Hasta La Creative!

Adult Swim has put its back into marketing Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s insane science fiction cartoon Rick and Morty. And well they might: It’s one of the best shows on the air, and last year it occasionally got more demo viewers than Harmon’s broadcast sitcom, Community.

So, it follows that the network would have a mild blowout around the release of the first season of Rick and Morty on Blu-Ray, too.

Accordingly, Roiland called on Ben Bayouth, puppet maker and costumer to the … well, to the very weird. (Seriously, the “creature suits and puppets” page alone is a huge productivity suck.) Bayouth made Rick, Morty and Meeseeks puppets and a giant Meeseeks suit (from this episode) in order to tell the world about the show.

Here’s the 90-second spot. It starts airing Wednesday evening on Adult Swim.

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When the cartoon premiered, Adult Swim erected a crashed spaceship in front of the Flatiron Building in New York, and the show got all kinds of attention at Comic Con, with a panel and a booth for its production company, Starburns Industries. (I don’t even want to tell you about the lines to get Harmon to sign things.) So, there are interestingly high standards for anything R&M-related over at Adult Swim, and they keep coming up with new tricks to promote it, not unlike FX’s various shenanigans around Archer.

We figured we’d also do an unboxing Vine (see below) so you can see the contents of the Blu-Ray, because another fun piece of the campaign is inside the box: Like the Jim Mahfood-drawn Kickpuncher comic book in Community’s Season 1 DVD set, Roiland and series writer Ryan Ridley collaborated with storyboard artist Erica Hayes to make a very cool little Jack Chick-style comic book fleshing out some of the show’s stranger sci-fi plot points.