‘Rick and Morty’ and ‘Inside Job’ Fans Can’t Decide Whether Rick Sanchez or Rand Ridley Would Win in a Fight
No one who hasn’t watched Rick and Morty or Inside Job could possibly comprehend how the most apocalyptic “Who would win in a fight?” hypothetical in cartoons is a showdown between two skinny, middle-aged alcoholics.
The mid-2010s to early 2020s was the absolute golden age for aged, gray-haired scientist lead characters in animated shows that attract adult audiences. Between Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty and the canceled but cult-beloved Netflix original Inside Job, many of the most popular cartoon protagonists and antiheroes of the past decade have all owed a debt to Christopher Lloyd and Dr. Emmett Brown for proving that wise-cracking, seemingly all-powerful inventors with gray hair and underaged sidekicks could captivate large audiences of adult nerds. The mad scientist archetype is, obviously, almost as old as Mary Shelley, but, in recent years, those characters have been on a bigger heater than Frankenstein himself when he first exclaimed, “It’s alive!”
There’s a popular fanart floating around that shows Rick Sanchez palling around with Randall “Rand” Ridley, the co-founder of the shadow corporation Cognito Inc, in a forest that bears a strong resemblance to the fictional town of Gravity Falls. Over in the Rick and Morty subreddit, this image inspired one fan of both the Adult Swim series and the sadly canceled Netflix show to pose a pressing question: If the two friends ever fought to the death, who would come out on top? The answer, of course, is fans of cartoon crossovers — this would be our Godzilla vs. King Kong.
Some Rick and Morty fans needed a little more context for this conjectural showdown — Inside Job was a workplace comedy based on the premise of, “What if every conspiracy theory was completely true?” The show centers around the employees of one of the six organizations that control society from the shadows as well as the company’s ex-CEO, the brilliant, boozing and misanthropic Rand Ridley, played by Christian Slater. Among Ridley’s achievements (beyond influencing every major world event) are attempting to blow up the sun and inventing a device that can alter the fabric of reality.
As for whether Rand Ridley could best Rick Sanchez, the Rick and Morty subreddit had an obvious favorite, though they were mostly open to other interpretations. “Rick,” chose one user, “but Inside Job is such a fantastic show, I wish it never got cancelled.” Another countered, “Depends on if Rand has the reality machine, Death Battle style where both get all their gear.”
“I guess more powerful would come down to the situation,” another theorizer wrote. “Is this some earth-bound situation, one that would be in the purview of the shadow government and it’s deep ranks of bureaucrats, or is the situation extra-terrestrial or extra-planar, in which case it would be in Ricks wheel house?”
Some commenters thought that Rick’s dominance was a no-brainer, as one fan called the matchup, “Coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb.” Though a few more Inside Job fans showed up to plead Ridley’s case for why he could hold his own against the smartest man in the Central Finite Curve, they needed some caveats: “Rick. Without breaking a sweat,” one such user wrote, adding, “Drinking contest is too close to call though.”
However, many fans believe that the real measure of a man isn’t how tough he is in a fight, but how well he cares for his family, with one more wondering, “What I wanna know is whose daughter needs more therapy.”
