Guess who’s back! That’s right, one of the most beloved and short lived sauces that ever graced a McDonald’s restaurant has been brought back. Szechuan sauce, a special teriyaki sauce originally introduced to celebrate the release of the Disney flick Mulan and was only available for a limited time back in 1998 and now it’s back! Release the celebratory balloons!
You can thank the Adult Swim show, Rick and Morty, for this unexpected, but welcome, return. In the season three premiere, Rick (an insanely intelligent scientist, emphasis on insane) made much ado about the delicious, savory, and unavailable sauce. In fact, the episode closed out with Rick making an impassioned speech about his obsession with the sauce.
Rick went on to say, “That’s my series arc, Morty! If it takes nine seasons!” Show creator Justin Roiland didn’t have to wait nearly that long, however, before McDonald’s reached out to him. Roiland snapped a picture of the gift McDonald’s sent him. Caution, the tweet does use some adult language, but considering the contents of the gift, it’s pretty understandable.
Holy shit. pic.twitter.com/vNEIfHTmNU
— Justin Roiland (@JustinRoiland) July 30, 2017
Along with a 64 oz bottle of the sauce of his dreams, McDonald’s included a note to Roiland, saying:
“Justin, We finally did it. It took months, but we’ve finally brought back some Szechuan Sauce. We’ll spare you the physics, but turns out, Dimension C-1998M is a dimension where it’s always 1998. 1998 every day. No smartphones, no social media. It’s a weird, scary place. But they’ve got Szechuan Sauce on the regular menu. So here we are with some precious cargo—the Szechuan Sauce you remember and some souvenirs from some of the dimensions we tried along the way. We wish we could’ve brought more sauce through, but we couldn’t risk keeping a portal like that open. Think about it, if you knew in 1998 that McDonald’s would have All Day Breakfast in 2017, would you really want to stay in 1998? Of course not. If we left the portal open, we’d have puka shells, bucket hats_and boy bands as far as the eye could see. It’s too risky, even for sauce_as delicious as this. A few lucky fans will also get to experience the glory, but the first bottle in this dimension is for you. Stay Schwifty, Chef Mike”
Yet that’s not all McDonald’s is up to concerning the Szechuan sauce. They also sent out a very vague, mysterious tweet with a photo of three other giant jugs of the sauce. On the photo, in very small print, McDonald’s wrote, “75% of all our Szechuan Sauce in the universe is in this picture.” We can only assume that Roiland was the lucky recipient of the other 25%, but we have to ask, which lucky fans will receive the rest? That seems destined to remain a mystery.
Honestly, though, it’s been so long since this sauce has graced McDonald’s that even though it’s not for us regular folk, there’s still the comfort that it does exist, somewhere in the world. And now there’s the hope that maybe, just maybe, we’ll have the chance to taste that delicious sauce one more time. And it’s all thanks to that mad scientist, Rick.
