Adult Swim
The latest episode of Rick and Morty on Adult Swim (Season 4 Episode 6) had a great post-credits scene that advertised the Story Train that Morty bought for Rick. But the website doesn’t exist when you try to visit it. What happened?
This article will have spoilers for Season 4 Episode 6.
UPDATE: Story-train.com now redirects to RickandMorty.com. Read the original story below.
There’s a Domain, But a Website Wasn’t Created for the Episode
When you try to visit www.Story-Train.com, as listed in the end credits, there actually isn’t a website there at all. This is surprising. Viewers were expecting to see something after the website was advertised at the end of Rick and Morty.
Adult Swim
But instead, you’ll just get an error message like this one:
www.story-train.com
This could be a meta joke about capitalism, now that we’re all trying to go and buy a Story Train during the coronavirus pandemic. I love how the show mentioned the virus and talked about how people are valuing shopping and consuming over everything else right now. Then after sharing this message, the show proceeded to push us to a website that doesn’t even exist. It seems fitting.
A dive into the Internet Archive shows that a webpage for Story-Train.com was never published in the past either. Internet Archive does point to something that was on the webpage back in 2013 that can no longer be viewed. (Internet Archive just shows the message: “This page is not available on the web because of server error.”) However, the domain wasn’t actually purchased by Turner until 2019 and nothing shows up on Internet Archive after that date.
Yes, according to WhoIs registries, the website was purchased back in 2019 and is on Time Warner’s name server. (Rick and Morty is distributed by Warner Bros.) But nothing was published on the website before tonight’s episode aired. If you go to Story-Train’s WhoIs information, you’ll see the following:
WhoIs
WhoIs shows that the website story-train.com was created on March 6, 2019, updated on March 2, 2020, and expires on March 6, 2021.
A more detailed WhoIs page reveals that Turner Broadcasting System owns the domain:
Turner owns Adult Swim, the network that airs Rick and Morty. So it looks like they did register the domain back in 2019, likely for this very episode. But a website and matching product were never created. Unfortunately, nothing has been put on the website for us to enjoy. Fans were hoping for Easter eggs on there from the episode or maybe even something to purchase.
Here are a few fan reactions to the missing domain:
Someone even checked to see if the domain could be purchased.
Searches for “story train” certainly spiked after the episode.
But unfortunately, it appears that there’s not a real-life story train you can buy at this time.
It’s certainly a disappointment. But the episode itself was amazing and more than made up for the lack of a Story Train website.
Rick and Morty has created websites before that were only used for specific episodes. The QR code on Rick’s funnel hat in Season 4 Episode 2 redirected to a real website. If you paused on the scene where Rick’s wearing the hat and followed the QR code, it really did take you to a webpage that was designed to sell you the hat Rick was wearing. The QR code took you to Shop.RickandMorty.com, which is selling a funnel hat with the same QR code on it. It was all very meta.
We didn’t get the same Easter egg this time around, but it seems kind of fitting that our capitalistic attempts were thwarted after watching Never Ricking Morty.
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