McDonald’s jumps through time and television
The internet’s love for nostalgia was underscored by the pressure recently piled on McDonald’s to bring back a favorite dipping sauce from the ‘90s. After the chain’s Szechuan Sauce played a prominent role in the Cartoon Network show “Rick and Morty,” devoted fans of the sci-fi cartoon took to social media to beg for a return of the sauce, even spawning a Change.org petition that garnered over 37,000 signatures.
McDonald’s took a playful never-say-never stance on reintroducing popular items, and a few months later, tapped into the buzz in a creative way. Rather than bring back the discontinued sauce, a lofty endeavor, they sent some remaining stock to “Rick and Morty” co-creator Justin Roiland, along with a note explaining that the sauce had been smuggled from an alternate dimension “where it’s always 1998.” The company also gave away gallons of the sauce to a few special fans via a Twitter contest, which received over 28k retweets and 44k likes.