Mistakes That Are Hard To Ignore In Rick And Morty
Following the wild adventures of a nihilistic mad scientist and his awkward grandson, Rick and Morty has quickly become one of the most well-known shows in adult animation since its premiere in 2013 on Adult Swim. Due to the show's sharp humor, relatable characters, and imaginative animation, each season of the series has earned at least 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. That's an incredibly impressive feat and a testament to all the talented people voicing characters and working behind the scenes.
However, while the series is exceptionally well-made, it isn't free of flaws. From animation goofs and continuity errors to scientific inaccuracies, Rick and Morty is filled with mistakes that ended up in the final cuts of some episodes. And if you want to learn more about these bloopers and blunders, then grab your portal gun and get ready as we look at some of the mistakes that are hard to ignore in Rick and Morty.
The viruses are too big in Rick and Morty
In the episode "Anatomy Park", Rick shrinks Morty and sends him inside the body of a homeless man. As Morty makes his way to the man's lungs, you can see that Morty's about the same size as a single air sac, or alveolus, which is roughly 200 micrometers. Immediately after Morty leaves the lungs, the virus Hepatitis A shows up and attacks. Hepatitis A towers above Morty and the group running Anatomy Park, but in reality, most viruses are roughly 1000 times smaller than an alveolus, measuring about 20-400 nanometers.
What's up with that screaming sun?
In "The Wedding Squanchers", after the Galactic Federation discovers that Rick has been hiding out on Earth, they show up and occupy the planet. This forces the Smith family to flee and find a new place to call home. One of the planets that Rick takes them to is one where the sun has a face and screams every second it brightens the sky. The only problem with this is that sounds, even ones coming from a face the size of a star, can't travel through the vacuum of space.
The concentrated dark matter is wrong
The episode "M. Night Shaym-Aliens!" introduces concentrated dark matter, a fuel that allows Rick to travel the universe faster than any other form of intelligent life. The episode also involves an alien race that kidnaps Rick and tries to trick him into revealing his recipe for the stuff. Rick, being two steps ahead of his captors, gives them an incorrect formula. While under surveillance, Rick tells Morty that the formula is two parts plutonic quarks (a pink fluid) and one part cesium (a green fluid). After "learning" the formula, Rick's captors let everyone go in order to celebrate their first batch of concentrated dark matter.
However, when they try to replicate the recipe Rick gave them, they combine the ingredients with the wrong proportions. Rick's alien captors create a mixture that is one part plutonic quarks and two parts cesium in what appears to be an animation error. Despite the aliens apparently getting the already incorrect formula wrong, Rick's plan is a success, as the mixture ends up producing an explosion that kills everyone after Rick gets away.
Keep an eye on those test tubes
"Morty's Mind Blowers" explores all of the terrible memories that Morty has asked Rick to repress, and each of Morty's memories is contained in separate test tubes that vary in color. However, over the course of the episode, there are a few animation errors that result in test tubes changing from one color to another. In one instance, Rick holds a purple vial. But in between shots, the vial turns from purple to blue. A similar animation error happens again when a purple tube turns red after a brief cutaway.
An animation layering error in Rick and Morty
In "The Wedding Squanchers," the Smith family attends the wedding of Rick's long-time friend Birdperson. After the ceremony, everyone is milling around, drinking and talking with the other wedding guests. In one shot, Birdperson is talking with Tammy and then walks away from her, land this is where things get weird. There's a random wedding guest holding a drink, but the glass doesn't stay in the background of the shot. The drink looks like it phases through Birdperson as he walks in front of the guest holding it. It's likely than an animator meant to animate the drink and put it on a background layer, letting Birdperson walk in front of it without any hiccups, but hey, even professional animators make mistakes.
You can't drown in a room with a hole
In the episode "Mortynight Run," Morty steals Rick's ship and crash-lands it in order to keep the assassin Krombopulos Michael from killing a Fart, an enigmatic alien creature. In doing so, Morty smashes through the wall of a larger spaceship. Soon, Galactic Federation troopers swarm the room to arrest Morty after the commotion. As Morty fumbles with the ship's controls, Rick opens a portal that floods the room all the way to the ceiling. He then opens another portal that drains the room of all the troopers, thus clearing Morty to escape.
The only problem is that this shouldn't be possible due to the hole that Morty made as he crash-landed the ship. It's not even as if the hole was filled after he crashed, either. It's still right there in the wall as Morty escapes. In other words, the room should've been impossible to flood.
Rick's disappearing pillows
After Rick and Morty drop Jerry off at the Jerryboree, they park in a parking garage so Rick can do some business in the episode "Mortynight Run." As they land, the back area of Rick's car is visible, showing that Rick has a few throw pillows in the rear of his vehicle. In a later shot, these pillows mysteriously vanish. In their place is a lot of miscellaneous junk that seems more likely to be the cargo that Rick usually transports in his car.
Rick's vanishing ice cubes
As Jerry is just about to give relationship advice to his son in the family kitchen during the episode "Rick Potion #9," Rick disapprovingly interjects. While explaining that Jerry isn't the best person to hand out advice — given the state of his marriage — Rick decides to make a glass of orange juice. Rick grabs a glass, grabs some ice cubes from the freezer, and then pours himself some juice from the fridge. But when he's shown in the next shot, Rick's glass of juice is ice free. As he was making his drink, Rick very clearly got at least one ice cube in his glass. So maybe it just teleported out of there?
Incorrect E. coli
The premise of "Anatomy Park" is that different diseases are kept captive in a zoo for visitors to pay to see. While creatures like the monstrous Hepatitis A don't resemble their single-celled counterparts at all, that can be chalked up to artistic liberties taken to make the episode more interesting. However, the E. coli that attack Morty seem like more of a misunderstanding or mistake. The E. coli are drawn with spindly legs that attach to stalky midsections with sharp, geometric heads. The problem is that this design is based off the cellular structure of a virus. In reality, E. coli is a rod-shaped bacterium, so yeah, somebody wasn't paying attention in science class.
That disappearing blood splatter
"Total Rickall" begins with the Smith family sitting down to a typical breakfast. However, when Rick enters the scene, he immediately finds there's an extra person at the table. Sensing that something is amiss, Rick kills Uncle Steve, who was actually an alien trying to infiltrate the Smith family. After Rick blasts the monster, a huge bloodstain can be seen on the kitchen wall next to where the alien was shot. In the next wide shot, the blood is suddenly gone.
Rick and Morty's magical remote
In "Lawnmower Dog," the episode where Jerry asks Rick to make the family dog, Snuffles, more intelligent so he won't pee inside the house, Jerry gets up from sitting on the couch to deal with his furry friend. As he sits, he has the TV remote resting on the arm of his recliner. But by the time Rick leans over Snuffles, the arm of Jerry's recliner is shown in the background of the shot, but the remote is missing. Of course, that could simply mean the remote just disappeared into a parallel universe. With this series, who knows?
There's something strange about Gearhead
The Gear People are a species that have gears located throughout their entire bodies, acting as organs. The primary Gear Person in Rick and Morty is referred to as Gearhead by Rick, though that's not his real name.
In order to talk, three gears on Gearhead's face rotate, representing mouth movement. However, the placement of the gears is a bit inconsistent, especially in regards to layering. In the episode "Ricksy Buisness," Gearhead's bottom orange gear is shown to be simultaneously on the top of the right gear and behind the left gear. However, a profile shot later shows the bottom gear jutting out past the top two yellow ones, which wouldn't be possible considering it's placed in between those two.
Mr. Meeseeks doesn't destroy
When Mr. Meeseeks fails to take two strokes off Jerry's golf game in "Meeseeks and Destroy," he decides to summon even more Mr. Meeseeks to help get the job done. But since they only exist to take care of simple tasks, the Meeseeks can't die until Jerry can be taught something. As the Meeseek's existential pain increases, they begin to turn on each other due to their frustration with Jerry. Fed up, one of the Meeseeks summons a new Mr. Meeseeks and gives him the task of killing another Meeseeks. This is nonsensical because Meeseeks can't be killed with violence. Instead, they must complete their task. Still, with all the twisty lore in Ricky and Morty, it's hard to blame anyone — including the scriptwriters — for getting a bit confused.
Rick's car is inefficient
In "The Ricks Must Be Crazy," Rick is having some serious trouble with his car's battery. After popping the hood of his space-traveling vehicle, he reveals that his battery is actually a microverse — a small universe contained within a box. Rick has cultivated life inside his microverse, and he's given them devices called Gooble Boxes. Stomp on these things, and voila, you're producing energy. But instead of producing energy to sustain the needs of a civilization, the Gooble Boxes send the majority of the power to Rick's car.
The issue here is that this is an incredibly inefficient way of harvesting the power of a microverse. The way Rick collects energy is by taking a fraction of the energy produced by stomping on the Gooble Boxes. This stomping is a fraction of the energy used to keep his microverse citizens alive. This is a fraction of the energy contained in the food that the people eat. And the food is made by harvesting a fraction of the energy of the nearest sun. A much better way of harvesting energy would be to get energy directly from the microverse's sun. But who knows? Maybe Rick is a genius who's managed to work around the Law of Conservation of Energy. Otherwise, that just sounds like a bad car battery with extra steps.
Where'd Alan go?
"Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender" introduces the Vindicators, a group of Avengers-like, crime-fighting superheroes who protect the galaxy. As the group assembles around a conference table to plan their next adventure, Alan Rails is seen sitting next to Supernova. However, when Vance Maximus enters the room, Alan disappears and isn't anywhere to be seen. In the next shot, Alan returns to his initial spot, as if he never left. Since Alan's only power is said to be his command over ghost trains and not teleportation or invisibility, it's safe to say his disappearing act was completely unintentional.
Morty grows in size
In the episode "Morty's Mind Blowers," Morty explores the memories that he asked Rick to erase from his mind. Once inside Rick's memory archive, Morty lies down on a bench as Rick shows him a deleted memory. Everything appears normal at first, but upon closer inspection, Morty changes size after the first memory is finished playing through Rick's memory-playing machine. When comparing Morty's size before the scene cuts away to afterwards, it's apparent that Morty suddenly grew a bit. Unless Morty has got some Captain America super serum hidden somewhere, we're thinking one of the Rick and Morty animators got a little sloppy.
Mr. Meeseeks suffocates in Rick and Morty
In season one, we learn that Meeseeks are creatures summoned to perform a specific task, and once said task is complete, they vanish. Unfortunately for Meeseeks, existence is pain, so they try to complete these tasks as efficiently as possible so they can quickly be wiped from existence. Based on what we've seen previously, the only way for a Meeseeks to die is for them to complete their task. By this logic, any sort of violence or injury can't result in a Meeseek's death.
However, in the season four premiere, "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat," a Meeseeks dies of suffocation while in the vacuum of space. While it hasn't been expressly stated if Meeseeks can or can't survive without oxygen, this seems to directly contradict the idea that the Meeseeks are reliant on finishing their tasks in order to die.
What's up with the teleporting phone?
In the episode "The Old Man And the Seat," Morty attempts to stop Glootie, an alien intern, from developing a suspicious dating app. When Morty confronts Glootie, the alien can be seen holding his cell phone in his left hand. And when Morty grabs Glootie by his jacket and starts shaking him in frustration, Glootie's left hand falls to his side, still holding the phone.
However, a light starts flashing in time to ominous beeping that's emanating from within Glootie's right jacket pocket. And what exactly is producing the mysterious sound? Well, it's Glootie's phone making all that noise. Somehow, despite the fact it was last seen on his left side, it magically worked its way into Glootie's pocket. Is this some sort of teleporting phone? In the world of Rick and Morty, you can never be sure.
That's some questionable product placement
In the season four episode "One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty," some not so subtle product placement can be seen as Rick watches Morty scale the side of a cliff. An Arby's bag flies by on-screen while Rick casually chows down on what's obviously supposed to be an Arby's sandwich. What's strange is that the sandwich that Rick is eating is wrapped in what appears to be some form of yellow paper.
This literal throwaway gag is flawed because Arby's sandwiches typically come in one of two containers — a multicolored red and silver foil or a cardboard box. While a yellow sandwich wrapper isn't used at Arby's, this type of sandwich container is prevalent at McDonald's. Considering how blatant the product placement is in the first place, you'd think the people behind the scenes would be extra careful to distinguish the Arby's brand in the finer animation details.
Morty's mysterious Rubik's Cube
In "One Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty," Morty plays around with a Rubik's Cube while Rick and Mr. Poopybutthole discuss the events of the episode. While at first glance nothing appears amiss about Morty's game, a closer inspection reveals that the color combinations he's working on don't make any sense.
See, Morty rotates the same column several times, but with each turn, the cube just switches between two sets of color combinations. So unless he's using some intergalactic Rubik's Cube, the alternating color combinations that show up on the Rubik's Cube are impossible.
Pay attention to that picture
Generally speaking, the people who animate Rick and Morty pay close attention to even the smallest details, but every so often, you can't help but notice a tiny error. For example, when Jerry goes to his upstairs bedroom in the episode "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Story," there's a framed picture of what appears to be two non-detailed people on a hanging shelf to the left of the door. However, when Jerry opens said door, the people in the picture swap positions with each other after the shot changes. While not a significant issue, this mistake is notable due to the keen attention to detail that's normally paid to the decorations that adorn the walls of the Smith house.
Rick and Morty's changing Christmas lights
The season four episode "Rattlestar Ricklactica" opens with a shot of Jerry trying and failing to hang a string of multicolored Christmas lights on the outside of his home. As the scene shifts to a closer image of Jerry, the number of lights and their color order isn't the same as it was just a few seconds ago.
In the tighter shot, there are more than twice as many lights on the string than we saw just moments earlier. Plus, pay attention to the sequence of colored light bulbs on the strand in Jerry's hand. In the opening shot, the color pattern is inconsistent, but that's fixed in the subsequent shot. In other words, it's a Christmas miracle.
Those disappearing snake bites
In "Rattlestar Ricklactica," time-traveling snakes invade the Smith house in droves to try to assassinate Morty, so Rick and Beth work together to help fend them off. In the fight, Morty is simultaneously bitten on his face and his shoulder by two insurgent serpents. Seeing this, Rick hoists his grandson onto a table, but in doing so, the bite on Morty's shoulder disappears, almost as if Morty had done some minor time-traveling of his own between shots.
Rick and Morty need more snake skins
At the end of "Rattlestar Ricklactica," versions of Rick and Morty from the future give themselves materials so they can infiltrate snake society. For his part, Rick receives a stack of books about snakes and snake history. Plus, Morty is handed two armfuls of dead snakes so he can use their skins to make snake suits for Rick and himself.
In the following scene, where Rick is reading the books and Morty is sewing the skins together, things fail to add up. Rick has the book Snake Math on his desk, which wasn't in the stack that was handed to him. Additionally, Morty was given roughly a dozen dead snakes to make those serpent suits. However, as Morty is finishing their scaly outfits, it's obvious that he must've used way more snakes for his craft than he was handed. Each snake suit seems to have used at least 12 snake skins apiece. On top of that, there's a pile of spare skins on the counter behind Morty.