That 'Rick and Morty' Joke About 'South Park' and 'Minecraft' Was Spot On

The Rick and Morty Season Three finale episode “The Rickchurian Mortydate” had a reference to [...]

By Jamie Lovett

The Rick and Morty Season Three finale episode "The Rickchurian Mortydate" had a reference to Minecraft and South Park that was funny enough on its own, but it goes to a whole new level when you realize just how precise its placement was.

"The Rickchurian Mortydate" begins with Rick watching Morty play Minecraft on his computer. Rick casually quips about how the game has you "mining stuff to craft with and crafting stuff to mine with," poking fun at the circular nature of the game.

While Rick starts off acting like he's too good for a game like Minecraft, he changes his mind after becoming incredibly bored with the adventure that The President sends him and Morty on. Rick and Morty decide to skip out on the adventure, and they end up playing in a virtual reality game that Rick seems to have built to be pretty similar to Minecraft. Morty is disappointed when Rick gets an alert about a tiny, nuclear-capable civilization that just appeared in the Amazon, and Rick decides that they should go explore that instead.

When Morty asks "What about this?" in regards to the virtual reality Minecraft, Rick notes that "South Park did it four years ago." Morty replies that "They're fast," and Rick retorts with "Or we're slow" as a reference to Rick and Morty's perpetually delayed production schedule.

South Park did do an episode about Minecraft, titled "Informative Murder Porn," in which the kids on the show try to distract their parents by teaching them to play the game. And Rick's assertion that South Park aired their episode four years ago is almost uncannily accurate. The episode, which was part of South Park's seventeenth season, aired on October 2, 2013, four years before "The Rickchurian Mortydate" almost to the day.

The accuracy is so precise that some fans even believe that the one off-week in the broadcast schedule for Rick and Morty's third season was actually to make sure that the Minecraft joke was timed perfectly with when South Park aired their episode, although it more likely had to do with the off week falling on Labor Day weekend.

Rick and Morty will return to Adult Swim for Season Four in a long, long time.

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