Spoiler warning - I guess? - for anyone who hasn't yet watched The Robot Chicken Adult Swim Special on Adult Swim or streaming via HBO Max subscription.
A perfect future would include monthly premieres of new Robot Chicken specials inspired by every corner of pop culture imaginable. (I’m waiting for a Stephen King Halloween special, for instance.) But until that possibility exists, the next best thing is The Robot Chicken Adult Swim Special, a decades-spanning mega-crossover celebrating the legion of offbeat animation and live-action creations that turned Cartoon Network’s evening blocks into a perverse and subversive phenomenon. It’s a truly chaotic love letter, which is the approach that makes Robot Chicken one of the best animated shows of all time.
Given the all-encompassing perspective, Rick and Morty fans such as yours truly wondered why the sci-fi comedy’s characters and their voice actors weren’t noted in the marketing materials, and many are possibly still wondering why they weren’t “officially” represented in the special. So I asked co-creators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich to address the R&M-shaped elephant absent from the room, and Green (while chuckling) offered up the most practical explanation, saying:
I'll tell you this: in the original ideation, everything was on the table [as far as] what kind of story do we want to tell and what is this going to be. And as it started shaping up into the story on the boat, every advantage that Rick and Morty would have on the boat would negate anyone else's potential experience or arc potential throughout the entire special. So the best we could come up with was that they were there, and then in typical narcissistic fashion, abandoned everybody as it was happening.
Amusingly enough, the grandfather and grandson's absence was directly referenced by Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil's Lucy herself, who said, "They're way too important to be here," when asked. But Green's explanation does make enough sense, in that Rick Sanchez is capable of getting out of literally any bad situation, and he could have solved the narrative plight without the need for Aqua Teen's Meatwad to team up with Assy McGee, Eagleheart's Chris Monsanto and Bitch Puddin'. And we needed that team-up.
Green continued, pointing out that the limited runtime also put a cap on any excess plans that the creative team might have had. In his words:
And, you know, the real estate in a 22-minute special is very, very limited, and you can see by this runtime how much we squeezed in. You should know, there's another 22 minutes that we recorded that we couldn't shoot, that we just didn't have the time to shoot. So the most clear answer is, we just didn't need that smoke. In any direction, right? In any direction. Ain't nobody got time for that. Not in 22:30.
My gawd. It's not clear if the other 22 minutes of dialogue that got recorded were all from sequences that weren't used in the final cut, or if it was mostly additional lines cut out of existing scenes from the episode. But either way, I'd love to listen to all of it however possible.
The Family Guy star then poked fun by bringing up the photo opp costumed characters who appear on the boat, saying:
You see [in the special], you can take a picture with the walkarounds. That's all anybody's trying to do anyway, right? They don't need this. They're gonna go to the show proper. They want Rick and Morty adventures, they're gonna watch that. They might even check out President Curtis, which is now in its fourth or fifth episode of critically acclaimed performance... God, can anybody love Keith David more? You see what I did? I turned this into a commercial for this other excellent content where you can watch your beloved Rick and Morty.
At that point, I jokingly chided both of the co-creators for not landing Keith David for the Adult Swim special, to which Green replied:
We ran out of money. Look how good that water looks. Come on, man!
I like the idea of either Seth Green or Matthew Senreich calling up Keith David's agent and publicist out of the blue just to say they won't be asking him to join the new special because the water looks too good to afford him. Life without sporadic bouts with confusion is boring, I say.
In any case, it's unclear if Lawyer Morty was originally conceived for R&M's Harry Beldon to voice, or if the role was always meant to be handled in-house. Either way it goes, there was more than enough to enjoy that the duo's absence wasn't so glaring.
To date, Robot Chicken has revised Star Wars history, brought laughs to The Walking Dead’s post-apocalypse, parodied DC’s superheroes, filthied up Archie Comics characters and crossed over with the 90 Day Fiance-verse, among others. What other specials will come next? That’s a mystery only Mike Tyson could solve.
Actually, no, it was announced at Annecy that the Robot Chicken team's next full-length special will be flipping Adult Swim script to honor all of the Cartoon Network originals that became hits in the '90s and beyond.
