Szechuan sauce incident

The Szechuan sauce incident was an incident that happened in 2017, after the animated TV show Rick and Morty made a reference to a McDonalds promotion 20 years earlier, where they had offered Szechuan dipping sauce for a limited time as part of a promotion of the Disney movie Mulan. The reference had made many Rick & Morty fans obsessed with this idea of eating McDonalds Szechuan sauce again, so McDonalds thought they’d get some free publicity by releasing a “super limited” run of the sauce in the USA. The problem was that McDonalds severely misjudged the number of people who would descend on their outlets demanding their tub of Szechuan sauce, and many McDonalds outlets either received no Szechuan sauce or only received a small number of single-serve tubs, like 20. Many of these places had hundreds of Rick & Morty fans descend on them, screaming and yelling when they couldn’t get what they wanted. Police were called to several.

The incident made international news, and was generally embarrassing for those who identified with geek culture (according to Sarah Z), and certainly for those who considered themselves fans of Rick & Morty.