Because nostalgia for the early 2010s piracy scene is now a subculture. And within that subculture, "Rick Potion #9" is a shibboleth.
Wubba lubba dub dub.
You’d try to play it in QuickTime. Nothing. You’d try Windows Media Player. Green screen. You’d install VLC, and it would stutter every time the Cronenberg monsters moved, because VLC’s software VP9 decoder in 2015 wasn’t great. You’d spend an hour learning how to use ffmpeg to transcode it to x264, losing quality in the process. rick and morty s01e06 libvpx
Rick would approve. He doesn’t care about authenticity. He cares about functionality. The replacement Summer pours cereal just as well as the original Summer. The replacement Jerry is just as useless. The replacement MP4 plays on your iPhone just as well as the original MKV.
In the early 2010s, the digital distribution landscape was fragmented. Adult Swim’s official streaming apps and website used adaptive bitrate streaming. For high-efficiency playback, they often encoded their library in VP9 via libvpx. This was a smart, forward-thinking choice: smaller file sizes, no licensing fees, decent quality at low bandwidth. Because nostalgia for the early 2010s piracy scene
By the third act, the world is unrecognizable. Humans have become grotesque, praying-mantis hybrid monsters. Summer is one of them. Jerry is fused with furniture. And Morty realizes the horrifying truth: Rick cannot fix this.
Furthermore, the episode’s thematic core—the acceptance of an imperfect copy as reality—has become a metaphor for streaming itself. When you watch "Rick Potion #9" on HBO Max (or whatever corporate husk holds the rights today), you are watching a re-encode of a re-encode. It has passed through multiple compression generations. The grain is gone. The color is shifted. It is not the original broadcast, nor the untouched web-dl. It is a copy of a copy. You’d try to play it in QuickTime
"Rick Potion #9" is often cited as the episode where Rick and Morty stopped being just a vulgar Back to the Future parody and became a existential horror show wrapped in burping catchphrases. It’s the episode that ends with the Smith family shattered, a planet Cronenberged, and Rick casually abandoning Dimension C-137 for a replacement reality.