The giant Rick head is hitting the road again… and this time it’s marching in a parade.
Adult Swim announced that the Rickmobile will roll in the Dragon Con Parade on Saturday, September 5 in Atlanta — the massive Saturday-morning procession down Peachtree Street that’s become one of the biggest cosplay spectacles in the country.
And here’s the part that matters if you’re going: they want cosplayers to march WITH it. Rick and Morty cosplayers attending Dragon Con can apply for a spot walking alongside the Rickmobile in the parade. Selected marchers get a free weekend pass and a swag bag.
Applications are open here — no deadline was announced, but parade slots for a con this size won’t sit open long.
A Network That Never Shows Up (So We Did)
Here’s the thing that makes this genuinely notable: Adult Swim almost never does Dragon Con properly. In two-plus decades of the con being the unofficial capital of Adult Swim fandom, the network’s official presence amounts to a couple of full NYCC-style “Dragon Panels” back in 2008 and 2009 — one of which featured Mike Lazzo appearing as a lighthouse, which remains one of the most Adult Swim things a television executive has ever done — and a Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell / Squidbillies panel in 2015.
That’s it. That’s the list. The likeliest explanation has always been the calendar: Dragon Con lands squarely on Labor Day weekend, and the network’s actual humans are at actual barbecues.
So who was running the Adult Swim programming at Dragon Con all those years? Funny story. For a long stretch… it was us.
Credit where credit is due: the door was opened by the People’s Republic of Venture — the Venture Bros fan table that’s been a Dragon Con institution in its own right. They’re the reason ASC had a presence at the con at all: Shout out to Ann Marie and the PRoV crew for being awesome people and Venturoos. Everything that followed grew out of that connection.
And what followed was a run: from 2008 through 2015, ASC was part of the Dragon Con furniture — hosting Adult Swim and Swimcast panels through the Animation Track (Aqua Teen, Squidbillies, even a Dana Snyder panel) and moderating a string of Venture Bros panels along the way. The ACPN side of the house got its turn too, with three Back to the Future panels through the Classic Sci-Fi Track. There was even an ASC fan table with legitimately great swag, parked in a corner of floor B2 of the Atlanta Hyatt… until we did the math and traded table-sitting for more panels.
Which is why a giant Rick head rolling down Peachtree matters more than it sounds: by our count, it’s the biggest OFFICIAL Adult Swim presence at Dragon Con since at least 2015 — at a con where, for most of the network’s history, the Adult Swim programming was a fan operation. We’d know. We were the fans. (And if our count’s off, Dragon Con faithful, the comments are open — we’d love the correction.)
A Brief History of This Truck Ignoring Us
Some more personal history, because ASC has a complicated relationship with this vehicle specifically.
Back in 2017, the original Don’t Even Trip Road Trip spent the first weekend of October playing everywhere in the New York metro area EXCEPT the one building containing 200,000 people in Rick and Morty cosplay. Jersey City on the 5th. Staten Island on the 6th. Hoboken on the 7th… and then Hoboken AGAIN on the 8th. Those are, and we cannot stress this enough, the exact dates of New York Comic Con 2017. The giant Rick head orbited the Javits Center for four straight days and never came inside. Hoboken got it twice. We got a PATH train view.
They made it right in 2018. Sort of. The Rickmobile finally rolled up to Javits the following year for what can charitably be described as a reluctant appearance — and the merch prices suggested the truck was still mad about having to show up. We were there. We have receipts. Literally… those receipts were not small.
All of which is to say: watching this thing get a hero’s welcome in a Dragon Con parade eight years later is very funny to us specifically.
Meanwhile, Inside the Con
The Rickmobile isn’t the only Adult Swim business in Atlanta that weekend. Venture Bros co-creator Doc Hammer is set to appear — Dragon Con has been the unofficial spiritual home of Venture fandom for the better part of two decades, a culture the People’s Republic of Venture table helped build — and the tradition holds, with Venture programming running through the weekend. That includes Venture Bros trivia hosted by ASC’s own Rilo on Sunday night of the con.
Which means ASC is back on Dragon Con ground — a con we spent the better part of a decade programming for — with eyes on the parade, the panels, and whatever the giant Rick head does when nobody’s supervising it. Expect dispatches.
The Rickmobile’s last major outing was 2024’s “All Anime-rican Tour,” an eight-city run built around early screenings of Rick and Morty: The Anime. Whether Dragon Con is a one-off appearance or the first stop of something bigger, Adult Swim hasn’t said — but either way, the giant Rick head returns to the road the same week Adult Swim turns 25. Dragon Con runs September 3–7 in Atlanta.
