Adult Swim Series’ Surprise Episode Makes a Big Deal of Disney’s “Mulan” Fast Food Tie-In

Update: As you may have heard last year, McDonald’s ended up bringing back the famed Szechuan sauce for a limited run… and it did not go well. However, today McDonald’s announced that it had distributed 20 million sauce packets to locations nationwide as of today. So, if you’ve been craving that Mulan dipping sauce for the past 20 years, today’s your lucky day!

Previously:

For April Fools Day (sidenote: see Alex’s “holiday” effort here), Adult Swim and the creators of Rick and Morty decided to surprise fans by releasing the first episode of the show’s third season. It’s a pretty clever and exciting move, to be sure… but where does Disney factor into this? In part of a rant by Rick at the episode’s end (and a plot point throughout), he oddly gets on the topic of a limited edition Szechuan dipping sauce McDonald’s stocked as a tie-in to Disney’s Mulan in 1998. In fact, he actually makes a pretty huge deal about it, as you can see below:

Despite Rick’s apparent madness in this scene, what he speaks of is a real thing. Don’t remember? That’s what YouTube is for:

This being 2017, the Internet has already taken to demanding that the fast food giant bring back this special McNugget sauce ASAP. Meanwhile, others have suggested the upcoming release of the live-action Mulan as the perfect opportunity for the Szechwan sauce to makes its glorious return. Unfortunately, Disney broke ties with McDonald’s back in 2006 over concerns of childhood obesity among other things. Moreover, recent movie tie-in toys, such as last summer’s Finding Dory, have been available at Subway.

So while a Mulan-themed McDonald’s Szechwan sauce isn’t very likely, maybe just maybe fans of Rick and Morty or just of McNuggets can make their condiment dreams come true some day soon.

Kyle Burbank
Kyle is a writer living in Springfield, MO. His deep love of Disney and other pop culture finds its way into his stories, scripts, and tweets. His first book "The E-Ticket Life: Stories, Essays, and Lessons Learned from My Decidedly Disney Travels" is available in paperback and for Kindle. http://amzn.to/1CStAhV