fetched scientific matters as time travel, multiple dimensions, and sentient artificial intelligence. Check out some of the premises I can remember from some of the episodes:
- A television cable network that features every channel from every possible dimension
- A creature whose sole purpose of being is to fulfill its purpose and then die
- A dimension where thousands of different versions of you from different dimensions form a council against you
- Entering the dream world of your math teacher, and then entering the mind of an imaginary creature in that same dream
- An evil space alien voiced by David Cross
The content is so typically Adult Swim: creative and wacky. That being said, don’t expect a family-friendly show in Rick and Morty. The show is very raunchy (one particularly offensive performance by Spongebob star Tom Kenny comes to mind) and characters frequently use a lot of explicit language. You know, the George Carlin ones. You’ve been warned.
The Blu-ray is packed with special features, with audio commentary and animatics available for all 11 episodes. There are also some deleted scenes. The “Behind the Scenes Featurette” was another one of those Adult Swim things where the producers of the featurette didn’t take it seriously at all. Typical. One really good feature of the Blu-ray was the ability to access the Episode Selection menu at any time while watching an episode. You can also access a Digital HD Ultraviolet version of the show upon purchase. The Blu-ray also comes with a small tie-in comic that will make more sense after finishing the season (actually, upon second reading, it still doesn’t make any sense).
If you’re an Adult Swim fan, you’ll probably love Rick and Morty. This first season Blu-ray is no exception to Adult Swim’s long line of interesting video releases.
Purchase
Rick and Morty Season One: Amazon