Adult Swim Has to Be Trolling With Its Worst-Yet Promo for ‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’

The lowly-anticipated Rick and Morty: The Anime now looks like it should be renamed Rick and Morty: The Slide Show.

When the first few clips of the upcoming Adult Swim spinoff series Rick and Morty: The Anime hit the internet, many Rick and Morty die-hards thought that the network was playing a mean joke on fans of their flagship franchise. After all, the original shorts featuring Rick and Morty in flashy, over-the-top action sequences all animated in the style of a different beloved Japanese series showed so much promise for the possibility of a full-length TV adaptation, but the Rick and Morty: The Anime teasers were shockingly absent any of the inspiration, panache or passion of their predecessors. Despite Adult Swim bringing back much of the team behind the pilot short films, released between 2020 and 2021, the new series, set to premiere before the end of the year, looks like the network took the original creators’ proof-of-concept and shipped it off to some overworked, cut-rate, outsourced animation house in a country with even more lax labor laws for professional artists than those of Japan itself.

Then, this past weekend, the Adult Swim YouTube channel dropped its single most derided promo for Rick and Morty: The Anime yet, featuring a framerate of roughly 1 FPS and still no release date beyond “2024.” If this laughably unimpressive teaser is Adult Swim’s idea of a joke, then it’s the first funny one we’ve yet seen from the spinoff.

The fraction of the massive, online Rick and Morty fanbase that's still following news about the upcoming spinoff reacted with exasperation to the lowest-budget promo put out by Adult Swim since the network first announced Rick and Morty: The Anime back in May, 2022. The stylistic (and possibly financial) choice to intersperse the action scenes with numerous freeze-frames made fans even less optimistic about the aesthetics of the show that's already been insulted for being “unconscionably ugly.”

“Looks like the animation took a dip in quality, the short film and previous trailers looked much better than this” one fan in the Rick and Morty subreddit lamented of the uninspiring visuals. Another commented on the hilariously low quality of the latest trailer, “Man I wish they just brought back the actual show, production costs would be better used on it.” One more bluntly remarked, “This looks like hot garbage.”

In addition to the artistic complaints about the video, Adult Swim's latest promo for their least-hyped series also perplexed Rick and Morty fans from a business perspective – not only is the most recent sneak peek obnoxiously cheaper-looking than the last few teasers, but, with Rick and Morty: The Anime still lacking a release date, followers wonder why the network would even bother dropping a sloppy, unfinished and unremarkable clip from the series on a random Sunday morning when the hype train over the project had already ground to a complete halt.

“Of all of the things to continually release clips of with no release date, why Rick and Morty: The Anime?” a YouTube commenter asked, while another observed, “'Later this year' has been said for years.”

One fan admitted of the apparently very real and very slipshod spinoff, “I honestly thought it was a joke when this was talked about.”