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Long before Adult Swim got involved, Rick and Morty existed as a scrappy little animated short Justin Roiland made back in 2006 called The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti. It was basically a filthy, unfiltered parody of Doc Brown and Marty McFly, and you can still spot the DNA of the finished show all over it.
Wubba Lubba Dub Dub wasn't even in the script. The line called for Rick to yell 'Woob woob woob' like Curly from The Three Stooges, but Roiland is dyslexic and just blurted out the wrong words entirely. Everyone in the booth loved it so much it stuck, and the writers later decided it secretly means 'I am in great pain, please help me.'
While he was still playing Walter White on Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston actually auditioned for the role of Jerry Smith. He lost out to Chris Parnell, which honestly feels like the universe course-correcting, because it's very hard to imagine Heisenberg's voice coming out of Rick and Morty's most useless dad.
For the first two seasons the writers room was basically all guys running around having Nerf gun fights and Lego competitions between pitches. Season three changed that with the show's first gender-balanced room, and both Harmon and Roiland have said the female writers brought in that year were a huge part of why the Beth and Summer storylines got so much stronger.
The actual animation isn't done in-house, it's handled by a Canadian studio called Bardel Entertainment, who also work on shows like The Dragon Prince and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fittingly weird bonus detail, their CEO happens to genuinely be named Rick.
Mr. Poopybutthole technically first shows up in Total Rickall, but the production team went back and edited him into the memory scenarios shown in that episode's own opening scenes to sell the joke that he'd secretly always been part of the family. So depending how you look at it, he was either never there before, or he always was.
Adult Swim rolled out Rixty Minutes before it actually aired on TV, splitting it into 109 separate 15-second clips posted to Instagram. Nobody had done that before, which technically makes it the very first television episode premiere to happen on Instagram.
Doofus Rick's Morty is drawn to resemble actor Eric Stoltz, who was actually cast as Marty McFly and had already filmed a chunk of Back to the Future before the studio quietly swapped him out for Michael J. Fox. It's a deep-cut Hollywood reference hiding in plain sight in one of the show's saddest side characters.
That eyepatch-wearing Morty who shows up briefly back in season one turns out to be the mastermind running the entire Citadel of Ricks election storyline in The Ricklantis Mixup. The second the show confirms he's Evil Morty, For the Damaged Coda by Blonde Redhead kicks in, and the band's music has basically become his unofficial theme ever since.
In one episode Rick and Morty get interrupted mid-Minecraft session, and when Morty complains, Rick just shrugs that South Park already did this joke four years earlier. Morty replies that they're fast, and Rick corrects him that actually they're just slow, a cheeky nod to the fact South Park writes and airs episodes within the same week while Rick and Morty doesn't release anything until a whole season is finished.
