Even before Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland was one of the more fascinating folks to work in animation, both as a voice actor and as a creator, most notoriously for the Channel 101 series House of Cosbys, which was an online sensation until Bill Cosby's lawyers did their best to smite it in 2006 (because on the Internet, nothing is really ever gone, you can find it on YouTube today).
It's exactly that anarchic spark which has driven the wild wackadoo storytelling of Rick and Morty, which Roiland co-created with Dan Harmon in 2013 for Adult Swim, and with its first four seasons has become both a cult favorite and a culture-defining series. Since the show's premiere, Roiland has gone on to found his own game studio and co-create the Hulu series Solar Opposites with one-time Rick and Morty writer Mike McMahan, while still providing the voices of the titular mad scientist and grandson for the Adult Swim juggernaut.
In this one-on-one interview with Collider, Roiland revealed how things have changed behind the scenes at Rick and Morty over the past few seasons, which of the many characters he voices is the hardest for him to do, and why Marvel might be looking at the Rick and Morty writers' room for talent like Loki head writer Michael Waldron. He also addresses the show's complicated relationship with the passing of time and episode-to-episode continuity — though, as he noted, in the spirit which makes his shows such a joy to watch: "Who cares? We can do whatever we want."
Collider: Thank you for doing this. I feel like I've maybe talked to you once or twice before, but I don't think I've had the opportunity to tell you that I was a big House of Cosbys fan, back in the day. As fraught as I know that show was...
JUSTIN ROILAND: Yeah. Then we find out the truth about [Bill Cosby] and it's just like, "Holy shit." That whole thing is so bizarre. It was a lot of fun to make that show. I was just shocked at how much people liked it right out of the gate. I did it for Channel 101 and the very first screening that night, people were cheering by the end of the opening credits just because it was so simple and the opening credits described so well what this was going to be, and people were just screaming. I was like, "Oh my God, this is insane. I've never had anything like that with things I'd made." Yeah. There's a lot of cool stuff in there, like the seeds for Interdimensional Cable are in an episode.
Then Cosby's lawyers came knocking. They were like, "We don't want you making the show." They were right because the arc was about to go into the Evil Cosbys compound, because every hundredth Cosby was evil. He sold the cloning plans. He built a bunch of cloning machines. He's killing all of the in-between Cosbys, he's enslaving all the Super Cosbys that he makes, and then building an army of Evil Cosbys. They were going to be really rape-y and fucking... all the things back in the day about Cosby, like "Oh, he's screaming about telling people to pull their pants up and whatever," all that stuff. It was going to be just playing on all of the darker aspects of Cosby for the Evil Cosbys. I have a feeling that probably wouldn't have been good for him.
But I had a choice. I remember my attorney was like, "Listen..." because I was like, "I'm just going to keep making it. I don't give a shit." Then he's like, "Look, you can do that. But just be mindful that you might end up spending a lot of time in a courtroom, and that's probably not the best place for you to be spending your time right now in your career." You know what I mean? It's like, "Okay, yeah." That's what scared me off, was like, "Yeah, I really actually don't want to do that at all."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbrwRcwtO_k
To fast forward to today, I'm curious, what does a day in your life like right now? Do you have a pattern of things that get done every day, in terms of the various projects you're working on?
ROILAND: Yeah. I mean, it's broken out throughout the week, and certain days are dedicated to certain things. I can actually get a lot more done now that I don't have to drive all around town and I can do all my meetings like this. It's made a huge difference. I'm so much more productive now that the world has shifted or adopted this work-from-home/Zoom meeting thing. But it's just a lot of meetings, back to back to back to back. It could be anything. On a random day, it could be a Solar meeting, some sort of development thing, or video game stuff. Just everything all just mixed together, a full day of just meeting with people.
And then of course there are records, those usually happen every week. Today, actually tonight, I have a record. But it's all just scattered throughout the week. I don't know, there's a lot going on, but it's mixed up and there's enough going on that there's enough variety. Nothing gets boring. You know I mean? Every week is different. Like this week, tomorrow and Friday, I have full writing days with a full writers' room. We start at 11:00 and I think we're going to be done at 6:00 or 7:00. It's two full days, and then we'll probably have another two next week. That starting this week as a regular thing for this new project, that's my next big video game. We're very far along in production, but now it's like we're at that point where real writing needs to start, actual writing needs to start. That's happening, and that's going to eat up a lot of time. All the other stuff I have is going to have to kind of come stacked in the front half of the week now as opposed to sprinkled throughout. It's going to just be nuts, but yeah, there's a lot going on.
In terms of that, how embedded in day-to-day operations do you feel you are at this point, with both Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites?
ROILAND: The key for me being able to do all the stuff I'm doing, the development, the video games, and all this other stuff, and even painting, which I just pretty much have only done on the weekends, but the key for that is having amazing partners. Like when I developed Solar with McMahan, I knew he's somebody that... well, first of all, I just love working with him. He's amazing. Our vision for what that show was going to be was so in sync on what it was meant to be, the fun, silly energy. Then getting Josh Bycel on board to be the day-to-day. I mean, Mike is day-to-day, Josh is day-to-day. Those guys are absolute heroes. [I was] heavily involved in the development and the pilot, and then in Season 1 breaking story with them, really making sure the characters are who we really want them to be and setting all that stuff up was key.
Now it's like I don't need to be in there every day. They're kicking ass. I'm blown away with some of the stuff they're doing, and I've got ideas and I'm coming to the table with stuff, but that to me is the key to being able to do a bunch of stuff. If you partner with people that you love, that you are a fan of, that you believe in, that you know if you couldn't be there for a week, things would be fine — if you do it that way, then you can spread yourself out with high-level development.
I'm a huge idea person, big ideas, big story craziness. For me, it's like I love partnering with folks that I can develop with, build those worlds out that I've got in my head with, and then get them off and running and then keep going with whatever else I've got in my head. I mean, Rick and Morty has been pretty incredible because that show is just... I mean, you can do anything. A lot of the crazy ideas I've had can just go into Rick and Morty. You know what I mean? That show is so wide open in terms of what you can do with it. There's a lot of crazy stuff that just found its way into that vehicle. It was like, "Oh, this crazy thing could have been a movie, but it works really well with Rick and Morty, so let's just do it there."
It's funny, because I remember way back in the day pitching shows, and it's so funny thinking about this now because I agree with it now, but at the time it was the worst thing to hear: You'd go pitch a show, and an executive would be like, "That sounds like a really good episode of a show, not a show." You know what I mean? You're just like, "Fuck, come on." But it's so funny because thinking about it now, it's like, "I get it," because it's like I'll hear a pitch and I'm like, "Yeah, that's like an episode of... that would be an episode. How do you sustain that across how many seasons or whatever, but..."
No, it's interesting that you say that, because you have things like the Wall in Solar Opposites, where that could be an entire series.
ROILAND: Yeah. The Wall was something that... that was one of those ideas that was just like, "Holy shit, this is so fucking cool if we do this." Then Mike and I planned the whole season around that big, full episode. They were like, "People are going to fucking freak. It's going to be at least subverting people's expectations when you get to that episode. You're going to be like, 'Are you fucking kidding me?'" But I don't know, I feel like The Wall works really well because of the alien stuff, because there's this pallet cleanser. They're so different. When you're popping back and forth, there's something that makes people really, really love The Wall because it's not all wall.
I feel like if it was entirely The Wall, it wouldn't be as... it's almost like Oreo cookies. If you're just eating that cream, you're going to get sick and puke, you're going to be just nauseous right away. The Wall thing was such a... I was so fucking excited about that. That was a really insane time. I think I'm in that time again now, super highly creative — I'm getting all these cool ideas pouring out of me. During that time, that was when I started my game studio, that was when we were developing Solar. I don't know. It's weird that that happens — if I'm in a really just good mood, just feeling good, things are good, then I can tap into that energy. It's awesome.
That's fantastic. It speaks to how some people sometimes say that "Oh, you have to be miserable to be able to be creative," when that's not necessarily true.
ROILAND: Some people, I think that's true for, but everyone's different. For me, I need to feel good and be happy and then all kinds of cool stuff will come to me.
So one of my favorite things about Rick and Morty is that I'm pretty sure in five or 10 years, we're going to look back on the writers who were in your writers' room at any particular point and they're all going to be famous showrunners. This is my segue to ask you about Michael Waldron, because of course he got swept up to do Loki, but before then I believe he was going to be your pick for the Season 5 showrunner of Rick and Morty.
ROILAND: Was it 5 or 4? I think it was 5. Yeah, I think that's right. It might've been 4 though. What we really wanted on Rick and Morty was... It was me on Season 1 and 2, and then for 3, I was like, "I don't want to be this..." After Season 2, I was like, "This is not the best way for me to contribute to the show, in my opinion."
We moved it onto McMahan, not officially, but he stepped up into that position on Season 3, and then Solar started to happen, and then his Star Trek show started to happen. So he had to bow out. Then we were like, "Waldron would be great." I'm pretty sure. Time might be a little off here, but in any case, yeah, I felt good about Waldron being in that position. I was directing all the actors up to... I want to say probably Season 4 is when I really pulled back. The only person I continued to direct was Spencer Grammer. But, the idea of having someone else being able to do that was really nice. It was like, "Okay, that'll be really cool." But then of course he got the Marvel thing and it's like, Dude, go fucking do it. Are you kidding me?"
Now we have Scott Marder in that role. This is somebody who's got a lot of experience doing it. We were just grabbing folks that we liked and putting them in that spot. Having somebody who's done it for a bunch of seasons on It's Always Sunny joining us, it's like, "Oh, shit, who knew how good it could be with..." I mean, I'm not shitting on anybody who was in that spot, but it's like you don't know what you don't know until you do it or have the person. Everybody did the best they could with what they knew and the relationships that we have and everything, the way production was. But Scott's brought to the writing side a new level of routine, more rhythm going on than we've ever had before, I think. That's really good.
And I'm fucking super happy for Waldron and proud of him. We've always loved him. He's just the nicest dude. He's super charismatic and likable and has a lot of good ideas and he's a good writer. When that came up, it was like, "Go there. Are you kidding me? That's an insane opportunity. That's just nutty."
Like you said, there probably will be more of that. It's funny because the Marvel stuff, I'm a huge fan of it now. I got into it at Thor: Ragnarok. I mean, I saw a few of the movies here and there over the years, but I was never a big superhero [fan]... they felt very paint-by-numbers to me. MacGuffin, and there's the big bad guy. Obviously Iron Man 1 felt a little different than that back in the day, there was just something special about those. But for the most part, I just didn't care. Then when Ragnarok came out, I was like, "Okay, I need to pay attention to what's going on because this is literally hard sci-fi. This is not typical. This is a crazy-ass sci-fi movie with a huge budget. It's like a comedy. I mean, it felt like my wildest fantasy version of a live-action Rick and Morty movie." You know what I mean? It was just awesome, crazy junk planet, weird aliens. I mean, it was crazy. Taika [Waititi] is just a fucking genius.
So I started paying attention to the Marvel stuff, and there is so much sci-fi in it. It is crazy sci-fi. It makes a lot of sense that they're looking at "who do we have? Who these guys have over there that might be good?" Because they have so much IP at Marvel. It's insane.
Yeah. I just want to clarify real quick — was Scott the showrunner on Season 4 of Rick and Morty?
ROILAND: No, no, no. He joined us for Season 5, but he joined us while we were still finishing 4. He had some involvement in the back half of 4, but officially, we hired him to basically start with us Season 5.
Gotcha. Was there another person also working as showrunner on Season 4?
ROILAND: I don't think we really had that position. I hope I'm not fucking that up, but I feel like no, because we were thinking Waldron and then that just didn't happen. The position that Marder is in didn't really exist until Marder came, in the sense that he's got his own office and he was working with Mike Mendel, God rest his soul — our line producer who passed away in late 2019. But I'm pretty sure that there wasn't a person because McMahan was doing Solar and his Star Trek show and Waldron was off at Marvel. I don't really remember us having anybody in those shoes. I think it was an ongoing discussion of who should this person be, and how do we find them and where do they come from? That kind of thing. I think we were just looking.
Over the years, Rick and Morty has done some fun commercials for other products, like Pringles or the Playstation 5. I'm sure you've gotten way more pitches for potential tie-ins than you actually have done — if you were to pick one as the weirdest or the strangest or most unexpected, does something come to mind?
ROILAND: God, it's funny, because there have been some interesting ones. What's the weirdest one? A lot of them make sense. The Pringles one makes sense. I wrote that commercial. when I'm writing those commercials, I try to just poke fun at the concept of advertising and I try to stay true to the show's tone and the characters. It can be really difficult with some partners because they... First of all, it's not like they come to us and say, "Hey, here's all of the pitches we have. Which one do you guys want to do?" We're just told, "Hey, so we did a deal with Pringles." You know what I mean? It's like, "Okay. All right, cool." We're not really in the loop on any of that. I'd like to be. I'd like to be in the room negotiating those rates, because I think that they're underselling the IP. I think they're giving it away. But they'll do stuff for Snickers and they'll come to us and say, "Hey, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Can you guys do this or do that?"
But my whole goal with writing those commercials is trying to stay true to the characters, trying to keep Rick cynical. Rick is the type of person that would see right through any fucking advertisement and who these big corporations are, the whole corporations weighing in on socio-political stuff. It's just so fucking ridiculous. It's funny to me, and Rick is somebody who would see right through that shit. It's like they just want money. That's all they care about. So I'm trying to keep all of that in mind while writing these commercials. It's a bit of a tightrope act, especially when you're submitting to the ad agency, they're showing it to the client and you're going to get notes from both, and trying to maintain that level of cynicism and staying true to the characters while also getting those notes implemented. It's a nightmare in some cases.
There are actually two in particular that are fucking insane, but I don't want to talk about them. But that whole thing is really fun though. I've always historically been the person who wrote those ads and it's been really cool to dip my toe in it. I used to do commercials back in my hometown before I moved to LA, for this record store called Replay Records. I think I made like 10 or 11 commercials, and he would run them all around the central Valley. People knew those commercials. It was really cool. I would meet people and they were like, "Oh my God, you made those commercials." It was a fun time, and was thinking about weird advertisements — how do you play in this space in an innovative way? It's been fun to do those ads because it's like I'm getting to role-play as an ad agency writing these spots and coming up with weird stuff to market, coming up with ideas I'm floating to them to help them sell their product, I suppose.
But it's fun and weird. We've continued to work with certain partners. For a while, I was just doing this bit where Rick just bursts into Morty's room with a bullhorn. I kept going back to that bit, and he's got all these anthropomorphized versions of the products they're trying to sell. What made that work for me was, it's like, "Oh, Rick's in on the take and he's also torturing Morty with it." There's something really funny about that. He's justifying this selling out by counting money. Or you can tell he's done on the take, and then also he's using it as a means to torture Morty or just... that was funny to me. It all is just an ad for some product, but anyway.
You can say that you've written a Super Bowl commercial, and there's not a lot of people who can say that.
ROILAND: Yeah. That is cool. That was very surreal. I feel like all the biggest events that we've had in the show's history, I've had this weird disassociation from their reality. The reality of the Super Bowl commercial, the Simpsons couch gag that we did. That's another one that's just super surreal and sort of... I have this weird dissociation from the reality of those things. It's bizarre, for sure.
Rick and Morty, I feel, has always had a really interesting relationship with the concept of serialization, where you're having characters go through an experience with one episode and having that pay off or be reflected in a future episode. What do you feel like the status quo is right now with the show in terms of that approach, and do you see it evolving further in one direction or another?
ROILAND: It's always been a nice mixture of stand-alone episodic, good point-of-entry episodes, because there's never any shortage of crazy ideas that you can make a great episode around, but we do have this larger canonical craziness going on. I don't see it changing or shifting in one direction or the other too intensely. I mean, every season there's going to be some larger canonical stuff in a certain number of episodes, and then a lot of just fun evergreen [stuff]. That's something that I love about the show, having real consequences and having the serialized things, but we always try to think of how can we do these in a way where we're not completely changing the landscape so once it's all over, things aren't completely different.
We had a really crazy one where Earth was basically taken over by aliens, and we were like, "How are we getting out of this fucking thing?" But it worked, it was like we figured it out and we're generally back to the status quo of what Season 1 was designed to be. But I'm not saying that this is real or that this is canonical or anything, but I even just think about like, "Oh, maybe this is a different reality," because there's infinite realities and there's realities that are so similar to others. There's some episodes where I'm like, "This could so easily just have happened in another reality," but that's just me just daydreaming about how crazy multiple realities are.
Even Season 5, I would say it's 60, 70 percent pretty evergreen episodic and then 40, 30 percent super-serialized to the point where you're going to want to make sure you've seen stuff before, especially Season 5. There's some stuff that it's like you're going to be a bit lost if you haven't seen certain episodes. But we don't like to do that too much. I think it's like having a good mixture of that. But I mean, obviously the longer a show goes and the more economical backstory stuff that you build up, the more you're gonna find it, "Hey, we want to do an episode that really requires people have seen stuff." That was the thing in the past, is like, "Well, we want to do this stuff, but we also want to make the episode feel like it could be a point of entry if somebody hadn't seen anything still."
But now we're getting to the point where there's just so much is that it is what it is. It's an episode that if you haven't seen the previous stuff, then you maybe turn it off and wait or something. I don't know. I think that's okay. The more history a show has, the more world-building and crazy events and stuff there are. Like you said, a show that has consequences and calls things back, and it doesn't just do a full blind reset every time the credits roll. You're going to start to get into scenarios where you really want to tell a crazy serialized story in an episode. In order to do it without some annoying previously on kind of thing in the beginning, previously on...
Yeah, I'm just realizing there's never been a "Previously on Rick and Morty..."
ROILAND: Yeah, that's true. I know House of Cosbys has always had the tag and I remember really wanting to do that on Rick and Morty, or did it?
I think House of Cosbys might've had a "Next week on..." that was never in the next episode.
ROILAND: That's right. That's what it was. Yeah. The idea there was like, "I just wanted to move the story further, so that next time I could be..." That's the same thing we did on Rick and Morty where we wanted to make it seem like in between episodes, it could be a lot of time has passed. I love when shows do that. I'm such a fan of that, where it just feels like, "Oh, this is bigger than just a sequence." Although, listen, I've loved stuff that is a really awesome story that takes place over a week or even a couple of days. Those are cool too. But I really love when shows have that like, "Oh, this is just going on. We're going to be visiting these characters over long spans of time." I find that to be pretty awesome.
Do you have a sense of how much time has passed from the Rick and Morty Season 1 premiere to Season 5, within the context of the show?
ROILAND: It's funny because it's almost been 10 years. The show premiered December of 2013. I've thought about this. I'm like, "I think it's been less time than that." They're still in high school obviously. That's an interesting thing because that's where the cartoonness comes in. I don't want to see Morty graduate high school. Personally, I'd prefer that high school always be on the table, because there's so many fun stories you can do there, and to me, that's a great place to go for character and story.
We could always transition to college, I suppose, but Summer is still there, she's older than Morty. There's still all the same age, yet they've been doing this a while. There's still character development and growth and stuff, but they're all still locked into that same age. There's that Simpsons energy going on where everybody's not aging yet. We're at odds with that because we're... like you said, we have these serialized things that we're acknowledging and we're paying things off emotionally and narratively and stuff. There's consequences and time is going on, marching on, there's Jerry and Beth splitting up for a while and then getting back... Just all this stuff that's happening that is serialized, yet we're still having them all stay the same age, which is kind of a funny, interesting... who cares? It's like, "We can do whatever we want."
I don't know, those things are a bit at odds with each other, but to me, I'm like... I think that would be us jumping the shark if it was like, "Okay, Morty's actually growing up." It's for better or for worse, the comic. She owned it, she killed it. That was the comic, was like, "These characters are going to age exactly the way real people age." And it's generational. It's pretty incredible. I think maybe one of the only comics that has ever done that, everything else is very much locked into however old they are. Calvin is always going to be a kid. Bart's always going to be a kid. I think if our show were to do the For Better or For Worse thing, that would bum me out. I'd be like, "Yeah, I don't like it. I don't like it. Go back. How do you go back? How do you undo that?" You can't undo it. Once you do it, you can't undo it.
I was not expecting that For Better or For Worse comparison point, but I love it.
ROILAND: I was always blown away with that. That was such an interesting idea. I was like, "Oh, she did it really well." It tripped me out. As I was aging, I'm like, "Holy fuck, these characters are..." I don't know, when it clicked, because it was a long time, I didn't realize that was what was going on, and them when I realized it, I'm like, "Oh, fuck, this is crazy." Anyway.
So, if you went back to when the show was first getting started. knowing what you know now, especially knowing that after Season 3 you were going to get a 70 episode order, do you think you still would have cast yourself as both Rick and Morty?
ROILAND: Yeah. No, absolutely because I love doing them. I love doing those characters. I feel like it was such an important piece of the show, especially in the early days, because I would run scenes with myself as we scripted any episode, like the pandemic one, the love potion episode, I knew those beats. I knew exactly what needed to be conveyed, and so I would just run the scenes. Then there are other episodes that I would do that in. There's a certain level of looseness, but I don't know, there's something special that we get out of that. It feels improvisational, but also it's still tight and it's still rhythmically moving the show in a certain speed that we like. I think there's a little bit of that.
There's a handful of episodes where it's full-on. There's a lot of bits and pieces of it throughout the whole show, but there's certain episodes where it's a full scene or a full section of that. It's really cool. It plugs right into the scripted stuff really well, and it enabled us a lot. I mean, listen, we've had episodes that came back in color that we needed to do some major, major lifting on. And if it weren't for the fact that I was both voices, I don't think we could have done it.
Like the "Tales from the Citadel" episode, we had a really strong animatic that just due to a bunch of circumstances on Season 3, that animatic script got completely rewritten unnecessarily, and Dan and I get to the color edit and it was like, "Oh fuck." I'm like, "Can we pop up the animatic?" And we watched the animatic and we're just like, "We just need to make it like this." We had to do a third version of it, but I was able to just do every voice. It was completely doable. It was like, "I can go record whenever. I can temp everything in here, so at least we know if it's working or not." It's given us a lot of flexibility in that way, and I don't mind it, honestly.
Now I've figured it out: I do a little bit of Rick. I'll do maybe a couple of pages of Rick. And then I'll switch to Morty and do all Morty. And then I go back and do all Rick. Then if there are any scenes that I really wanted to play with, I'll just go back and run those scenes. My Morty voice tends to be fine after doing Rick, if I'm going back and forth.
It's crazy — the voice that fucks me up the most, and I would have never guessed this in a million years, is the Corvo voice. Doing Corvo, after an episode of Solar, my voice is just wrecked. I can't do Morty at all. I have to wait a few days before I can even get back my ability to do Morty, get to that place, because Corvo is deep and screaming all the time. You know what I mean? It's crazy.
Solar's a show that, by the way, there was a minute where I was going to be doing both of those guys, I was going to doing Corvo and Terry, that was where I was like," I don't know, dude." I was really not sure about that. Because with Rick and Morty, those were voices I'd been doing for a while and I really knew what to do and how to do them. I brought more Morty the way down, because the original Morty, the Morty voice was just so ridiculous. But I knew those characters really well and I knew how to do them and I knew how to play against myself and talk to myself, basically. But with Corvo and Terry, I didn't have that. It was just different. I just was like, "I don't think I should be the voice of Terry at all because it's just going to be that same voice." I don't know. It was freaking me out.
Then we were like, "Okay, let's really start looking for people." But anyway, crazy stuff. I actually really am glad that I was able to do and continue to do both Rick and Morty. It feels right for the show. I think it's a big part of what makes the show special, especially in the early seasons with how loose we would get sometimes, it was really special, and also just the flexibility it gives us to make, like I said, those changes when they need to be made.
Gotcha. It's funny because, thinking about the voices you do for Rick and Morty, it seems very different than a character like, say, Kermit — even I can do a half-decent Kermit impression when given the opportunity, but I feel like Rick and Morty, those characters, would be really hard for another actor to mimic exactly the way you do it.
ROILAND: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. A friend showed me a guy who's online, on social, I don't know, I think it might be on TikTok or something, who does Morty and it's crazy close. It creeps me out how close he is to how I sound. But his Rick is off. The Rick is just not there. It's not just that. Like you said, it's also just instinctual stuff and the energy that's going into it and weird shit I'll think to say that it's like, "What the fuck?" You know what I mean? My brain is so weird and I'll say weird stuff that it will be like, "Oh, that's really funny and bizarre. That's great."
So yeah, it's tough in regards to like, "Yeah. How would you do that if I got hit by a bus?" I think if I get hit by a bus, I think the first dude I'd hope that they'd reach out to you is that guy on TikTok or whatever he's on.
But just for Morty?
ROILAND: Yeah, just for Morty, and then it would be probably a long arduous process to find a vocal match for the Rick part, but it'd be really interesting. I know with Ren and Stimpy, Eric Bauza did Stimpy, and he got really damn close to Billy West, I felt like. It was crazy how close he got. It was eerie. I mean, well, you could tell, but it was pretty close.
Thank you again for this — I'm excited for everyone to see Season 5.
ROILAND: It's so great. Listen, I really wanted to swap two and one. Wait till you see Episode 2. I was like, "This should be the premiere. It's fucking insane." But it was too late to make that change. I love both of those episodes, by the way. They're so cool. I'm excited for people to see the rest of the season. Episode 2 is fucking insane in the best way. It's really a classic, over-the-top, Rick and Morty brain-melting episode. In a good way.
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