I think everyone wishes this sequence of interstitial promotional bump clips were longer. Produced for Adult Swim by the company Human Element, & directed by Paul B Cummings with Samuel Brownfield as director of photography, these three *very* short scenes aim to tickle the nostalgic fancy of Back to the Future fans & hardcore R&M fans alike, with less than half a minute of the all-time greatest wrinkly inventor fanservice ever to grace the small screen.
Right off the bat, pretty much everything in C-132 looks a bit more fresh-&-shiny than what we're usually shown: C-137's garage never looks quite this tidy. As for old C-132 himself, his shirt & labcoat are spotless; no green drool stains in sight. Overall, the C-132 reality seems unnervingly sanitized in comparison to the R&M realities we usually see.
Harkening back to Rick & Morty's earliest roots, we see Back to the Future's original Doc Brown, Christopher Lloyd, give an aggressively live-action performance as an alternate version (C-132) of TV's Rick Sanchez. (For those who might not know, Rick's character was originally inspired by Doc Brown & based on a subversion of the Doc Brown \ Dr Who trope of a superficially deranged scientist dragging along unwitting minors on outlandish misadventures.)
Apart from an inhuman amount of hairgel / oil, Jaeden Martell looks about as much like Morty as anyone with a healthy body:head mass ratio possibly could. In the cartoons, Morty *does* wear a disgusting amount of hair product, but when filmed in real life under the bright lighting suitable for cameras, the reflectivity is bizarrely high, making this "Morty" look like a psychopath &\or plastic replacement. (Perhaps if imagined as one of Rick's robotic Morty stand-ins, the look is just right?)
As for the kid's acting, there's barely enough footage to go on, but I feel the direction given to both actors should have included a bit more emphasis on both characters' constantly recurrent undertones of abiding depression & ennui.
Those are really my only three (very minor) criticisms of this otherwise masterful reenactment of a now classic cartoon duo: It's all inhumanly shiny, unusually peppy, & WAY TOO SHORT!
Ultimately, the three clips combined total less airtime than a single 30 second commercial. While these exceedingly brief interstitial clips are a beloved hallmark of Adult Swim's promotional efforts, it would have been wonderful to see two-to-four times as many of them... or even a live-action episode.
