Feel old yet? “Rick and Morty” will already be ten years old in 2023! Series creator Justin Roiland has more to offer, however. “Solar Opposites”, where five aliens land on Earth and experience the craziest shit, is at least as good.
Like “Rick And Morty”, the series “Solar Opposites” was created by Justin Roiland and is included in the Disney+ subscription in Germany. There you can watch all three seasons.
WHAT IS “SOLAR OPPOSITES” ABOUT?
After a meteor hits their home planet, the Solar Opposites are stranded on Earth by necessity. Due to disagreements about how to proceed, arguments are inevitable between the four-member team around leader Korvo, the psyched hipster Terry and the two younger replicants Yumyulack and Jesse. And then there’s the baby-like Pupa, which can terraform entire planets – provided it reaches the final stage of its transformation. Until then, it stuffs itself with sweets and pranks both the team and the neighbours in the small American town where the aliens have taken shelter.
Meanwhile, the young offspring go to school and torture fellow students (for research purposes, of course), while the rest try to get the broken spaceship up and running again. If only it weren’t for the humans, whose racism, egomania and astronomical stupidity make them the most annoying creatures in the galaxy.
Justin Roiland’s cult series “Rick and Morty” hit like a bomb in 2013, not least because he doesn’t mince his words. There are swear words every few seconds, swearing non-stop and the humour gets blacker and blacker episode after episode. Now all you have to do is combine this with aliens who on the one hand want to indulge in drugs and the good life on Earth, but on the other hand don’t shy away from using sci-fi weapons against everything and everyone. Voilà – you have “Solar Opposites”.
So Roiland’s second series is in absolutely no way inferior to the first, certainly not in terms of humour and pop-cultural references in every single episode. Surreal images, edgy gags, crazy meta-allusions and a good portion of violence round off the animation series perfectly.
THOUGHTFUL STORIES
However,
“Solar Opposites” is not just about stringing together one gag after another. The stories are also really well written and show the fans the human stupidity again and again. The aliens arouse ten times more sympathy. While “Rick and Morty” (mostly) restores the status quo after the end of each episode and the individual episodes rarely build on each other, this is different here. A wall in which shrunken people are trapped, for example, runs through all the seasons.
The colourful animated series is thus much more stringent or purposeful, also because there is a mission to work towards with the spaceship repair. The fact that pop culture references occur much more frequently makes “Solar Opposites” stand out enough not to be a cheap “Rick and Morty” copy. A crossover of both series would probably be the best thing ever.
