Season 5 of popular Fox musical series Glee.
The anime characters are first introduced when they kidnap Morty outside of the Smiths’ secret nightclub. Knowing that Morty has been relegated to a security position and largely ignored by Rick and Summer, they try to convince him to betray his family to help them reclaim the robots. When Morty refuses, they attempt to kill him, and he escapes only to be rejected by his family once again. The anime antagonists later return to infiltrate Rick’s operation and turn on him in an epic space battle before the rest of the family returns, armed with the giant incest baby of Rick and Morty season 5 episode 4, to save him.
Rick and Morty's anime creatures identify themselves only as “the rightful owners of the ferrets.” There are five of them, and their leader is a redheaded girl who calls herself Kendra, but little else is revealed of their origins or intentions throughout the episode. However, the characters do appear to reference several different anime productions. The episode’s plot references the anime television franchise Voltron, as well as the previous Japanese series Beast King GoLion, which ran in the early 1980s. Rick and Morty seems to derive the name “Gotron” by combining the titles of the two shows. Both shows involve a team of animated characters who assemble and weaponize giant robots, much like Rick’s obsession in “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion.”
The anime characters in Rick and Morty parody the Voltron, as well as poking fun at anime in general. They display the hallmarks of stereotypical anime characters, including punctuating sentences with odd facial expressions and sounds. Morty’s description of Kendra is “big eyes, plus signs for teeth, ends sentences with weird sounds that don’t fit,” the punchline being that these are all typical anime characteristics. Kendra herself appears to parallel the main character of another anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, which also involves giant fighting robots and from which the Rick and Morty episode takes its title.
With Rick and Morty’s history of referencing anime productions and the recent anime-style shorts released by Adult Swim, it is no surprise that the show included a full episode inspired by such media. However, the anime villains in “Gotron Jerrysis Rickvangelion” are unlikely to appear again. The self-contained nature of their episode’s events, as well as their limited development compared to recent villains like Mr. Nimbus of the season 5 premiere, point to Rick and Morty's anime characters being a one-off.