Because the English audio was taken from a separate source (often a screener), the sync was notoriously bad. In the infamous "pant shitting" scene, the audio for Rick's belch would arrive two seconds after his mouth moved. For a show where belching is a plot device, this made the pilot nearly unwatchable for purists, but oddly hypnotic for the rest of us. Why Did People Download It? Simple: Time.
Just don't expect the audio to sync during the credits. rick and morty s01e01 r5
"Is the R5 worth it, or should I wait for the 720p WEB?" "The Russian subtitles are burned in, but I don't care. Wubba lubba dub dub!" Today, you can stream the pilot in 4K HDR. The belches are crisp. The colors pop. Justin Roiland’s improvised stutters are perfectly encoded. Because the English audio was taken from a
The R5 of the pilot was not the final animation. Animators for House of Cosby's (the studio behind the show) had clearly finished the scenes, but the color grading was off. Characters didn't pop against the backgrounds. The lighting on Rick’s lab looked flat compared to the deep shadows of the broadcast version. It looked like a really, really good Flash game. Why Did People Download It
For two whole weeks, the only way to see Rick turn Morty into a neutrino bomb was to endure the R5. It was a right of passage. You watched it in 480p with artifacted shadows and dubbed audio because the hype was real. Community forums were flooded with threads like:
If you discovered Rick and Morty in late 2013 or early 2014, you likely didn't see the crisp, final broadcast version first. You saw the "Rick and Morty S01E01 R5." For the uninitiated (or those born after 2010), an R5 is a relic from the golden age of digital piracy. Unlike a TELESYNC (someone filming a screen in a theater) or a WEB-DL (the clean, final digital file), an R5 refers to a DVD release from Region 5 .