McDonald’s is bringing back its beloved (?) Szechuan sauce — served briefly alongside nuggets during the summer of 1998 as a promotion for Disney’s Mulan — in honor of Rick and Morty. Wait, what? Turns out the quest for vintage McNuggets sauce is a major plot point in season three of the show — it is, in fact, Rick’s driving motivation — and soon we, too, may have the opportunity to live the dream, the dream of eating McNuggets dipped in Szechuan sauce. Some of us, anyway.
After the show’s unexpected April premiere, fervent fans of either the show or the sauce (what is real anymore?) started an eBay bidding war for an unopened 20-year-old jug of the stuff, which ultimately sold at the totally reasonable price of $14,700. Of course, McDonald’s execs saw an opportunity, and the chain hinted that a Szechuan-sauce revival was not outside the realm of possibility. “We never say never, because when our customers speak, we listen,” a McSpokesperson told the Huffington Post. Fast-forward to earlier this month — these things, they take time — Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland told reporters at San Diego Comic-Con that McDonald’s had promised him a container of the sauce, and you’d better believe McDonald’s honors its word.
On Sunday, Roiland tweeted several atmospheric pictures of the sauce, which arrived with a note explaining the precariousness of the situation. “We wish we could have brought more sauce through, but we couldn’t leave a portal like that open,” wrote McDonald’s chef “Mike.” “It’s too risky, even for a sauce as delicious as this.”
While Roiland gets the first bottle, the note suggested that “a few lucky fans” would also “get to experience the glory,” and indeed, yesterday morning, McDonald’s tweeted a photo of three more jugs of the sauce and a plea to “retweet or like” to “bring them back to the present day.” So far, more than 50,000 people have responded to the call.
So, the sauce is coming back (in some capacity), though there is no specific information about where or when or for how long it might return.
