By The current seventh season of Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty” marks the first season not to feature Justin Roiland providing any voice work, though he is still credited as co-creator and executive producer.
Soundalikes Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden have taken over the Rick and Morty roles for the new run which is the lowest-scoring season so far amongst both critics and audiences on review aggregate sites.
Amongst the audience reviews the reaction is sharply divided with a lot of 5-star reviews from hardcore fans, and a bunch of 1-star reviews with a lot of those angry over Roiland’s dismissal.
Speaking with Gizmodo recently, co-creator Dan Harmon and showrunner Scott Marder spoke about the vocal fan community and whether they’re aware of all the vitriol online. Harmon says:
“The internet is so Balkanized now. Even within individual comment sections, let alone separate venues, the only rule is complete polarity: everything has to be the absolute worst or the absolute best. Even people that say something’s mediocre have to say it with such vehemence that you would think their blood vessels were bursting…. I kind of have to have a general rule that I’m not googling anything about this show.
Stuff will trickle through to me; somebody will say, ‘Hey, the spaghetti episode [‘That’s Amorte’] is very well-received,’ and they’ll point me in the direction of, for instance, the Rick and Morty subreddit, where mental health seems to be still having a last stand… they were just having a nice, lively discussion as if they were just, you know, Star Trek fans discussing a show that they love. And it was very uplifting and wonderful.”
As to the fan reaction to the new voices, he says “it seems that we were successful in that mission” in that most fans were fine and found the characters were still very much alive: “I think that most people seem to be saying, Okay, it sounds like Rick, and it sounds like Morty, let’s proceed.”
Marder added that: “I generally was really pleased with the response… felt like way more of a warm hug than I expected.” The new season of “Rick and Morty” continues to air on Sundays.
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