TV SERIES · 2013–present · USA
Rick and Morty
- Created by
- Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland
- Network
- Adult Swim
- Seasons
- 9
- Episodes
- 91
- Studio
- Williams Street, Harmonious Claptrap, Justin Roiland's Solo Vanity Card Productions
38 archived facts 6 topics 1 source Last reviewed Sep 2026
Follows a sociopathic genius scientist who drags his inherently timid grandson on adventures across the universe.
Summary: TMDB
19 Facts From the Making of Rick and Morty
- #002
After being fired in 2006 from a television series he found creatively stifling, Justin Roiland created The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti for Channel 101, an animated short parodying Doc Brown and Marty McFly from the Back to the Future trilogy.
- #005
Dan Harmon was unfamiliar with animation, and his approach to creating television centered more on dialogue, characters and story. He called Justin Roiland to ask whether he had ideas for an animated series.
- #006
Justin Roiland immediately proposed using the Doc and Mharti characters, renamed Rick and Morty. He first wanted the show to run as a single eleven-minute segment, but Adult Swim pushed for a half-hour program.
- #007
Dan Harmon believed the best way to expand the voices into a program was to build a family around the characters, while Adult Swim development executive Nick Weidenfeld suggested Rick be Morty's grandfather.
- #008
The first draft of Rick and Morty was written in six hours on the Paramount Pictures lot, in Dan Harmon's unfurnished Community office. Harmon recalled that Justin Roiland urged him to stay and write the whole draft rather than go home, saying it might otherwise take three months.
- #011
Many later Rick and Morty episodes were rated TV-MA, beginning with the season 2 episode "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate."
- #012
The Rick and Morty theme song, composed by Ryan Elder, was first used in a rejected Cartoon Network pilot called "Dog World" that Justin Roiland made.
- #014
Rick and Morty's first-season writing staff consisted of Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon, Tom Kauffman, Ryan Ridley, Wade Randolph and Eric Acosta, with writer's assistant Mike McMahan also receiving a writing credit.
- #016
Like many Adult Swim productions, Rick and Morty's writing staff is not unionized with the Writers Guild of America, though in 2022 production staff filed a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board seeking to join The Animation Guild.
- #017
Dan Harmon has acknowledged that his perfectionism can disrupt production and delay writing schedules, which he said largely explains why Rick and Morty's third season ran to 10 episodes rather than the 14 originally planned.
- #018
Rick and Morty episodes often follow a story circle that Dan Harmon created, drawing heavily on Joseph Campbell's monomyth, also called The Hero's Journey.
- #019
The show's two-act structure puts the act break at an unusual point in the monomyth: after The Meeting with the Goddess rather than at Atonement with the Father.
- #020
Justin Roiland has said that he and Dan Harmon intended Rick and Morty to avoid traditional continuity, using discontinuous storylines that are not bound by rules, and that the writers steer clear of old tropes for fear of disingenuous fan service.
- #021
Rick and Morty is animated with Toon Boom Harmony, a vector-based 2D puppet software chosen as a more economical option than traditional hand-drawn animation.
- #022
Post-production on Rick and Morty is carried out in Adobe After Effects, while its background art is created in Adobe Photoshop.
- #023
Bardel Entertainment in Vancouver, Canada produced the animation for Rick and Morty's first eighth seasons.
- #024
Mercury Filmworks in Ottawa, Canada has handled Rick and Morty's animation since the ninth season, and Lighthouse Studios in Kilkenny, Ireland since the seventh season.
- #036
Co-creator Dan Harmon described Rick and Morty as a blend of Matt Groening's The Simpsons and Futurama, mixing family life with heavy science fiction.
- #038
According to Dan Harmon, much of the concept and humor of Rick and Morty draws on British television series such as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Doctor Who, and the series favors British-style storytelling over traditional American family TV stories.
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
Sources for the entries on this page
- Wikipedia Rick and Morty — Wikipedia
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