What If I Say "Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub" and Nobody Is There to Hear It?
As Season 8 of Rick & Morty nears, I analyze the demise of this once beloved animated sitcom.
This article is an edited and expanded excerpt of my October 13 article “The New Pleasure Island”. I just wanted to write about Rick & Morty ahead of the Season 8 premiere on Sunday, May 25.
I used to love Rick & Morty. For the first few seasons, I eagerly anticipated the release of each new episode. Around Season 4, I began falling away, but Season 8 is strangely premiering on Adult Swim in two days on Sunday, May 25. It’s been nearly two years since a new season, but it also seems like the time flew. How did Rick and Morty get to eight seasons? Remember when fans were clamoring for the release of Season 3 in 2015, 2016, and 2017? Now, in 2025, we don’t care about the wait. A new season of Rick and Morty might as well be a new season of The Simpsons, a once great show that has now become white noise. How many old fans of Rick & Morty even know that it’s still airing?
Oh. There are new episodes? I thought they fired the voice actor for committing false imprisonment of his girlfriend?
Rick & Morty has led to great examples of adult vice and childhood bliss in the 2010s and early 2020s. Its co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland exemplify the worst form of man-children. Before I analyze the demise, I must talk about the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan. If you are at all peripherally aware of the cringe content that came out of the Rick and Morty craze, then you know where I am going with Mulan.
This user on the subreddit for the Adult Swim show Rick and Morty is celebrating the opening of a smoke shop in New York based on the cartoon. We even have one of the two titular protagonists — Morty Smith — using a bong. Morty is a 14-year-old boy in the show. More so than any of those Nickelodeon shows, Rick and Morty relishes in the mixing of adult vice and childhood naivety. The show became one of the most acclaimed and popular shows of the 2010s after it aired in 2013. It used to be “cool” to watch, but it quickly degraded in cultural relevance and acceptability by 2017 midway through its highly anticipated and delayed Season 3.
Szechuan Sauce
The Rick and Morty craze really jumped the shark in October 2017 when McDonald’s re-released the notorious szechuan sauce, something that they offered alongside McNuggets originally in 1998 during Disney’s promotion of its animated film Mulan, which takes place in China.
In Season 3 Episode 1 of Rick & Morty “The Rickshank Redemption”, which aired in April 2017, Rick Sanchez — the other titular protagonist alongside his grandson Morty Smith — travels within his memories back to the year 1998. During this trip within his psyche, he makes sure to travel to a nearby McDonald’s to buy the szechuan sauce because it was only available in 1998, and McDonald’s had not re-released yet.
This was one of the most highly anticipated television episodes of the 2010s. It had been 18 months since the Season 2 finale of Rick and Morty, which had skyrocketed in popularity since then. People were starving for the third season, and this episode aired without any announcement on Adult Swim on April Fool’s Day in 2017. Consequently, Rick’s bit about the szechuan sauce attracted many eyeballs. In reality, Rick Sanchez’s voice actor Justin Roiland, who also voices Morty Smith, was using Rick as a fill-in for himself.
Justin was trying to use his platform as Rick’s voice to petition McDonald’s to perhaps bring back this fast food item from his youth. Roiland was born in 1980, so he would have been 18 years old when McDonald’s was doing its Mulan promotion in 1998. Strangely, Roiland is one year shy of being a millennial. Instead, he is a member of Generation X, yet he really codes as a millennial and exudes much of the zillennial ethos about which I am writing in this article.
Four months after the airing of the Season 3 premiere of Rick and Morty, McDonald’s sent Roiland a jug of a new batch of szechuan sauce. McDonald’s included the following message in a letter to him in the package:
Justin,
We finally did it. It took months, but we've finally brought back some Szechuan Sauce.
We'll spare you the physics, but turns out, Dimension C-1998M is a dimension where it's always 1998. 1998 every day. No smartphones, no social media. It's a weird, scary place. But they've got Szechuan Sauce on the regular menu.
So here we are with some precious cargo- the Szechuan Sauce you remember and some souvenirs from some of the dimensions we tried along the way.
We wish we could've brought more sauce through, but we couldn't risk keeping a portal like that open. Think about it, if you knew in 1998 that McDonald's would have All Day Breakfast in 2017, would you really want to stay in 1998? Of course not. If we left the portal open, we'd have puka shells, bucket hats and boy bands as far as the eye could see. It's too risky, even for sauce as delicious as this.
A few lucky fans will also get to experience the glory, but the first bottle in this dimension is for you.
Stay Schwifty,
Chef Mike
Then, a description on the actual jug read:
For use only in McDonald's® restaurants (C-1998M) during limited promotional window, and then maybe again twenty years later. DO NOT SERVE to mad scientists traveling with their teenage grandson; potential non-scientist versions of mad scientists from an alternate dimension; and/or Jerry.
In these messages to Roiland, McDonald’s includes many references to Rick and Morty to show that they are not just a soulless multi-national corporation. Rather, they are “hip”, and they get it! Chef Mike of McDonald’s signs the letter with “Stay Schwifty”, a reference to a song that Rick and Morty had to write for an intergalactic music competition in the Season 2 episode “Get Schwifty”, which Adult Swim aired on August 23, 2015. The message on the actual jug of sauce warns people to not serve the sauce to Jerry Smith — the routinely mocked, pathetic father of Morty Smith and son-in-law of Rick Sanchez.
McDonald’s said that this jug of szechuan sauce came from alternate universe “C-1998M”, where it is always the year 1998 and McDonald’s locations have the Mulan szechuan sauce permanently on their menus. Clearly, McDonald’s is playing with the underlying premise of Rick and Morty in which Rick can use a portal gun to travel to infinite alternate universes and dimensions with endless possibilities. Based on the logic of the Rick and Morty canonical universe, of course, Rick could have access to a universe in which Earth has not escaped the cultural fetters of 1998. This throwback revival of the sauce just for Roiland demonstrates exactly what I am discussing here in this article. Roiland yearns for a return to the late 1990s, a fetishized era in today’s culture — and, as I have already written, he uses his stature as both eponymous protagonists of Rick and Morty to get what he wants. McDonald’s even throws in some nostalgic references from the late 1990s — such as puka shell necklaces, bucket hats, and boy bands.
Based on the target demographic for Rick and Morty, I would assume that most fans would not have the ability to remember the szechuan sauce. Either they were born after the promotion of Mulan, or they are too young to remember. I fall into the latter camp. I was five months old when Mulan came out in theaters on June 19, 1998 — and I was really the perfect age for the height of Rick and Morty. I was in my later teenage years at the show’s zenith. Of course, because of the popularity of Rick and Morty and heightened attention to this long-awaited Season 3 premiere, the hundreds of thousands of Rick and Morty fans would be clamoring for McDonald’s to revive the sauce — especially, after they proved that they could recreate the sauce personally for Roiland.
McDonald’s obliged, and it returned in limited quantities at limited locations in October 2017, six months after the airing of the Season 3 premiere of Rick and Morty. Because of shortages of the sauce, McDonald’s revived it again for a more widespread, nationwide release in February 2018. When I say shortage, Rick and Morty fans did not respond well to these shortages in the autumn of 2017. The unsatisfied, outsized demand fueled massive “protests” by fans across the country.
Before I delve into these protests, I want to note that this craze perfectly embodies massive corporations spamming fans with nostalgia in order to increase revenues. Fans will blindly obey and give their dollars to the multinational corporation of McDonald’s. Justin Roiland and the other creator of the show Dan Harmon used to proudly “rebel” against cultural norms with Rick Sanchez’s nihilistic, sardonic commentary in the show through Roiland’s distinctive, gravely vocal delivery — but they “sold out” to these corporations that they may have mocked half a decade before the craze. This irony will eventually lead to Roiland and Harmon eventually chastising their fans and the show becoming excessively meta-referential and self-loathing.
Posts online emerged of many fans who waited for hours in line at local McDonald’s locations to learn that the location had already run out of the packets of the sauce. In the tweet above, you can people were pitching tents outside this particular McDonald’s location in San Francisco.
In this video posted on Twitter, you can see a McDonald’s location where protestors outside were chanting “We want the sauce!”. Police eventually had to come to quell the solicitors. Unfortunately, these entitled fans were harassing hourly workers, who had no control of how many packets of sauce their particular locations received. I do not know the actual location of this McDonald’s, but dozens and dozens of pieces of footage such as this proliferated over social media from locations across the country.
The mania very quickly reached a point of no return when a viral video showed a man screaming at McDonald’s employees once he found out that particular location had already run out of their limited stock of szechuan sauce. The man, wearing a Rick and Morty t-shirt, jumped onto the front counter and screamed several of Rick’s famous quotes from the show, including “Wubba lubba dub dub” and “I’m Pickle Rick”. The man then proceeds to jump back down onto the floor and starts convulsing as if he having a seizure. Finally, he bolts out of the restaurant in a Naruto-inspired run.
The “Pickle Rick” exclamation comes from the probably the most infamous and well-known episode of Rick and Morty, Season 3’s “Pickle Rick”, which aired on August 6, 2017. The premise of the episode follows Rick, who transforms himself into a pickle to avoid group family therapy with his daughter Beth, his granddaughter Summer, and his grandson Morty. Although this episode attracted great controversy and became a poster child for the irksome absurdity of Rick and Morty, the episode itself is not any more absurd than any other random episode of the show. The episode is probably one of the stronger episodes of the series. Rather, the ire emerged because of how the fans responded and the memes that spread across social media. “Pickle Rick” and the subsequent szechuan sauce craze exemplify the moment in which Rick and Morty flew too close to the sun.
The ratings for Rick and Morty peaked in Season 3. Below, I am displaying a chart from Wikipedia that shows the average viewership for each season of Rick and Morty.
As you can see, Rick and Morty maintained strong viewership in its first four seasons but peaked at an average of 2.33 million viewers per episode in Season 3. The viewership then precipitously falls after Season 4. It dipped below an average of 1 million viewers in Season 5, and it dipped below 500 thousand viewers in Season 7. These seasons are not necessarily one year after another due to the notoriously inconsistent production and release schedule of Rick and Morty, so I am listing the timeframe for each season in the list below:
Season 1: December 2013 to April 2014
Season 2: July 2015 to October 2015
Season 3: April 2017 to October 2017
Season 4: November 2019 to May 2020
Season 5: June 2021 to September 2021
Season 6: September 2022 to December 2022
Season 7: October 2023 to December 2023
The production schedule became more regular in the later seasons, but Season 8 is scheduled to air sometime in 2025, two years after the airing of Season 7.
What exactly led to this decline? Shows typically gradually decrease in viewership over time. Newer programs eventually grab the attention of the fickle American audience, but something more sinister was happening with Rick and Morty. As I have already noted, I think that the szechuan sauce “riots” repelled many normal media consumers who may have otherwise enjoyed the show, or they repelled older fans who no longer wanted any association with a cringe-inducing fanbase. Despite this decline, the show maintained its high quality for a while after the peak of its popularity, but the creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon began resenting their fans, who did embarrass them with Pickle Rick memes, szechuan sauce riots, and pseudo-intellectual snark inspired by Rick Sanchez’s occasional monologues in the show.
I give you the quote below to exemplify the worst of Rick’s self-indulgent attitude as the canonical smartest man in the universe. Rick Sanchez and his daughter Beth Smith are having an exchange about the downsides of being “smart”. This dialogue comes from Season 3 episode “The ABC’s of Beth”, which aired on September 24, 2017.
Beth: Am I evil?
Rick: Worse, you're smart. When you know nothing matters the universe is yours, and I've never met a universe that was into it. The universe is an animal, it grazes on the ordinary. It creates infinite idiots just to eat them …You know, smart people get a chance to climb on top and take reality for a ride but it'll never stop trying to throw you. And eventually it will, there's no other way off.
This sort of philosophy undergirds the entire show and gives a permission structure to fans to fully embrace nihilism and justify the behavior by asserting that “they are smarter than everyone else”. School is stupid! Society doesn’t understand me! God isn’t real! These sentiments need to go back to 2007-era r/atheism on Reddit, but they kept hobbling through the next decade to die in a Rick and Morty script. You really get the sense that Justin and Dan are speaking through Rick here. This is no longer a wacky goofy bit about szechuan sauce by Rick. No, Rick was now telling you how the world really works, but none of this is the worst of Rick and Morty.
The show really reached the doldrums in Season 4’s episode “Never Ricking Morty”, which aired on May 3, 2020. In this episode, the show got extremely meta-referential and used it to mock fans who wanted certain characters to return (e.g., Evil Morty). I do not need to explain to you all the references because the episode would deeply confuse anyone who had not watched every episode of Rick and Morty leading up to this one.
Rick and Morty did not even reach its true depths until Season 5’s “Rickdependence Spray”, airing on July 11, 2021. I do not even want to write out the full plot of this episode because of how disgusting it is. It really should have been a deep-cut episode of the vile Netflix series Big Mouth. The episode sees the sperm cells from Morty, a fourteen-year-old minor, become evil monsters attacking the world. At the end of the episode, one of them fertilizes an egg cell of his sister Summer, thereby creating an incestuous fetus in space. It’s absolutely repulsive, and this potty humor will lead to the actual death of Rick and Morty with the firing of co-creator and star voice actor Justin Roiland. You can see where his mind is with this episode from 2021.
The Firing of Justin Roiland
In August 2020, Roiland received felony charges of false imprisonment of a woman whom he was dating in Orange County, California — but the arrest and the charges did not become public until NBC News published a report on the issue on January 12, 2023. Around two weeks later, Adult Swim cut ties with Roiland as they were in the middle of recording voices for Season 7. The show continued and premiered Season 7 on October 15, 2023.
How did the show continue without Roiland’s iconic voice? The entire universe of Rick and Morty relied on Roiland’s “wacky characters”. Taking away his voice would be similar to taking Seth MacFarlane out of Family Guy or Hank Azaria out of The Simpsons. Well, Adult Swim replaced Justin Roiland’s voices as Rick and Morty with two new, separate voice actors. In Season 7, Ian Cardoni began voicing Rick Sanchez, and Harry Belden began voicing Morty Smith.
Both Cardoni and Belden were largely unknown before Adult Swim hired them. Adult Swim re-recorded any Season 7 dialogue initially performed by Roiland before his firing, and Cardoni and Belden fit in pretty well to the roles. A casual fan likely would not spot a difference. Roiland’s other show Solar Opposites, which streams on Hulu, took a different approach. He also voiced the protagonist of that show, Korvo, an alien who crashes on Earth. Of course, Hulu fired Roiland just as Adult Swim did, and they needed to find a new voice actor for the character. They hired Dan Stevens, an English actor who first gained prominence as a character in Downton Abbey. Stevens gave Korvo a completely different voice with an English accent, making light of the change of actor.
NBC News reported more stories of Roiland grooming underaged, teenage girls. He had allegations of abusing women during dates. Now, Roiland has never been convicted of anything. In March 2023, the false imprisonment charges were dismissed because of lack of evidence, but Roiland has had a documented history of making very creepy comments on interviews and online, which I do not necessarily want to write out here. When you consider the broader context of Rick and Morty, it all fits. It leads a fan to re-examine all the lewd content of the show knowing that Roiland co-created it and voiced the eponymous protagonists. Roiland’s predilection for much younger girls demonstrates this sort of arrested development that falls under the broader themes of this article. In many ways, Roiland is a man-child, or he at least has conducted himself that way in the public eye.
Rick & Morty vs. Other Adult Animated Series
The show Rick & Morty can’t quite grow up. That is the issue with animated shows for adults. At the end of the day, we will always see cartoons as a children’s medium (at least in the West). The way that animated shows for adults stand out from children’s cartoons is by being gratuitous and raunchy. It all goes back to the X-rated 1972 animated film Fritz the Cat. Since adult animated television boomed after the success of The Simpsons — we saw South Park, Family Guy, Beavis and Butthead, etc. It seems like every new show was trying outdo the last one.
But Rick & Morty did something that Family Guy never really tried to do. Rick & Morty tried to be DEEP. Sure, South Park does that sometimes too, but they cloak it in enough absurdity for it to work. I also don’t think that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are “man-children” in the way that Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon are. They never tried to take themselves too seriously, but — with those monologues of Rick Sanchez that I analyzed earlier — you can see that Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon are inserting their own immature cynicism of the world into Rick. Neither Trey Parker nor Matt Stone do that in South Park.
This summer, I am awaiting another animated adult series: the reboot of King of the Hill. This Mike Judge show will be airing its 14th season on Hulu and Disney Plus in the summer after being off the air for 16 years. The image above shows Hulu’s promotional image. It will be an 8-year time jump, so it will provide a fresh context for the show. Mike Judge is returning as executive producer and reprising his voice roles. Most of the voice actors are returning, except for the ones who have tragically passed away since the original run.
Johnny Hardwick as Dale Gribble
Brittany Murphy as Luanna Platter
Tom Petty as Lucky Kleinschmidt
My two favorite animated shows of all time are The Simpsons and King of the Hill, but The Simpsons has been subpar since Season 9. On the other hand, King of the Hill has consistent quality all the way through (although it dipped around Season 7). It is because King of the Hill has a sense of hyper-realism to it. It does not have any wacky gags as those other shows do. Almost every sequence in King of the Hill could have been filmed in a traditional live-action sitcom. Mike Judge was not riding the line of man-child with King of the Hill, but both Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon were.
Out of all these shows, Rick & Morty is in the worst uncanny valley. As we go into Season 8 and beyond, I predict that it will age way worse than any other animated series that I have mentioned in this article.