Rick and Morty Season 9 Brought Back Its Best Stephen King Parody 3 Years Later

With its latest season 4 outing, Rick and Morty brought back the show’s funniest Stephen King parody with another jab at the author’s first (and last) feature film as director. Rick and Morty brings back long-forgotten gags all the time, so it shouldn’t come as a major surprise that season 9 features callbacks to some classic outings of the animated comedy. However, Rick and Morty’s reference to one particularly infamous Stephen King movie kept a uniquely random, and funny, series tradition going.

In season 9, episode 4, “A Ricker Runs Through It,” Morty is disturbed to discover that Reese, a mutual friend of his and Rick, is really just a sentient password storage space for his unreliable grandfather. Morty attempts to free Reese from his fate before Rick can dispose of him and replace him, but this soon gets out of control and, before long, a planet of vodka-producing hogs is holding the Smith family hostage to get their long-awaited revenge on Rick. It’s in this context that the show parodies a classic Stephen King story.

Rick and Morty Season 9 Episode 4 Parodies Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive

When the Smith household’s appliances attack them, the ensuing bloody melee is an obvious nod to the 1986 King adaptation Maximum Overdrive, a gory horror movie wherein electronic appliances and other machines start attacking humans and murdering them in a variety of inventive ways. While there are plenty of Stephen King books deemed unfilmable by Hollywood, Maximum Overdrive had the unique honour of being the only screen adaptation of the author’s work to be directed by King himself.

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A campy, ludicrously gory blend of action, gross-out horror, and comedy, Maximum Overdrive was a critical catastrophe upon release. Earning only $7 million on a budget of $9 million, Maximum Overdrive was dubbed “heavy-handed,” “hackneyed and stiff,” and “a mess” by one critic. King himself called the project a “moron movie,” saying that directing was a learning experience, but it mostly taught him that his talents lay in the pen and not behind the camera.

In recent decades, Maximum Overdrive has become something of a cult classic among bad movie aficionados thanks to its absurd premise and its memorably nasty opening sequence, even though the movie undeniably runs out of steam soon after this ludicrous setup. While there are plenty of better Stephen King stories out there, Maximum Overdrive clearly made an impression on the Rick and Morty writing staff, judging by the show’s many references to the largely forgotten ‘80s cult curio over the years.

Rick and Morty Has Spoofed Maximum Overdrive Before

Rick and Morty has brought up Maximum Overdrive before more than once, most notably in season 7, episode 6, “Rickfending Your Mort,” which features an infamous “Maximum Overdrive with Clothes” sequence where ravenous garments attempt to kill Rick and Morty in an alternate reality. Weirdly, the movie was also momentarily referenced only a week earlier in season 9, episode 3, “Rick Fu Hustle.”

During Rick and Morty’s climactic kung fu fight with a martial arts master, the three combatants produced a string of increasingly silly fight moves. One such move was a “Maximum Overdrive Punch” that brought nearby machines to life and set them on one’s opponent. Before this, back in Rick and Morty season 2, Rick’s spaceship went rogue to supposedly “protect” Summer, firing on dozens of onlookers in the process in a gory sequence reminiscent of Maximum Overdrive’s opening scene.