Recently reinstated showrunner of Community Dan Harmon returned to the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour to promote his new animated series Rick and Morty.

Harmon and co-creator Justin Roiland crafted the initial character set-up based on Doc and Marty from “Back to the Future” and other influences on the soon-to-be Adult Swim show include British sci-fi that Harmon grew up reading like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Doctor Who”, according to IGN.

Roiland described Rick and Morty as “little mini movies” filled with “homages to various sci-fi tropes.” Roiland continued to say Rick and Morty was “very ambitious for an animated show,” with very little re-use of elements to be used as a cost-cutting measure, according to IGN.

Roiland’s animation/voice acting background with shows like Gravity Falls, Adventure Time and other series lend him his abilities to do both the voice for Morty and Rick, while Chris Parnell and Sarah Chalke voice as Morty’s parents.

Upon working with Harmon, Roiland described him as, “a talented, genius writer, who writes some of the best dialogue that [he has] ever read, and [he] think that’s more important to Hollywood than anything else.”

The freedom and breathability for Harmon and Roiland to create come from Adult Swim’s Mike Lazzo. Harmon said that Lazzo “has the autonomy and the humility, the mental power to take a script, recognize it as what it is — which is a document, words on paper — then tell you what his reactions were as an individual as he read it… He never says ‘I don’t think people are going to like this,'” allowing Harmon to detach from big network constraints on writing that confrom to the needs of a mass audience.