LeBron James and the Tune Squad need all the help they can get. But who thought they’d get it from Rick and Morty!!
Rick Sanchez is after your cash. That’s not a secret—in fact, it’s a point Rick And Morty has made repeatedly over the course of its five seasons on the air: There is no principle, friend, or family member that the gleefully amoral super scientist will not betray for a juicy enough incentive or a large enough cash pile. The show’s central character’s mercenary attitude extends far beyond its universe as well: It’s pretty simple to get Rick Sanchez to yell “Wubba Lubba Dub Dub!” while telling millennials to shove Hardee’s hamburgers in their faces—or to show up to add some inexplicable Adult Swim cred to your new Space Jam movie. Simply pay the man and see what happens.
Justin Roiland, who not only voices every enthusiastic ode to Old Spice or Pringles that spills from Rick’s puke-stained mouth, but also writes the majority of Rick And Morty’s surprisingly numerous ad spots, is clearly aware of the loophole at work here. Roiland has created a paradoxically perfect pitchman by creating a character of functionally infinite cynicism: Rick can say anything, tell his hungry audience to buy literally anything, and never break character—as long as it’s clear he’s only saying it because someone paid him to. Or, as Roiland put it in a recent Collider interview:
The end result is ad campaigns that feel effective in direct proportion to how checked-out their star sounds. An Instagram promotion that sees Rick gushing about the interactive wonders of the “Rickstaverse” constructed experience, for example, comes across as positively moribund, whereas the Old Spice spot, in which Rick literally counts his ad money while reading from a sheet of provided copy, feels completely in sync with the show. (After all, this is the series that has had its heroes canonically hang out with Logic to promote his album, and beg Nintendo to send them shit—not to mention the enormously strange situation that bled into real life when Rick waxed poetic about McDonald’s Mulan-themed Szechuan dipping sauce in the season 3 premiere.)
You can’t really blame Roiland (or co-creator Dan Harmon) for attempting to strike a balance between getting paid and maintaining the show’s own sensibility: After all, they’re beholden to their corporate masters, who are the ones selling ads that Roiland then has to make feel authentically inauthentic. And it’s difficult to deny that Rick would set up a merch-filled Rickmobile to tour the country or write a crooning birthday song for Kanye West (apparently commissioned by Kim Kardashian for her now-ex husband) if the price was right.