Dan Harmon explains the “rebirth” of Rick And Morty in the season seven finale
Dan Harmon used Rick And Morty’s “shakeups and transitions” to resolve old storylines
Aux News Rick and Morty
The last few years have been taxing even for the universe-hopping, referential labyrinth of Rick And Morty. Following the ousting of the show’s disgraced co-creator, Justin Roiland, the show never missed a beat—even without the person considered the show’s creative engine. It’s almost as if television shows aren’t made by a single creator and that other funny people are just as capable of writing Rick And Morty adventures.
With season seven coming to a close, Dan Harmon spoke to Variety about how the show’s “shakeups and transitions” coincided with the show’s “canonical storylines being resolved.” Harmon says he sees this as an “opportunity for a rebirth.”
Harmon, who had previously expressed aversion to serialized plotting, said he would “target the episodic [installments] personally.” That doesn’t mean they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Showrunner Scott Marder assured fans that season eight “will have a lot of similar flow and vibes to six and seven, which is like a cool balance of silly and one-up canonical stuff.”
“That’s the stuff I want as a fan. And that’s the stuff that Harmon and I work on all jammed together,” Marder says. “I’m really proud of these last couple of seasons; they’re sort of the perfect blend of what I look for as a fan.”
Losing a showrunner like Roiland isn’t easy. However, there has been much fan outcry since Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden took over as Rick and Morty’s respective voiceboxes. Roiland, for his part, has been MIA since declaring “justice” and vowing to “restore his good name.” Since then, more allegations of inappropriate and predatory sexual relationships with young fans and admirers have come to light.
“Trust has now been violated between countless people and a show designed to please them,” Harmon told The Hollywood Reporter last September regarding Roiland’s exit. “I’m frustrated, ashamed, and heartbroken that a lot of hard work, joy, and passion can be leveraged to exploit and harm strangers.”
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The last couple seasons have been better, that’s for sure.
Whether it was intentional or not, the death of Rick Prime sure reads different after knowing what happened with Roiland.
RICK PRIME: What’s your life without me?!
RICK C-137: Let’s find out…
And to a lesser extent, killing the versions of R&M from Space Jam feels like a minor apology to fans. Harmon’s never shied away from the merch angle of the series, but even that seemed to be a bridge too far.
it’s funny that the first few seasons there was literally no merch, then there was beyond too much, and now it seems like it’s stabilized a little. i remember going crazy wanting a shirt for so long, and by the time they were available i didn’t really want it anymore haha.obviously bootleg weed merchandise is still doing the most.
It’s funny, as much as the show is considered a stoner show, I usually prefer not to watch new episodes high. The jokes just go by so quickly, and some of them need to be thought out for a sec, that sometimes you’ll lose a great joke just because there were so damn many of them if you’re high. The action sequences, though, are brilliantly designed for this.
The worst part is that there was a clearly great moment where Rick and Morty could’ve showed up, so I’m guessing Harmon wasn’t even asked about that cameo or limited knowledge of it.
Otherwise….
“So, you’re playing a looney toon themed basketball game against an easily manipulated A.I. surrounded by a crowd composed of WB characters in bad costumes?
Wha…*burp* what happened? Was Party City closed or was LeBron’s ego only large enough to fit into the 12th Escalade?”
Losing a showrunner like Roiland isn’t easy. However, there has been much fan outcry since Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden took over as Rick and Morty’s respective voiceboxes.The use of “however” makes me thing that this should say “hasn’t been much fan outcry” since the second sentence should come in opposition to the preceding sentence. As written, the second sentence just adds more evidence that losing Roiland “isn’t easy.” Right?
There’s much worse than that in the sentences you quote as journalistic issues. Justin Roiland hadn’t been the showrunner for many years. As The Hollywood Reporter explained a year ago, Roiland more or less gave up on contributing to the show (outside of recording voices) after season one, when the writing room expanded to handle the heavy lifting. Roiland felt estranged in the middle of people who had been mostly hired by Dan Harmon, and would only make a few suggestions and jokes. Around the end of season 3, he stopped going to the meetings, that he was mostly derailing anyway. To the rest of the world, he pretended that he was still heavily implicated, which allowed him to mingle with celebrities and hit on young female fans, but he hadn’t been creatively involved with the show for at least three seasons when he was fired.https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/justin-roiland-animation-empire-implosion-rick-and-morty-1235319366/
To be fair, that article isn’t exactly neutral reporting. It’s the result of Adult Swim launching a public PR campaign to make the argument that firing Roiland won’t hurt the show.
I remember Trey Parker and Matt Stone saying something about how people kept trying to get them to leave South Park, that the expectation was that with South Park established, the way to get money was to hand it off to other people to run the day-to-day and go create another show, to develop and make that, and so they could hand that off to other people and go sign a deal to create another show. They didn’t see any reason to ever leave a show they enjoyed working on where they could do whatever they wanted, but I think of that when people start running around making shows, whether it’s Family Guy / American Dad / Cleveland Show, or Rick and Morty / Solar Opposites / Koala Man.I think two things are true. That Justin Roiland is a scumbag with serious personal and personality problems that make him totally unfit for being in any creative professional environment, and that his humor and sensibilities is a big part of what people originally liked about Rick and Morty, and the show lost something when Justin wasn’t there improvising for hours in the studio and pushing back on overwrought writing with left-field ideas like, “so how about freaking Mr. Meeseeks comes in and is like ‘Hi, I’m Mr. Meeseeks, look at MEEE.”
Wow, so he wasn’t just a perv, he was a liar about his creative work, too?
Why am I not surprised…
Every day I find at least one very basic yet crucial error in this site
I’m not sure I would’ve noticed the VA changes if I wasn’t already aware of them and listening for it. Rick’s & Morty’s really excited/upset voices aren’t quite as manic or shrill, but for everything else, I can’t tell the difference.
I think that’s most people’s experience, and I think the article was *meant* to convey that but they left out a word
Yeah, I’d have to agree. I can tell the difference if I really look for it, or do A-B comparisons, but it’s almost unnoticeable if you remove the confounding-variable of foreknowledge.
I haven’t seen the newest seasons. Not because of Roiland, the VA change, the serialization, the stabs at character development or even the weird incest baby episode. I got off at the Story Train. It was fitting that one of the most self-involved, meta yet myopic sequences of intellectual masturbation ever animated made references to “cum gutters” as I’m sure the authors needed them to handle the sheer volume of self-satisfied spunk being unloaded on the writer’s room floor. Has it gotten any better?
I just realized I forgot to watch the new season. The train one was a low point for sure though. I also see Solar Opposites had a special come out earlier in the month. Hulu needs to advertise better for people who pirate all their shit and never use their app.
Story train is terrible. Doubly terrible when you realize Joseph Campbell was a hack Nazi apologist misogynist antisemite whose writing advice was literally, “Be rich and do whatever, man. Also all my favorite stories are the most important stories ever written, just ignore what those stories are actually about or else it won’t make sense.”
That season was the worst. The last two seasons were definitely better – I’d consider them more-or-less a return to form, but at the very least they’re a step up in quality.You should know, though, that there is an episode that heavily references the Story Train and how much everyone hated it. It’s similarly meta, but IMO, a good deal more enjoyable. YMMV
I fell off because the misses started to outweigh the hits, and Solar Opposites hits the old R&M notes in better ways.
Or rather, used to. The new VA in SO is absolutely terrible. They should have used the same person they did for Rick’s VA replacement.
Wait – I thought the most recent season ended a few months back. Was it only a half-season?
ditto, this is one of those vapid filler articles to maintain interest during the series gaps.
If I’m being honest I pretty much forgot there were new VAs in season 7 as I was watching it. It felt like a real return to form for the show. The Suicide Spaghetti episode was probably the hardest I’ve laughed at the show in a while. It felt like there were really only one or two duds in the bunch.
As a vegan, Suicide Spaghetti was a masterpiece. Every few minutes I grew less comfortable and laughed even harder.
That episode really earned its content warning.
If there’s fans that are mad about the new voices, I am glad I have never heard anything from them. Fuck those guys. And as far as Roiland being, “considered the show’s creative engine,” citation needed? By who? I don’t remember where I read it, but I could’ve sworn I read something about how Roiland was phoning it in the entire time.
“Losing a showrunner like Roiland isn’t easy.”According to all the (PR?) pieces put out in the wake of his firing, it was actually pretty easy to lose him, as he supposedly was nothing but a nuance and hadn’t contributed substantively to the show for years.How true that is I don’t know, but that’s the story everyone agrees on.
They have told the same exact stories about Solar Opposites, that he quickly lost interest in writing/became sidelined and only stayed to voice the lead character from his home, and it’s pretty consistent with Roiland’s R&M credits coming from stuff like the Interdimensional Cable episodes (which are mostly a bunch of adlibs) and stopping after season 3. Besides, it’s not as if season 7 had taken a turn for the worst.
It wasn’t necessarily easy because I’m sure they had to win back many vocal viewers who backed Roiland despite not knowing the truth. Viewership is the ultimate goal and that might have been or possibly continues to be a challenge post-mortem.
Is this an article that’s been sitting there on someones desk for a few months cause season 7 finished up back in December last year did it not? 10 episodes have been released just like previous seasons numbers.
It’s just that and more that AVClub and it’s commentariat hate Rick and Morty for the most part, so they pretty much ignore the show and scarcely talk about it.
Yeah good riddance to Justin Roiland
“the show never missed a beat—even without the person considered the show’s creative engine”Roiland was actively sabotaging the show creatively since season 1. He only shows up, screams into the microphone about how his name is flooby mcdoover, and fucks off to go home. Staff members would say he would be actively disruptive by insisting on going to get Nerf guns during the working day, playing with them for the rest of the afternoon, and bringing around his porn star friends like Riley Reid to parade them around the office.After he left in season 7, the show lost none of its creative spark, and even probably got better with more of Harmon’s friends and adults in the room who contributed creatively to steadying the ship and providing great voice work, like Heather Anne Campbell and Rob Schrab. It’s better off without him. Much less incest jokes.
Harmon and Roiland, two drunk manipulators of women. Harmon is just better at manipulating and mea culpa-ing. But it’ll come back to haunt him again, just watch.
I may’ve forgotten parts of the story, but wasn’t Harmon’s much less sinister, and with exclusively adults…?