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Rick and Morty gets season 5 return date, plus new trailer

We have less than three months to go before mad scientist Rick leads his hapless family into more crazy adventures.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read

It's about damn time. Rick and Morty now has a season 5 release date and a trailer packed full of tempting peeks into the new episodes. And the people at Adult Swim obviously know how rabid their fans are for this kind of news -- captioning the YouTube video with "Now you can start asking us about season 6."

The season's release date is June 20, at 11 p.m. ET/PT. The trailer, set to music by The White Stripes, only reveals snippets, but that old Rick and Morty craziness is back in full swing. 

Rick and granddaughter Summer have a hilarious fight over the phrasing of that old horror-movie cliche: "It's quiet. Too quiet." Some kind of sea lord pulls his dolphin-drawn, octopus-driven carriage up to Beth and Jerry's house. The family ends up dressed like Power Ranger-type superheroes, all in different-colored costumes, ziplining through futuristic metallic tunnels. Morty gets punched in the face by a weird dog-looking alien. You know, typical stuff in the Sanchez-Smith household.

The fourth season of Rick and Morty ended way back in June 2020. But it didn't seem like a full 10-episode season, thanks to a four-month split in the middle and a world that changed dramatically between the season's two halves. 

Five episodes of the Adult Swim animated comedy aired in 2019, but the latest five weren't shown until spring 2020, airing as the world faced the coronavirus outbreak. The controversial sixth episode, Never Ricking Morty, even included a mention of the virus, with Rick telling his grandson to look "straight into the bleeding jaws of capitalism" and buy things, since "no one is out there" shopping.

The show famously got a massive renewal of 70 episodes back in 2018, so there are at least 60 more to go. In 2020, co-creator Justin Roiland told Slashfilm he didn't think the fifth episode would be split in half like the fourth was, but that it was up to Adult Swim, not him.

Earlier this month, on the one-year anniversary of Nintendo's popular Animal Crossing: New Horizons game, Adult Swim released a video placing Rick and Morty in the Animal Crossing world. To no one's surprise, it gets weird.

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