Adult Swim rings in April Fool's Day with faux opening for 'Rick and Morty Babies'

Adult Swim may have already won April Fool's Day 2021 with a toddler-centric take on Rick and Morty's opening credits. Rick doesn't need a portal gun when he can just spit up swirling green doorways to other dimensions. 

The 50-second video for "Rick and Morty Babies" is a clear homage to Muppet Babies. Running from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the classic cartoon re-imagined Jim Henson's famous puppet characters as young kids going on all sorts of wacky adventures. If we're being honest with ourselves, it probably set the stage for Nickelodeon's Rugrats, whose first season premiered in 1991, the same year the original Muppet Babies concluded. 

To complete the illusion of de-aged R&M, Adult Swim, which had no comment on the matter, rebranded its YouTube channel to "adult swim junior" (a textbook definition of the word "oxymoron"). The infantile opening was actually part of a larger prank initiative, which took place at midnight early Thursday morning. Per Entertainment Weekly, Adult Swim aired an edited version of Season 2's "Total Rickall," in which "they re-dubbed the episode ... with kid actors and even changed the name of Mr. Poopy Butthole to Mr. Poopy Butt Butt." Now that's what we call commitment!

Check it out:

This isn't the first time the hit series has dared to enter an alternate reality of what could have been. In the past, Adult Swim delivered shorts inspired by anime (check them out here and here) and the X-Men cartoon from the 1990s.

Earlier this week, Adult Swim announced a June 20 premiere date for Season 5, which also unveiled its first trailer. In addition, the mature programming block has officially dubbed June 20 as "Rick and Morty Day," so get your Plumbuses ready. The first episode of Season 5 (written by Jeff Loveness) debuts that Sunday at 11 p.m. EST.