Adult Swim has put its back into marketing Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland's insane sci-fi cartoon Rick and Morty. And well they might: It's one of the best shows on the air, and last year it occasionally got more demo viewers than Harmon's broadcast sitcom, Community.
So, it follows that the network would have a mild blowout around the release of the first season of Rick and Morty on Blu-ray, too.
Accordingly, Roiland called on Ben Bayouth, puppet maker and costumer to the ... well, to the very weird. (Seriously, the "creature suits and puppets" page alone is a huge productivity suck.) Bayouth made Rick, Morty and Meeseeks puppets and a giant Meeseeks suit (from this episode) in order to tell the world about the show.
Here's the 90-second spot. It's on Adult Swim's digital presence as of Tuesday evening and starts airing in cut-down form Wednesday night on AS.
>When the cartoon premiered, AS erected a crashed spaceship in front of the Flatiron Building in New York, and the show got all kinds of attention at Comic-Con, with a panel and a booth for its production company, Starburns Industries. (I don't even want to tell you about the lines to get Harmon to sign things.) So, there are interestingly high standards for anything R&M related at AS, and they keep coming up with new tricks to promote it, not unlike FX's various shenanigans around Archer.
We also did an unboxing Vine (see below) so you could see the contents of the Blu-ray, because another fun piece of the campaign is inside the box: Like the Jim Mahfood-drawn Kickpuncher comic book in Community's Season 1 DVD set, Roiland and series writer Ryan Ridley collaborated with storyboard artist Erica Hayes to make a cool little Jack Chick-style comic book fleshing out some of the show's stranger sci-fi plot points.
