Here’s the Sci-Fi Genre That ‘Rick and Morty’ Season Eight Parodies First in the Sneak Peek
by Keegan Kelly · Cracked.comThe rough-cut first look poked fun at a classic sci-fi set-up
October 17, 2024
Finally, Rick and Morty will take on the genre that’s been begging for a masterful, Dan Harmon-style parody – true crime podcasts.
Of course, the exploitative murder porn podcasting sphere is such an easy target that Rick and Morty needs fewer than fifteen seconds to tear it apart, so, in the Rick and Morty Season 8 sneak peek that Harmon and his team debuted at New York Comic Con earlier today, the series tackles a popular and significant subgenre within the science fiction canon that was long overdue for a part-parody-part-pastiche in the Rick and Morty fashion. After spending the last seven seasons dissecting and satirizing so many tropes, literary devices, genres and franchises ranging from Terminator to Die Hard to the entire idea of a heist movie, Rick and Morty Season 8 will return to its roots as it lands on a classic sci-fi set up after wandering aimlessly towards it for hundreds of years in a cryogenically-induced hibernation.
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In the rough-cut "first look" that Adult Swim posted on their YouTube channel just minutes ago, Rick and Morty stumble upon a floating “cryoship” full of frozen space colonists fleeing their stripped-clean planet in suspended animation, à la the Arthur C. Clarke short story and eventual novelization Songs of a Distant Earth and its many derivatives – see the full clip below:
The “cryogenically frozen colonists” premise is practically as old as popular science fiction itself, which makes it surprising that Rick and Morty didn't already incidentally parody the common plotline before Season 8 – Clarke's 1958 short story pioneered the specific set-up of frozen colonists searching for a new world after the old one fell to ruin, but the whole concept of suspended animation has been a part of the sci-fi genre since as early as the 1939 Buck Rodgers film, in which the titular adventure hero spends 500 years in a technologically induced slumber. In fact, just about every classic sci-fi franchise of the 20th century tinkered with the idea of cryo-sleep at some point, with the Alien series, Planet of the Apes and Star Trek all making use of the imaginary technology.
In recent years, the specific, Songs of a Distant Earth-style “save humanity by sending colonists frozen in tappable glass pods careening through the cosmos for centuries” set-up has been used in prestige films like Interstellar and much shittier movies like the 2016 Chris Pratt/Jennifer Lawrence sci-fi/romance Passengers. Presumably, Harmon and the Rick and Morty writers have seen every iteration of this plot throughout popular film, TV and literature, both the good and the bad, and they will condense down the perfect parody/pastiche to premiere with Season 8 sometime in 2025.
Now if only we could find a glass pod to crawl into while naked for some reason and sleep through the unbearable wait until the season premiere.
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