Rick and Morty Creator Addresses the Status of the Kanye West Episode

There may not be a bigger Rick and Morty fan on planet Earth than Kanye West, and the folks behind the acclaimed animated series admire the musician as much as he does them. He has made his love for the show clear, and the Rick and Morty creative team have gone as far as to officially offer West his own episode of the series. Of course, that was two years ago, and fans are still left wondering if the partnership with ever come to fruition.

This week, MSNBC released an interview with Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon that was conducted during the pandemic, and he was asked about working with Kanye West on the series. While Harmon wasn’t concrete about if or when the episode could happen, he did tell the story of West coming into the Rick and Morty offices and meeting with the entire writing team.

“Time will tell,” Harmon said. “I think that when Kanye signs on, as he did, to do an episode, it won’t just be Kanye doing a guest voice or Kanye doing a song. We agreed that it needed to be really interwoven with the Rick and Morty franchise having its own integrity and Kanye having his own, without spoiling any details of what that story would be. Suffice it to say, the end result was going to be a lot of original music.”

So West signed on to do the episode, but things weren’t able to get off the ground after that initial meeting. Not that there was anything wrong with the collaboration, though. It was actually going very well. They were actually breaking an entire episode “within minutes” but were eventually told by executives to reel it back in.

“At that point, that was when seven different corporations — and I don’t fault them for this because this is their job — they have to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. Slow down psychos. What are you doing,’” Harmon continued.

The chemistry is certainly there, and both sides want to make the episode happen. But legality does come into play at some point when dealing with music and fictional IP, so there are probably a few things that need to be ironed out before anything can happen.

So while there isn’t a firm date for a Kanye West episode of Rick and Morty, it sounds like there’s enough passion there for it to happen one day. There are still 60 more episodes of the series that have already been ordered by Adult Swim, so they’ve got time to figure it out.