To be quite frank, one does need to have a rather significant amount of intellect to comprehend Richard & Mortimer. Why, just yesterday I attempted to show my cousin (who has just entered his seventh year) the episode where the titular character, Rick, turns himself into a pickled cucumber. He laughed at the mere thought of a man become fermented vegetable, but I sat there watching, lamenting the deeper message: the death of intellectual pursuit, the desensitization to societal filth, muck, and mire, and the shameless abandonment of psychological understanding.

At the end my cousin turned to me and proclaimed, “I am the scientist that was once named Rick, but I have now become a pickled cucumber. Look at me, I am pickled Rick!”, and I could not help but smile, not that the line he had just recited was humorous, but at the realization that this, in front of my very eyes, was the sum of what the episode had just warned against.

I cannot blame my cousin just as much as a man cannot blame a dog for consuming its own bile. It merely does not know any better, and what could be said about a man who judges things he does not have merit to judge?