Solar Opposites Creators Address Possibility Of Rick And Morty Crossover
Could Rick and Morty visit the world of Solar Opposites? If Justin Roiland and Mike McMahan are to be believed, we probably shouldn't hold our breath. The duo took part in the Solar Opposites panel at this year's San Diego Comic-Con — held as a virtual event dubbed Comic-Con@Home — and during the panel, they indicated that it would take some pretty serious and atypical levels of corporate synergy for such a crossover to happen.
Solar Opposites is the most popular original series in Hulu's history, almost certainly due to its pedigree as the co-creation of Roiland, who cooked up the series with McMahan, a producer and writer on the smash hit Adult Swim animated series Rick and Morty. Roiland, of course, co-created that series with Community mastermind Dan Harmon. Roiland's presence as a voice actor is a major component of both shows; he voices both of Rick and Morty's titular characters, among others, as well as Korvo on Solar Opposites. Given that — and that the animation style of the two series is, to put it mildly, similar — fans have been wondering if perhaps that crossover might be in the cards in the future. Fortunately, Roiland decided that the Solar Opposites Comic-Con panel was a good time to address the issue, albeit in characteristically irreverent fashion. Not-so-fortunately, the answer appears to be a pretty unqualified "no."
Roiland and McMahan say that corporate red tape is a barrier to the crossover
For his part, Roiland expressed a Rick Sanchez-like exasperation with the corporate powers-that-be that would make a crossover between his two hit series difficult, if not next to impossible. "I mean, you've got to ask these giant, lumbering mega-corporations that have merged together like water droplets, just growing into a giant, ocean-sized whatever," he said. "Maybe if they finally just merge together into one giant thing, it'll happen."
From there, the whole response largely turned into a battle of zingers between the two creators, with McMahan joking, "Everybody knows that the first thing you do when you're creating a new show is you start to think about all the crossovers you can. We've already written the Transformers crossover, the Star Wars crossover, the Muppet Babies crossover, the Captain Crunch crossover. We have a bunch more crossovers to write in case we can ever do them."
Roiland then played at keeping the discussion on track, saying, "The thing is now, we've got to get these corporations on board to make nice with each other and lend the [rights to the intellectual property]. I don't know how it all works." McMahan then chimed in, "Yeah, don't ask us how to cross over with Rick and Morty. Ask us how to cross over Disney [owners of Hulu, with AT&T, which now owns Adult Swim parent company WarnerMedia]."
Roiland did offer up an idea in place of a Rick and Morty-Solar Opposites crossover: "I say let's focus our sights on the McNuggets. Remember the McNugget characters from McDonald's? That's the crossover we need to prioritize." McMahan then got one last joke in: "I know what we would do if we did a Rick and Morty crossover. It would be everybody sitting in a room and they would be writing emails asking the Power Rangers to do a crossover with Star Trek."
Could a Rick and Morty crossover with Solar Opposites still happen?
Obviously, these are a couple of very funny guys whose minds constantly go to weird and random places, which is part of what makes both Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites so special. We understand Roiland's pessimism; it's tough to get two corporations that own valuable IPs to play ball with each other simply for the sake of the fandom. We feel fairly safe in stating, though, that it's not quite as impossible as Roiland may have made it sound, and that it's probably not necessary for Disney to absorb AT&T to make it happen (not that we would put that past Disney).
In fact, we can back up that point with relevant history. In 2015, fans of The Simpsons had their faces blown away by an inspired couch gag in which the family's regular opening credits assembly in front of the tube is interrupted by none other than Rick and Morty, whose spaceship crash-lands in the living room, wiping out the entire family. A little mini-episode of Rick and Morty ensues, as the dimension-hopping pair set about fixing their blunder by bringing Simpson DNA to an alternate universe to be reconstituted.
If that crossover can happen, then we submit that anything's possible — and, funnily enough, Simpsons network Fox is now owned by Hulu parent company Disney, so there's kind of a precedent for that corporate synergy we mentioned earlier already. We wouldn't go so far as to say Roiland was blowing smoke at the Comic-Con panel, but it sure wouldn't surprise us to see Solar Opposites and Rick and Morty collide in some form, at some point in the future.