McDonald’s eventually bowed to pressure and brought it back in 2017 as a full-time addition to their menu, and, in February 2018, shipped a total of 20 million packets of the sauce to its restaurants. It was eventually bought by the DJ Deadmau5, who tweeted “im getting that f_ Szechuan sauce.” Consequently, Rick and Morty’s reference to the sauce being “f_ amazing” led to hungry fans bidding more than $15,000 for a 64-oz jar of the dark-hued necta. McDonald’s, attempting to burnish their pop culture bona fides, brought back Szechuan sauce, in honour of the show’s allusion, but did so for one day, at a limited range of locations. What even they could not have anticipated was the fan reaction. It was intended as a light-hearted allusion to Roiland’s obsession with the condiment. Such promotional foodstuffs are hardly unknown, and are mainly forgotten about mere weeks after they finish, but the show’s co-creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland considered it worth a joke. In the third season’s opening episode, The Rickshank Rickdemption, the protagonist, misanthropic mad scientist Rick Sanchez, makes a throwaway remark trying to find “Szechuan sauce” nothing authentically Chinese, but a limited-edition dip that McDonald’s created in 1998, to tie in with the release of the Disney animated picture Mulan. The adult-themed animation Rick and Morty is an exception to this. There are few television shows, no matter how successful they are, where one throwaway joke can lead to both a mass fan movement and, subsequently, to a major corporation bending over backwards to accommodate this fan movement.
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