Rick and Morty’s currently in its seventh season, but it was much earlier in the Adult Swim show’s run that people started realizing how involved its fan base really was—remember 2017’s Szechuan sauce kerfluffle?
With the show’s biggest controversy to date now in the rear view, and the new voices in the cast settled in, io9 got a chance to ask co-creator Dan Harmon and showrunner Scott Marder how aware they are of Rick and Morty’s vocal fan community. It turns out they do keep tabs on their viewers, but with some important boundaries in place.
“The internet is so Balkanized now,” Harmon said. “Even within individual comment sections, let alone separate venues, the only rule is complete polarity: everything has to be the absolute worst or the absolute best. Even people that say something’s mediocre have to say it with such vehemence that you would think their blood vessels were bursting. So unfortunately, it’ll dictate the course of my entire day if I see the wrong thing, which means that even though there’s a bunch of important stuff out there to see, I kind of have to have a general rule that I’m not googling anything about this show. Stuff will trickle through to me; somebody will say, ‘Hey, the spaghetti episode [“That’s Amorte”] is very well-received,’ and they’ll point me in the direction of, for instance, the Rick and Morty subreddit, where mental health seems to be still having a last stand. I don’t know how they manage to cultivate that. I was pretty impressed—I was able to scroll through the entire subreddit, people reacting to the spaghetti episode, and they were just having a nice, lively discussion as if they were just, you know, Star Trek fans discussing a show that they love. And it was very uplifting and wonderful.”
Ahead of season seven, fans were eagerly waiting to hear the recast voices for Rick and Morty—revealed in the first episode to be performed by soundalike newcomers Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden.
“I think the silent majority and healthy majority are like, ‘Okay, this is as good as you can manage,’” Harmon said of the fan reaction to the new voices. “The characters are still alive. That was the goal from the outset; fans of the show, consider them fans of the characters, and they just want to continue to watch the show and feel that those characters are still alive, and it seems that we were successful in that mission. I think that there is an air of religious zealotry to the people that are insisting that the voices are somehow unignorably, catastrophically different. I think that most people seem to be saying, ‘Okay, it sounds like Rick, and it sounds like Morty, let’s proceed.’”
Marder agreed. “I generally was really pleased with the response. We felt like we did our job on our end, but the fan response felt like way more of a warm hug than I expected, and it was very rewarding.”
New Rick and Morty episodes arrive Sundays at 11 p.m. ET/PT on Adult Swim.
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