When Tourism Comes to You (But You Still Have to Go Get It, Dawg): The Rickmobile and Transmedia Tourism/Fandom

Abstract

This paper analyzes the Rickmobile as a site of mobile media pilgrimage and fan tourist destination. The Rickmobile is a mobile, pop-up merchandise car themed and designed around eponymous Rick Sanchez from the cult cartoon Rick and Morty. As a material fan object and as an object of fan tourism, the Rickmobile becomes a site of overlapping discourses surrounding the historical context of cult merchandising, media pilgrimage, and social media ‘pre-textual’ fan reporting (Hills 2015b). At the same time, it problematizes traditional fan studies’ examinations of active and passive fan labor. This paper argues that the Rickmobile functions as a pseudo transmedia extension, allowing fans to create one type of active Rick and Morty fan experience, but to be used as a different type of passive industrial Rick and Morty experience.