Rick And Morty announces season 5 return date by kicking tons of video game ass
Rick And Morty has always been pretty good at the self-promotion game—this is, after all, the show that once April Fools Day’d its own season premiere months ahead of schedule, and drove thousands of fast food employees to the point of madness, basically as a joke. Now, though, the Adult Swim series might have outdone itself, finding what may very well be the coolest possible way to announce its upcoming fifth season return date: A new 17-minute animated video from pixel art legend Paul Robertson.
If you’ve been hanging around the internet long enough, you’re probably familiar with Robertson’s work; he first picked up prominence way back in 2006, when his short film Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 blew a lot of people’s minds by creating, out of whole cloth, what looked like the most amazing, over-the-top, completely bizarre side-scrolling video game ever. In recent years, Robertson’s been doing a lot of work for Adult Swim, crafting several of the network’s iconic between-episode bumpers, often featuring the Rick And Morty cast. But all of those videos were brief little interludes, rarely more than 30 seconds in length; Rick And Morty In The Eternal Nightmare Machine is running on a whole different level.
Clocking in at 17 minutes, the video—which premiered last night during a marathon of the show’s fourth season—is a blisteringly violent, fast-moving exploration of the show’s whole extended cosmology, all presented through the viewpoint of Rick and Morty (who acquits himself better than you might expect!) kicking the asses, Final Fight style, of everyone who gets in their way. Among other things, it’s one hell of an Easter Egg hunt: Where else are you going to get to see Pencilvester finally get his day in the sun as a potential instrument of murder?
Meanwhile, Adult Swim also released a more traditional trailer for Rick And Morty season 5, in case you (for some weird reason) didn’t want to watch 17 minutes of gorgeous fake video game to learn that the new season arrives on Adult Swim on June 20.