Jul
23
Sep
23
Adult Swim's Rick and Morty Get Muppet-ized in Promo for Season 1 DVD
Posted in: Uncategorized
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.
>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.
Dec
02
Adult Swim Crashes a Spaceship in NYC for New Show Rick and Morty
Posted in: Uncategorized
If you were wandering aimlessly around Manhattan last week, you probably saw lampposts with a flier showing a cheap, grainy-looking photo of a spaceship and "take one" pull tabs at the bottom telling you to go to 23rd Street and Broadway to buy a slightly used spaceship.
When you got there, the perceptive among you may have noticed the spaceship, which appeared to have crashed into the ground next to the Flatiron Building, with cartoon characters Rick and Morty from the new Adult Swim show (titled, cleverly, Rick and Morty) hanging around. (Well, actually, they were statues. Morty was still inside, and Rick was on a bench taking a slug from a bottle of XXX.) The installation is pretty impressive—they even mangled some chairs that look like the furniture that sits in the public area around the building and arranged foam bricks that look exactly like chunks of the tan pavement.
The network's campaign for the show has been an elaborate one—there's an ad on Craigslist for the spaceship, too, as well as normal(ish) posters around town. The network also posted the first 22-minute episode of the show, which premieres Monday at 10:30 p.m., on YouTube. You can check it out below, along with the net's time-lapse video of its spaceship assemblage.
And we've got an interview with co-creator Dan Harmon here.
Here's a snippet we had to cut to make the interview fit in the magazine, but is still pretty cool: "It's very much like Doctor Who and Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker's Guide, and Willy Wonka," Harmon said when asked why he liked crazy, antisocial characters like Rick. "They just don't have time to interface with the people around them in a way that makes anybody comfortable. I think the answer over time is that you'll come to believe that he's a real person. I think even by the end of these first 10 episodes, we've figured out that the more hours you log with this guy, he never really jumps the shark in terms of revealing that he loves all the people around him, or crying and saying, 'Oh, it's so hard to be this big a prick,' but you get it, or you get that you don't get it. It made me so excited that this character could possibly live for a long time."
Check out the clip below to see how insane Rick is, or stop by the Flatiron to say hi until the end of today.
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