Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
It felt as long and deeply confusing as a Story Train, but at last the moment has arrived. All of Rick and Morty Season 4 is finally available to stream, in its entirety, on both Hulu and HBO Max. That means you can watch all 10 episodes from this past season all at once with no months-long wait time.
Think you know everything there is to know about the Rickest Rick and the Mortyest Morty? Well guess again. Here are some of the most surprising, delightful, and grossest takeaways from Rick and Morty Season 4’s DVD and Blu-ray. Let’s just say after this list you’ll never look at slut dragons or plumbuses the same way again.
Rick's ship was based on garbage, and a plumbus was based off Jeff Goldblum.
According to lead prop designer Brent Noll, the Rick and Morty team originally decided that Rick was going to make a lot of his inventions out of trash. Though Rick is always scrappy, the series has largely stepped away from that concept. But that early note explains the two trashcans balancing on Rick’s spaceship.
Another prop with an unusual story is the plumbus. First introduced as a joke in “Rixty Minutes,” this tool that everyone own has since appeared in the series multiple times. “Really the plumbus, the design of that is based on a banjo,” storyboard artist Dan O’Conner revealed. “The front of the plumbus, like those bristles, that’s inspired by Jeff Goldblum’s hairs on the back of his back in The Fly. And then the top is just like genitalia because everything has to have genitalia.”
Some of Rick is based off of director Bryan Newton.
Unlike with live action, the director of an animated series has almost complete control over the acting of an episode. Because of this, one of Rick and Morty‘s longest running directors has done a lot to inspire its titular character.
“Since I’ve had Rick for so long, since the pilot, I feel like a lot of myself gets translated into it. Like a lot of his cynicism and his sarcasm, how he doesn’t give a fuck about a lot of things,” director Bryan Newton said. Though he’s been part of the series’ team since the beginning, Newton’s first directorial credit was “Meeseeks and Destroy.”
Rick basically can't die.
It’s been assumed that nothing can stop Rick except for death. But “Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat” proved that not even death can stop him. Early in the episode Rick is thrown out of his spaceship and dies. Rather than that being this show’s big finale, the rest of the episode follows a constant stream of cloned Ricks.
“We know that Rick pretty much can’t die,” said series co-creator Dan Harmon. “Well, that’s not true. I mean, life is meaningless. When does it ever end or begin? So he can’t die by conventional means, like a vampire. There are ways to kill vampires, werewolves, and Rick. But I won’t tell you.”
Animators made over 140 death scenes for "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die and Rickpeat."
Season 4’s first episode is all about death crystals. This particular bit of sci-fi nonsense shows anyone who is holding the crystals how they’re going to die. To make the episode the team had to come up with and animate over 140 deaths, series art director James McDermott recalled.
Want to know another shocking statistic? “One Crew Over the Crewcoo’s Morty” pushed out over 900 assets. “Which in animation terms is not something that is normally done,” Newton said.
The talking cat truly meant nothing.
Remember that talking cat voiced by Matthew Broderick who loved Florida? Stop fretting about what he represented. He truly meant nothing.
“The cat subplot was an attempt to just have fun. The cat represents that voice in your head in the writers room that you’re overthinking it,” Harmon said.
But just because he means nothing doesn’t mean he had a boring inspiration. “That came from like those movies like Oliver and Company and all that,” said writer Jeff Loveness. “They didn’t really explain why the cats can talk.”
At one point there was a dragon made of shit.
Think Rick and Morty is gross? One version of “Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim’s Morty” was almost a lot grosser than a 10-way soul orgy with your grandpa. Character designer Kari Kilpela originally designed a dragon literally covered in poop for the episode.
“There were just a lot of versions of dragons. I got one that was just like ‘Dragon covered in shit.’ And I was just like, ‘Oh so you want like a dragon covered in feces?'” Kilpela recalled. “So I started doing that and someone came around and was like, ‘What are you doing? No we just meant like ornaments. Like weird stuff all on them.'”
The space snake episode has been around for years.
According to series writer James Siciliano, “Rattlestar Ricklatica” came from an idea they couldn’t quite crack in Season 3. But even in its infancy the episode always started with the same scene: a snake that bites Morty while Rick fixes a flat tire in space.
“It’s always fun to do terrestrial things in a dumb sci-fi way,” Siciliano explained.
"Promortyus" was a first for the team.
According to Dan Harmon, “Promortyus” marks the first time Rick and Morty has experimented with nonlinear storytelling. Rather than starting the episode at the beginning of Rick and Morty’s adventure, the episode starts in the middle right as Rick and Morty first break free from the facehuggers.
What’s interesting about this storytelling approach is that Rick and Morty itself criticized this style in an earlier episode. In “Look Who’s Purging Now,” Morty is forced to listen to an old lighthouse keeper’s screenplay. His honest complaint of the story has to with its nonlinear structure. “I’m not a huge fan, personally, of the whole three weeks earlier teaser thing,” Morty says in the episode. “I feel like, you know, we should start our stories where they begin, not start them where they get interesting.”
Suck it Rick and Morty. Sincerely, Rick and Morty.
The Glorzo facehuggers were inspired by the DC Universe.
Dan Harmon has compared the Glorzo race to dodo birds. “It’s the saddest alien species in the world,” Harmon said. Despite how pathetic these aliens are, they’re a reference to something pretty cool. The Glorzo were based off of the DC Universe supervillain Starro. The tenacled monster first appeared in the comic, Brave and the Bold #28.
"Promortyus" was so violent it made some designers uncomfortable.
Rick and Morty is known for getting bloody. But the duo’s absolute annihilation of the Glorzo home planet came close to crossing a line. “Some of us were like uncomfortable working on the episode,” director Byran Newton revealed.
All of that discomfort came from the episode’s big twist: showing that the Glorzo weren’t stock bad guys after all. They were actually creatures capable of intelligence, compassion, and empathy. “Like in a Star Wars movie you feel completely fine murdering thousands of Stormtroopers. You don’t think about it,” writer Jeff Loveness said. “But then we just wanted to swap that to humanize these evil aliens. I always wondered does the facehugger have dreams of its own?”
"The Vat of Acid Episode" was mostly written in a day.
This tidbit about this year’s Emmy-winning episode comes from writer Albro Lundy. “We kind of wrote the episode, as far as figuring out the structure of it, in a day. And all of us were still kind of weirded out that it worked,” Lundy revealed. “It was so dumb. All of us were like this idea’s incredibly stupid. The funniest thing we can do is to try to make it a whole episode.”
The big fight scene in "Childrick of Mort" had a surprising inspiration.
After spending more than half of “Childrick of Mort” believing that he impregnated a planet, Rick eventually learns that the rock children’s real father is a Zeus. Mostly because of Rick’s ego the two face off in the sky. “Rick has said he’s a god many times so it was really exciting to see two gods getting into a fistfight,” said writer James Siciliano. “I wrote this as a parking lot fight between two dads at a softball game.”
“What we’re learning about Rick is he’s not a good dad. But he’s so petty he’d rather just fight to the death than let his daughter down,” added Harmon.
The 'Rick and Morty' team is already behind on Season 5.
“We are already behind on Season 5 and we haven’t even started it yet,” associate producer Dave Otterby revealed. Otterby said this in a day-in-the-life video that chronicled November 12, 2019. It’s certainly possible that Rick and Morty‘s new season has caught back up to its schedule. But considering this show’s breakneck pace and the delays caused industrywide by COVID-19, that seems doubtful. The good thing is these new episodes sound like they’ll be worth the wait.
“The episodes this season and coming down the pipe in Season 5 are huge. The amount of time that we have scheduled, it’s just not enough,” producer Sydney Ryan said. “Because the character designers have a ton of characters to draw, the prop designers have a million more props to draw, background designers are sometimes designing more than 200 backgrounds in an episode, which is insane. But then we have our coordinators and our managers who have to track every design. It’s busy every day now.”
