McDonald’s have brought back Szechuan sauce, but there’s a Rick & Morty-esque catch

Who would have thought that one of the biggest talking points from a TV show would be an obscure fast food condiment?

When the first episode of Rick and Morty Season Three aired (briefly, via an online stream, and now fully available on Netflix), searches for 'McDonald's Szechuan sauce' skyrocketed. The sauce, a limited edition item used to promote the Disney movie Mulan, was only available for a short time in 1998, before disappearing into the ether. Then, after 'The Rickshank Rickdemption' debuted, fans had the taste - nay, the hunger - for that darn Szechuan sauce. They scoured high, they scoured low, but apart from a few ancient examples, the sauce was nowhere to be found. That was until Justin Roiland, co-creator of Rick and Morty, received a special delivery from McDonalds. https://twitter.com/JustinRoiland/status/891521911460470784

It's a goddamn huge bottle of Szechuan sauce!

McDonald's have clearly been paying attention to all the fuss over its nearly-20-year-old sauce, sending Roiland a 4lb bottle of the stuff.

The bottle appears to have arrived in a very sci-fi case, emblazoned with the words 'Dimension C-1998M'.

Accompanying the sauce was a message from someone called 'Chef Mike'.

The message reads:

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 sou-venirs 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.

So it seems that, at least for now, Mr Roiland is the only one with the sauce (figuratively and probably literally) on his hands right now, but if Chef Mike is to be trusted, we could all be getting a taste of that sweet, sweet, Szechuan soon enough.