Commentary: ‘Rick And Morty’ And ‘Solar Opposites’ Deliver The Same Content
by Frank Martin
It’s obvious that stories developed by the same people will have a lot of similarities. This can be anything from genre and tone to plot and characterization. But it can even go deeper. A great example of this in action regards the two animated series Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites.
On the surface, each series has a completely different premise. Created by Dan Harmon, Rick and Morty is about a nihilistic and sociopathic inventor who is extremely brilliant and, perhaps, the smartest man in the universe. He creates all sorts of inventions and takes his grandson on wild, crazy, and even depraved adventures. Likewise, Solar Opposites, created by Mike McMahan, is about a group of aliens who crash land on Earth and are merely biding their time in society before they eventually have to terraform the entire planet in preparation for their species’ takeover of the world.
Although the plots and characters for each of these are distinct there is some surface-level overlap: brilliant inventors and plotlines that take the characters into space and beyond. But deeper similarities exist on two fundamental levels. The first is an extension of the premise, which is to play on sci-fi tropes. Both shows take various science fiction elements — time travel, virtual realities, genetic experimentation, etc. — and stretch them to absurd levels. It’s so abundant that the shows also make pop culture references to tons of other works that came before them as either a direct copy or a knockoff. The second similarity involves their immature comedic tones. They make borderline offensive jokes with a lot of cursing and highlighting degenerate behavior. When all of this is taken to account, the sci-fi tropes and comedic approaches, it appears as if these two shows just have different ways of delivering the same content.
Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites are both streaming on Hulu.
