Hulu’s new show Solar Opposites might be about green (and blue) skinned aliens, but it also briefly features a familiar yellow-skinned family: The Simpsons. The cartoon series from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland and writer/producer Mike McMahan features a brief flashback in which Terry, Korvo, Jesse and Yumyulack team up with the Simpsons to defeat the Monstars from the 1996 Michael Jordan movie Space Jam.
Cutaway gags like this are a staple of another Fox-produced cartoon series, Family Guy, but Solar Opposites doesn’t indulge in them frequently. The show follows a family made up of two asexual aliens and their respective replicant children, who crash-land on Earth after their own planet, Shlorp, blows up. The show derives most of its humor from the aliens inadvertently (and sometimes deliberately) wreaking violence and chaos on the people of Earth as they try to settle into their new suburban surroundings.
In the Solar Opposites season 1 finale, “Retrace-Your-Step-Alizer,” Terry and Korvo go back in time to when they first met on Shlorp and accidentally change events so that an annoying fellow alien called Vanbo (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas) ends up on Earth with them. During their attempts to fix history, Terry and Korvo get into a fight and manage to reconcile things by remembering some of the good times that they’ve had. Among those good times: defeating the Monstars in basketball with the help of the Simpsons.
Because of the altered timeline, Vanbo is present in all of the flashbacks that Terry and Korvo remember, which include not only things that happened in the show, but things that didn’t. As a caveat, the end of the episode reveals that everything has been taking place on the Pretend-O-Deck (their ship’s equivalent of Star Trek‘s Holodeck), so Vanbo never existed. That means it’s possible that the Simpsons team-up (and “the day when everything was a musical“) aren’t actually part of the show’s canon either.
This probably wasn’t the cartoon crossover that viewers were expecting to see first in Solar Opposites, given the talent and animation style that the show shares with Rick and Morty. But while Roiland has said he considers Solar Opposites and Rick and Morty to exist in the same multiverse, the odds of seeing that on screen are complicated by the two shows being owned by different parent companies. Meanwhile, Solar Opposites and The Simpsons are both under the Disney umbrella, making appearances like this pretty straightforward. Who knows – perhaps we’ll see the characters of Family Guy pop up in Solar Opposites season 2.
