Don’t Let the Awfulness of ‘Rick and Morty: The Anime’ Overshadow How Adult Swim Nailed the Australian Adaptation

Of all the chaotic and dangerous places that the titular heroes visit during their adventures in Rick and Morty, no fictional dimension can match the unhinged peril of rural Australia.

We’re only one episode into the long-awaited (or long-dreaded) spin-off series Rick and Morty: The Anime, but it’s already clear that too much of the original show was lost in translation for the anime to be a meaningful addition to the franchise. Despite the success of the original Rick and Morty anime shorts, the new series thus far is sadly missing the humor, the nihilism and the mayhem that makes Rick and Morty so unique. 

However, as hard a time as Rick and Morty: The Anime is having in translating the winning Rick and Morty formula to Japanese animation, disappointed fans shouldn’t come to the conclusion that Rick and Morty isn’t amenable to an inspired yet faithful adaptation.

On April 1, 2018, Adult Swim aired an 11-minute “special episode” of Rick and Morty, titled “Bushworld Adventures,” which proved that Rick and Morty absolutely can overcome the translation barrier. In fact, the characters sound even more delightfully deranged in Australian.

The release of “Bushworld Adventures” marked the one-year anniversary of the surprise April Fool’s Day launch of Rick and Morty Season Three, adding yet another layer of hilarity to the channel’s best prank yet. Australian animator and Newgrounds veteran Michael Cusack wrote, directed, produced, animated and voice-acted in “Bushworld Adventures,” combining the art style and tone of his popular animated YouTube videos with the characters and chemistry of Rick and Morty. 

While “Bushworld Adventures” is decidedly lacking in the science-fiction elements typically associated with Rick and Morty, there’s something satanically charming about how well Cusack took the humor of Rick and Morty and made it dark in a harrowingly real way instead of a “Rick’s sad that his hivemind girlfriend broke up with him” sense — like how on-brand it is for sadistic Australian Rick to turn his portal gun into a normal gun and tell Morty that their newest adventure is a murder-suicide situation.

“Bushworld Adventures” was a huge hit in the Rick and Morty fandom — as demonstrated by its 30 million views on YouTube — and Adult Swim seemed to be equally impressed by Cusack’s work. In 2020, Adult Swim turned Cusack’s YouTube series YOLO into a TV show, and Cusack co-created the channel’s sleeper hit Smiling Friends in 2022 with fellow YouTuber Zach Handel. 

But the real triumph of “Bushworld Adventures” is that it proved that an adaptation of Rick and Morty could succeed if it had the right people behind it. Maybe Cusack should try his hand at Japanese animation — it’s not like his art style is any less complex than the one in the official anime.