Adult Swim Crashes a Spaceship in NYC for New Show Rick and Morty

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.