Film Theory: Rick is a Morty CONFIRMED! (Rick and Morty)

foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] me [Music] hello internet welcome to film theory the show where today we ask the eternal question wubble lubba dub dub or wubba lubba sub sub since we're talking about rick and morty the anime you see the team behind rick and morty just dropped an anime short their second mini anime episode of the year in fact and normally this wouldn't be the sort of thing that i would dedicate an entire episode to it's a fun little spin-off episode to keep the fandom engaged sure fine whatever get a few extra views for your adult swim youtube channel get a bit more promotion to keep rick and morty on everyone's minds in the entertainment wasteland that is 20 20. yeah i get it you gotta run on that content treadmill rick and morty but here's why i'm dedicating a theory to these anime shorts i think they're important or at least i think this latest one is important to the overall canon of the show so much so that i think it might be hinting at answers to the biggest mysteries left remaining in this franchise including the history of rick sanchez and his past relationship with evil morty no joke rick and morty may have just told us everything we need to know about evil morty in an eight minute made for digital anime which come to think of it probably isn't the strangest thing that this franchise has ever done so i read that line as if i'm surprised but should i be you see the first anime short titled samurai and shogun was released in the before times back in march of 2020 and follows a different rick from the dimension wtm-72 it's extremely cool and extremely bloody but there's not a whole lot of substance beyond our characters riffing on old samurai movies like lone wolf and cub no it's the second one here that really matters released just a few weeks ago rick and morty versus genocider explicitly calls out that we're watching the adventures of c137 rick yes unlike the previous anime short which intentionally distanced itself from the action of the show by pulling a random rick from a random universe completely disconnected from what we watch on tv this one very specifically is drawing our attention to the fact that this is c137 rick and it's more than just a fun action rom it's drawing on the events and themes and most importantly the characters of the canon of rick and morty the tv series but first a bit of an explainer of what this video is all about and i know that explainer portions of videos can sometimes come across as something that youtubers do to pan out the runtime but believe me this video needs the explainer if the number of wtf did i just watch comments that this thing has gotten is anything to go by the short opens with morty at the citadel of ricks this video seems to take place after the tales of the citadel episode from season 3 because it appears that everything is under the control of evil morty who if you recall won the citadel election at the end of that episode before promptly eliminating all his opposition now is the time for action and if there's any doubt that this is evil morty well the end of the episode gives us even more evidence but we'll come to that in a second morty worried that rick is being hunted by a group called the genociders heads off to tokyo to find him as he walks around tokyo we see people starting to disappear we're told that this is all part of the genocider's plan destroy life by altering people's memories we're shown a moment where rick explains to morty that reality as we know it is simply the state formed by the consensus of human memory if i can translate what i think this means the past only exists because people remember and agree to certain events having happened without that consensus the past is nothing it's nebulous it disappears those past memories then are like points on a graph you connect those together to find out where you are currently that is yourself in the present and if you follow that line forward you're projecting out to create a target for your future but without those past memories to guide the way to form a foundation upon which the present and future are built everything collapses which i presume is why people are disappearing from the cities morty eventually makes his way to the last place in tokyo that's still humming the seediest place in the city shinjuku kabukicho for those who don't know kabukicho is indeed a real place the entertainment and more importantly red light district of shinjuku tokyo a place filled with hosts and hostess clubs and the sort of hotels that charge you by the hour it also has a really awesome robot restaurant with a really catchy theme song that plays at all hours of the night where you descend down into a basement to watch animatronics create fire hazards literal feet from your face i did a video all about that over on game theory you can watch it in 360 in fact that was uh that was a wild night anyway it's not really explained how this is the one part of the city where there's still people maybe it's because people living in tokyo's so-called sleepless town are always forming new memories or maybe it's because they're boozing it up so hard that they never had any memories to begin with but at any rate this place definitely sounds like rick's idea of a good time so it comes as no surprise when morty is able to find him there rick gives morty a vial of some blue potion saying once i'm gone take this it'll make you rip van winkle referencing the old american folk tale about a man who drinks a mysterious potion falls into a deep slumber for 20 years and then wakes up to a completely different world at least that's what the english subtitles are saying if you listen to the original spoken japanese dialogue rick actually tells morty that drinking the vilo turn him into arashima taro here i'll play it for you did you hear it hiroshima taro is a character from an old japanese folk tale about a fisherman who leaves home on a fantastical adventure and returns to discover that a hundred years have passed in his absence it's similar to rip van winkle but with a few important distinctions make a note of that we'll come back to it in a minute anyway rick explains that the potion is made with the secretions from the alien brain parasites that we saw in the season two episode total rickal in case you forgot this iconic episode it's the episode where the smith family has to deal with alien parasites that reproduce by creating false memories which manifest themselves as new alien parasites it's also the episode where everyone's favorite mr poopybutthole was first introduced so again the important detail here is that rick gives morty a blue potion that's somehow related to memory and memory replication at this point rick leaves morty to go fight the genociders [Music] an explosion rocks the building rick is sent flying and a bunch of portals open up revealing an army of ricks of course our rick isn't bothered by this from his perspective everything is unfolding exactly according to kaikaku rick unleashes his powers to become ultra instinct rick in an epic anime battle ensues the battle ends with an explosion that annihilates everyone which reveals that the main genocider rick was actually a robot all along a robot controlled by none other than evil morty back at the citadel this whole moment is a call back to the first time we were introduced to evil morty back in season one in the episode close rick counters of the rick kind when evil rick is revealed to be surprise surprise a robot notice the exact same mechanism behind their eyes and we cut to the reveal of evil morty who is controlling him via remote in his eye patch and in yet another parallel in both the anime and the episode evil morty crushes the controller under his foot in short the whole genocider threat was created by evil morty to get r morty to expose rick c-137's hiding place and while the assassination team might be dead so is c-137 and apparently that's good enough news for evil morty mission complete or is it as evil morty leaves the control room an image of rick appears behind him taunting him um he turns around and rick is nowhere to be seen was rick's taunt merely a hallucination or something more again i'm getting to that let's just finish describing this thing we've got like less than a minute left in the aftermath of the battle we cut to a shot of a silhouetted figure wearing a lab coat receiving a voicemail from jerry reaching out to his dear old father-in-law the figure who we can only presume to be rick based on his profile reaches for that familiar hip flask except when he places it back down it's shown not to be the hip flask but the vial of memory potion that rick had given morty earlier in the episode roll that jojo meme [Music] so as you can see there's a lot to unpack here i'm gonna present two possible interpretations of this one that seems to be among the more popular theories floating around the internet and the other of which is my personal theory one that i think meshes best with what we're shown both inside the anime short as well as the rick and morty series as a whole the first interpretation is this at the end when rick fights against the assassination squad and dies morty takes the blue memory potion this not only allows morty to absorb rick's memories but physically transforms him into rick from there morty with his newly acquired rick memories rebuilds japan as we saw in the anime battle the entire city got destroyed so it's up to morty as the new rick to reset the world back to a time 14 years before when morty was born he does this somehow the video kind of hand waves this away but you know it's rick he has hundreds of backup plans for these sorts of situations anyway with the city now reset to where it was 14 years ago by morty rick the cycle begins anew and the events of the past begin repeating themselves it's a time loop story except without any actual time travel because as we know rick and his creators always talk about how much they hate time travel i mean he even mentions it in this episode one strong piece of evidence supporting this theory is that rick tells morty that drinking the memory potion will turn him into arashima taro in the old folk tale arashimataro is a fisherman who rescues a turtle and as a reward the turtle takes him on a magical adventure down to the dragon palace beneath the sea there he meets with princess otoime and spends what he believes to be several days there eventually he asks to go back home and is given a mysterious jeweled box the princess tells him that the box will protect him but that he shouldn't open it taro returns home and discovers that although only a few days have passed for him more than a hundred years have passed back home everyone and everything that he remembered from his home village is gone when he opens the forbidden jeweled box that he was given by the princess he becomes an old man now a lot of things fit here mostly the idea that when morty drinks the potion he literally becomes an old man he becomes his grandfather rick after all rick did tell him that the potion when consumed would turn morty into arashima taro maybe he meant it a bit more literally than any of us could have imagined a similar but slightly different interpretation is that morty isn't transformed into rick by the potion so much as he naturally grows up to become rick that this final scene isn't a time loop or anything like that but rather a shot from many years later when morty is himself an old man in other words what we know of as rick is just an old grown-up morty morty survives the battle against the genociders and goes on with his life at some point he drinks the potion and gains rick's memories but it does nothing to him physically morty just grows up and lives out his life the idea that morty grows up to become his own grandfather or that rick is just an older version of morty is certainly a strange one and certainly a bit confusing but it's one that's supported by imagery in this episode right before rick goes off to the fight we see a momentary shot where the camera fades between a shot of morty's face and rix overlapping now that might seem like it's just a stylistic thing but to me it's clearly the animators telling us that these two separate people are actually one and the same now this would have itself a few interesting consequences one it allows morty to stay safe avoiding the murderous intent of evil morty who clearly has it out for c-137 or any of his descendants two it aligns with the last words that rick tells morty before he goes off to the fight i rick in this moment knows that morty will grow up to become him they'll certainly have more adventures together but this time morty will be in the role of rick it's a coy double answer and three it's something that's actually been alluded to in the show before in that tales of the citadel episode again we see the school where they train up mortys and who do we have in class with the mortys a dumb rick did i graduate this time yet back then it got people's minds working if a dumb rick is the equivalent of an up-and-coming morty could there be more to this connection here this anime seems to suggest yes because here's the thing theorists regardless of the mechanism whether it's transformation or natural age one thing that seems undeniable is that morty becomes rick so the question is is any of this canon well i think so the anime short goes a long way to reference specific moments and characters from throughout the tv series explicitly naming this rick as r-rick c-137 all the visual parallels to evil morty and his robotic rick outright calling out season two in the memory parasites i mean remember if their goal was to just tell a fun rick and morty themed story it would have been very easy for them to do what the other anime short from earlier this year did and just tell us that this rick was from a different dimension but they actively didn't do that so that is already a huge possible revelation here but i think there's one more thing remember that hallucination that evil morty had of rick it shows a familiarity a past relationship evil morty hallucinating c-137 rick trolling him shows an inferiority complex a psychological need to prove to this specific rick that he's better that he's smarter he's more capable and that doesn't make sense unless as many have already suspected this morty is rick's original morty one thing that's gone under discussed in videos about evil morty is that he actively targets rick c137 throughout the tv series in his first appearance his plan is to frame rick c137 for the murder of all the other ricks that way the council of ricks punishes him by death the plan doesn't work and here again we see evil morty despite having already taken over the citadel still targeting this specific rick why is he afraid that rick might take him out doesn't really make sense rick doesn't care about anything as long as he's left alone no this morty has a personal vendetta against c137 rick he wants to poke the beehive he has something to prove he wants to see this rick suffer it's the mortiest morty versus the rickest rick evil morty appears to be rick's original morty which as we just learned is also kind of himself talking about rick and morty gets to be kind of weird sometimes of course all of these lore bits and relationships between the characters are contingent on it actually being canon and while i do think that all signs point yes i wouldn't put it past the show's creators to one day say that this was made by an entirely different writing team and therefore nothing in the anime is canon i don't want to see any more anime stuff happening to my son buster which means that until season five it's all just a theory a film theory and cut [Music] you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 5,472,187

Rating: 4.8429766 out of 5

Keywords: rick and morty, rick and morty season 4, rick and morty anime, rick is a morty, evil morty, rick and morty season 4 episode 9, rick and morty season finale, rick and morty beth, beth clone, rick and morty season 4 finale, mr poopybutthole, mr meeseeks, rick and morty trailer, rick, morty, adult swim, rick sanchez, rick and morty train, rick and morty full episode, rick and morty theory, film theorists, film theory, matpat, film theory rick and morty, rick and morty episode

Id: L2O-ZLKLhiw

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020