Fans of popular animated TV series Rick and Morty have yet another reason to get excited ahead of the show’s fourth season this November.
That’s because today, acclaimed handheld synthesizer manufacturer Teenage Engineering announced a special new partnership with Rick and Morty co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, a new special edition synth called the PO-137.
The new synth is part of the company’s Pocket Operator lineup, tiny calculator-like devices that come with onboard drum machines, a vocal synthesizer, and a built-in microphone. Apart from various show-inspired sounds, the PO-137 will include eight different Rick and Morty characters performed by Roiland, giving music makers a wide assortment of cool new tones to play with.
The PO-137, like all of the company’s Pocket Operator devices, will feature a built-in LCD display, a small folding stand for ergonomic setup, 120 seconds of sample memory for storing microphone-recorded sounds, and a built-in alarm clock — because why not?
You probably won’t have to pay much to get your hands on this new handheld synth: Current models of the Pocker Operator will run you between $49 and $89, and it seems unlikely even this special edition version will cost much more than that. After all, these are very simple devices.
Interested in snagging a PO-137? Set your calendars and keep hitting refresh. The new synth will hit Teenage Engineering’s online store in July and will ship to consumers in November — hopefully just in time for the much anticipated new season.
Until then, those who are looking to make rad Rick and Morty inspired jams will have to do what they’ve always done: Chop up bits and bobs from the show itself.
Once the synth is out, we look forward to hearing the awesome lo-fi electronica that fans of the show come up with. Who knows, if someone makes a track that’s good enough, maybe Harman and Roiland would feature it in the show, much in the same way The Simpsons recently featured a song by Simpsons-inspired hardcore band Okilly Dokilly in the end credits of an episode.
Dare to dream, Rick and Morty fans. Soon, the power of the animated universe can be yours.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?