Rick and Morty
Featuring the voice talents of Justin Roiland, Chris Parnell, Spencer Grammer, Sarah Chalke, and Kari Wahlgren.
SYNOPSIS:
Rick and Morty: The Complete Seasons 1-5 collects the first five seasons to date of Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s riotously chaotic and funny animated show. If you have any of the first four seasons on Blu-ray, take heed that Warner Bros. included the same discs here, with the fifth season platter serving up a nice batch of extras.
I’ve long been a fan of Dan Harmon’s eclectic TV show Community, so it was only natural that I would gravitate toward his foray into animation with Rick and Morty, which he co-created with Justin Roiland. Originally conceived as a parody of Back to the Future, in which Rick Sanchez is a horrendously inappropriate alcoholic scientist grandfather and Morty Smith is his nebbish, well-meaning grandson, the series has spun off in multiple directions, allowing it to also serve as a parody of many other pop culture touchstones.
During its five seasons on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block, Rick and Morty has taken animated humor far beyond the example set by shows like South Park. (Remember when The Simpsons was the height of blasphemy? That series seems quaint now in comparison.) It has also taken a cue from the comic book industry’s concept of multiverses, with multiple versions of its characters existing in different places in time and space. Doing so allows Roiland and Harmon to side-step some of the trickier parts of travel along the space-time continuum while maintaining a canonical history for the show.
The show has featured 51 episodes so far, and if you’re just now getting into the series, I would recommend taking small bites of a few episodes at a time, rather than big gulps of entire seasons in one sitting. While the show is funny, its plots are pretty formulaic, so the storylines can become a blur if you try to view too many of them at once. This new Blu-ray collection includes all the seasons on five platters, along with a code for digital copies of all of them, in case you want your Rick and Morty on the go.
The discs for the first four seasons are the same ones Warner Bros. has previously issued, so the new bonus content is confined to the season five disc. Given the show’s vintage, sound and picture quality are unsurprisingly top-rate, allowing the studio to port over the previous seasons’ platters without needing to do any restoration work.
There’s a ton of bonus content here, so I’ll go through it season by season:
Season 1
The one that started it all. There are 11 episodes on the disc, nearly all of them with titles that reference elements of pop culture, such as “Rick Potion #9,” “Rixty Minutes,” and “Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind.” Harmon and Roiland show up for commentary tracks on all of the episodes, joined by different members of the creative team. They cover just about everything you might want to know, including inspiration for the stories, various pop culture references, and so forth. As group commentary tracks go, these are pretty good at keeping off-topic chatter to a minimum.
Three of the episodes also feature guest commentaries with such luminaries as Matt Groening and other staff members from The Simpsons, The Walking Dead showrunners Robert Kirkman and Scott M. Gimple, and Kent Osborne and Pendleton Ward from Adventure Time. These give a well-informed fan perspective on the show.
There’s also a 19-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that mostly tries to deconstruct the idea of featurettes; your mileage may vary regarding how funny you think it is (I found it to get a bit tedious after a while). In addition, you’ll find storyboarded deleted scenes from seven episodes as well as full-length animatics for the entire season.
Season 2
Clocking in at ten episodes, which is where the rest of the seasons land too, the second season grabbed the baton handed to it by the inaugural season and sprinted down the track with it. Since this is a show concerned with continuity, it picks up where the first season ends, albeit after some time has passed.
As before, Harmon and Roiland are joined by various members of the creative team for commentaries on all the episodes, and there are three guest tracks with a variety of folks. In addition, you’ll find animatics for all the episodes, two minutes of deleted animatic sketches, and a 43-minute video of the band Chaos Chaos playing at the season two premiere party.
Season 3
Ricky and Morty’s third season saw the show really hitting its stride, likely because of the long gap after season two that allowed Harmon and Roiland to lock down their creative process. All ten episodes feature the usual batch of commentary tracks with Harmon, Roiland, and crew, along with three guest chats with Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson, Russell Brand, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Peter Dinklage.
In addition, you’ll find animatics and short (very short) behind-the-scenes featurettes for all ten episodes, along with three more brief featurettes that go behind the scenes in the recording booth and cover the show’s origins.
Season 4
The fourth season proved that Harmon and Roiland could keep the show’s central premise interesting as they took the characters in new directions. Some fans felt that the middle of this season sagged a bit, which I can see, but overall, Rick and Morty stayed flat-out hilarious and crazy in these ten episodes.
This season, along with the fifth one, eschew the commentary tracks in favor of one-to-two-minute featurettes for each episode. The season four platter also serves up seven more featurettes, none of them more than ten minutes long, that offer glimpses of the staff behind the scenes, character and prop designs, animation challenges, and more.
Season 5
Hey, if The Simpsons could manage 30-plus seasons of an old-school network TV show, surely Harmon and Roiland will be able to crank out many more ten-episode seasons of Rick and Morty, right? The show’s fifth season is one of those “If you’ve made it this far, you might as well keep going” affairs, which isn’t to say that it’s sub-par. Rather, the creative staff has settled into a nice groove that I hope they keep going for a while.
Like the fourth season, the season five Blu-ray doesn’t have any commentary tracks, instead again relegating all the bonus content to one-to-two-minute Inside the Episode micro-featurettes for all the episodes, along with nine featurettes that total close to half an hour. This time around, you get to hear how the pandemic affected the show, the creative process for developing each episode’s sub-plot, the coloring process for the animation, and more.
Brad Cook
