Which film series did Doc and Mharti parody?

Doc and Mharti parody the Back to the Future film series. The pair are exaggerated versions of Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown and Marty McFly, the scientist and teenager at the center of the time-travel trilogy.

Justin Roiland created The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti in 2006 for Channel 101, a Los Angeles short-film festival co-founded by Dan Harmon. The original cartoon was deliberately crude and provocative, but its central pairing—an eccentric older inventor and his anxious young companion—provided the foundation for Rick and Morty.

When Adult Swim later approached Harmon about an animated series, Roiland revived the Doc-and-Mharti concept. The names and characters were changed to Rick Sanchez and Morty Smith, while the relationship expanded into a dysfunctional grandfather-and-grandson adventure across alternate dimensions.

The common mix-up is to treat Rick and Morty as an entirely unrelated concept. Although the finished show developed its own mythology, humor, family structure, and science-fiction ideas, its direct creative ancestor is unmistakably a parody of Back to the Future.