I don’t think The Simpsons ever cynical. And I’m not sure Bartmania compares to the popularity of Rick and Morty because The Simpsons were always marketed as a family sitcom and Fox knew the potential was there to market Bart and his sisters to children.
The whole reason Blue Shirt Bart came about is because the show…

Who still measures success based entirely off of broadcast TV ratings?

At a certain point ironically selling out just looks like selling out with a little lip service. I mean, good for Roiland for making a character that’s useful for corporate shilling, I guess.

This show has a surprising aptitude for drawing you in just enough to be truly grating.

I was too young to see Simpsons during their prime in the 90s (especially during Bartmania) but I imagine it didn’t feel much differently than this. It’s pretty fascinating to me how such a strange show developed such a massive following — and how they’re able to directly inject the show’s cynicism into so many of the…

The overarching joke about Morty being completely ashamed to have fucked a horse-semen-collecting machine while Rick actually just went ahead and fucked an actual horse is reasonable.

The Simpsons wasn’t nearly as high concept, though.

Definitely among the stupidest plots for the show, but I still laughed. Of course I was also pretty stoned, thanks to my bootleg Rick and Morty grinder 

Did you watch the Inside the Episode after? Because the people who made it absolutely agree with you.

I come from the future (aka the Canadian leak of Episode 7). I have a message for all Rick and Morty viewers of the past: don’t lose hope! Have faith in the giant space incest baby! It was significant all along!

The opening scene with Morty realizing what the semen collector was had me in tears. The rest of it was okay, but the cold open was superb.

It was dumb as hell, but it also made me laugh a lot, so I can’t hate on this episode too much. 

There are jokes in here that Family Guy, at its absolute shittiest, wouldn’t touch

Is a “spetacle” similar to a spectacle?

I don’t know what world Zack lives in that this is considered coasting. I could not believe the cold open. The machine and the ending(the baby) are such insane things to depict in a cable tv show. Fucking wow. 

I’d honestly be less embarrassed getting caught fucking a horse fleshlight than being responsible for this episode.

“Spray” kind of reminded me of the SouthPark Bono/turd episode where it seemed they were mocking the Emmys and Comedy Central for paying them to push whatever boundaries of bad taste they thought they were breaking. This was a Grade “C” effort at best

I don’t blame any of you for not sticking around for the post-show interview snippets, but uh... wow. Everybody knew this was a bad episode. Everybody.

This was maybe not just the dumbest episode of Rick and Morty but I think the dumbest episode of TV I’ve ever watched other than maybe like... The Big Bang Theory. At least I actually laughed at this though xD

I kept thinking that at the end it will turn out that the whole situation was meant to let Rick give Morty shit about jizzing in the horse machine, but Morty gave it away before the climactic of the battle.