Is Rick And Morty’s Bushworld Adventures Worthy of the Name?

Just as April Fools’ Day 2017 saw the shock release of the first episode of season 3 of Rick and Morty, April Fools’ 2018 also saw the surprise of a new episode – an eleven-minute shitpost guest-written and -animated by Michael Cusack, which trades in Rick and Morty’s usual blend of American suburbia and high-concept sci-fi rigmarole for a far wackier setting. Instead of an alien world full of unfamiliar climates, odd cultural practices, and incredibly dangerous creatures, they’ve set it in Australia instead.

The subtly different ways of our antipodean brethren has been fodder for cartoonists for some time now. There’s a classic Simpsons episode in which Bart systematically fucks with the entire country (which Cusack cites Bushworld Adventures as a response to), you can have scenes set upside-down as visual shorthand for the setting, and they’ve literally got kangaroos roaming about the place – which are easily one of the funniest animals after the humble platypus. And more recently, in the internet age, Australia has taken on an important role on Anglophone social media due to its geographical position, serving up its own distinct flavour memes while the Americans and Brits slumber.

Bushworld Adventures throws out the complex, lavish style of the series proper, instead opting for the kind of animation that could probably, in a pinch, be knocked up in Paint Shop Pro, with an unpolished art style to match. While the animation is obviously quick-and-dirty stuff, the art style – with characters’ facial structures varying wildly from scene to scene – is anarchic enough to work quite well here. If nothing else it’s reminiscent of the Rick and Morty ‘exquisite corpse’ short, one of the other tidbits of content that tides the fanbase over between seasons, in which a wide array of guest animators came in to try their hands.

As befits a fan production, Bushworld Adventures reduces the property to its bare bones – not even really bothering with the interdimensional wackiness for the most part, and even the Australian elements being largely surface-level, instead focusing purely on the central power combo as they stumble through a basically meaningless adventure. And this has always been the central pillar of the property. Even before the pilot, it was Dan Harmon’s original ‘Doc and Mharti’ short that was the genesis of the franchise (which, I remind you, became successful enough to terrify fast-food workers everywhere), and that didn’t have any of the sci-fi, it was just scuzzy, crudely drawn versions of Doc and Marty from Back To The Future engaging in wildly inappropriate sexual conduct.

(Bushworld Adventures, incidentally, harks back to the plotline of ‘Doc and Mharti’, such as it was, when Morty is bitten on the genitals by a bush snake and Rick comes perilously close to attempting to suck out the poison.)

Crucially, in ‘Doc and Mharti’ the characterisations and voices (Rick’s burping slur, Morty’s constant whine) were more or less the same as the versions we’re now familiar with. This speaks to the robustness of the central duo as comedy protagonists, explaining why you can extract them completely from their usual context, drop them in Australia (of all places!) and they’re able to carry on basically as normal. Compare their guest appearance on The Simpsons, in which they literally crash through the wall and mess everything up.

The idea of the comedy duo is something I’ve written about before, with specific reference to the idea of the straight man/funny guy dichotomy. While Rick is closest to the ‘funny guy’ here – being more overtly wacky, and typically being the one to drive the plot forward, leaving Morty to react to it – both get their fair share of jokes, so it would be unfair to pigeonhole them in precisely that way. However, there’s perhaps a closer analogy to be found to the Rick/Morty two-hander in the work of David Mitchell and Robert Webb.

In my review of Mitchell and Webb’s recent series Back, I referenced something they’d written about their career-making series Peep Show, that their characters in that were conceived as ‘two men in their midtwenties sharing a flat; one called Otto — deluded, talentless and invincible: and one called Phil — crushed. anal and frightened’. Summaries which, if you’ve seen Peep Show, are probably fairly recognisable early drafts. They then dialed this back slightly, reasoning that ‘Otto was too much the cartoonish force of nature and Phil was too much the thankless comedy stooge’ – and now, this is probably sounding a bit more familiar to fans of Rick and Morty.

The only way Otto there isn’t an accurate prototype of Rick is that Rick is empowered by all the wacky fictional technology the writers can dream up, and as such isn’t talentless, or strictly speaking a force of nature – otherwise it’s spot-on. He’s the human id unleashed, in much the same way as South Park’s Cartman before him – and Cartman, for all his flaws, also tended to be the smartest guy in the room. As for Morty, Rick wasn’t far wrong in identifying him as an ‘implausibly naive pubescent boy with an old Jewish comedy writer’s name’ – and there’s perhaps more of the Borscht-belt tradition to Morty than is often mentioned, with his role often boiling down to having a really good kvetch about the awful status quo he’s been lumbered with.

My ultimate point here is that Bushworld Adventures proves that Rick and Morty are effectively a self-contained combination, who could potentially be grafted onto any number of settings or contexts. The show itself had, even in the first season, already recognised they were a strong enough duo to riff on their relationship by presenting the Citadel of Ricks, an entire civilisation of Ricks and Mortys. Were they to simply turn up, without fanfare, in some other established fictional universe – well, at the very least the fans would love it.

There was an old Cracked article that suggested something similar regarding Grand Theft Auto IV – that the obvious strength of that game was its meticulously detailed open-world setting, and that it would be no bad thing to simply let other developers use it as a ready-to-go backdrop for whatever they might want to create. Racing through the streets of New York (without GTA IV’s helplessly floaty handling), stick in a superhero a la the Spiderman 2 game, even sprucing up a nice Midtown apartment, the possibilities would be endless. But, at this point, I think I’m obliged to smash the premises together and suggest that Rick and Morty be let loose in a nigh-photorealistic New York. Rick lives life like a GTA game anyway, and Morty could kvetch up until the crack of doom.

Dead List is released on VOD on May 1st