Why Princess Ponietta From Rick And Morty Season 5 Episode 4 Sounds So Familiar

Well, there's really no way to summarize the fourth episode from "Rick and Morty's" fifth season without being gross, so let's just jump right in. In "Rickdependence Spray," Rick comes up against a group of cannibalistic underground-dwellers, or Chuds, which in this case are also part horse. Rick tries to collect a bunch of horse semen from a horse breeding mount. Problem is, Morty had already "used" the horse breeding mount. So instead, Rick accidentally created a bunch of oversized human sperm monsters.

We did warn you up top.

"Rickdependence Spray" actually has two characters who probably sound familiar: Princess Ponietta, the leader of the Chuds, and supermodel Kathy Ireland, who shows up near the end of the episode to wax philosophical about society's attitudes about masturbation. Both roles were voiced by none other than nineties teen idol Christina Ricci. Here's where you might know her from.

Christina Ricci made her name by playing characters who were various shades of twisted yet somehow managed to be endearing. That persona goes all the way back to her breakout role as Wednesday Addams in the 1991 live-action comedy "The Addams Family" and its 1993 sequel, "Addams Family Values." And the term breakout role doesn't really do the part justice: not only did Wednesday launch Ricci's career, she also had a profound effect on the actor's personality.

In a 2018 interview with The AV Club, Ricci talked about the formative experience of playing Wednesday at such a young age. "I feel very inextricably bound to her, because I feel, like, who can say how much influence being that person at that age for the amount of time that I was her, the amount of positive reinforcement from playing that character," she explained. "It's like a chicken-or-egg debate: Did I influence her as a character, or did she as a character influence my personality?"

Two years after "Addams Family Values," Ricci returned to the supernatural family comedy genre with her lead role as Kat Harvey in the 1995 live-action "Casper" movie. Although it's not technically the lead, it's a pivotal role in the story. Kat is the daughter of Dr. James Harvey (Bill Pullman), a paranormal expert who helps ghosts cross over to the afterlife, and she becomes Casper's best friend and eventually his romantic interest.

"Casper" was the first feature film to have a computer-generated lead character, which makes Ricci the first child actor to star opposite a CGI character. On-set, the production crew used mounted tennis balls as stand-ins for the ghost characters (via Slashfilm). For Ricci, who was around 13 when "Casper" was filmed and who was still relatively new to the film industry, the role was more challenging than most. 

"But to be that age and to be on the Universal lot making a movie for Amblin for nine months, it could be a lot worse!" she told The AV Club. "Bill Pullman was great to work with, everybody was fantastic. It was a really nice experience."

After "Casper," the teenage Ricci began the transition to more mature roles. In 1999, she starred alongside Johnny Depp as Katrina van Tassel in "Sleepy Hollow." 

In the movie, Depp plays Ichabod Crane, a New York City cop sent to Sleepy Hollow to investigate the mysterious Headless Horseman. There, he falls for Katrina, the daughter of a local farmer with a connection to the spirit world. (There's that haunted through line again.)

Katrina van Tassel wasn't Ricci's first "adult" role — she had earlier acted in adult-oriented films like "Buffalo '66," "The Ice Storm," and "The Opposite Of Sex" — but it was her first grown-up role in a blockbuster. For Ricci, one of the biggest challenges wasn't the acting itself, but the transition from child stardom to adult stardom. "I think when you become famous as an adult, you sort of decide who you are and who you want to be known as," she told the AV Club. "But when you're growing up and you're famous, you don't have that ability or that objectivity. So for me it was very confusing being a young adult and being a celebrity."

In 2003, Ricci shocked the world with her performance as Selby Wall, the fictional girlfriend of real life serial killer Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron). In the movie, Aileen is a sex worker whose clients repeatedly brutalize her. After she kills one in self-defense, she eventually begins robbing and murdering them, all with Selby's help. Once Aileen is caught, Selby takes a deal with the prosecution to testify against her, with Aileen's blessing. 

That's an intense role for any actor, but for Ricci, the biggest challenge was the fact that the character of Selby is a fictional creation of the film, who is completely different from Wuornos' real-life girlfriend. Without the advantage of research, Ricci had to base her performance entirely on the script itself. "I think that [Selby] is a very weak person and someone who wasn't intentionally cruel," Ricci told Movie Hole. "I don't think she was malicious but had such a strong desire to have a better life and to be happy that she couldn't see long term how sticking by someone and caring about someone else as much as she cared about herself would provide that."