Rick & Mortry Szchuan Sauce Debuts in China After "Conquering the West"

A trick to performing comedy (that we've heard of) is to retell a bad joke over and over until someone laughs. This layman's version of stand-up has been exploited to exponentially tragic-comic extremes with McDonald's China newest Szchuan Sauce promotion, leaving us to wonder when the joke will finally end.

Debuting across the country on Wednesday, McDonald's Szchuan sauce promotion is a direct reference to the "Disney's Mulan Szchuan Sauce" featured in an episode of the cartoon Rick & Morty that became so highly demanded that near-riots broke out when a limited supply ran out at US Mcdonald's restaurants. 

As highly prized Szchuan sauce became to Rick & Morty fans in the US, the promotion has an entirely different context in China. That's because McDonald's China Szchuan sauce promotion contains no specific reference to either Rick & Morty, Disney, their animated film Mulan, or even Sichuan.

In the absence of everything that makes this significant to an American audience, the McDonald's China promotion offers this single selling point: If it's popular in the USA, then it must be good. As condescending as that may seem, this is overturned with the one contextual point about this promotion that has never wavered: the sauce is Szchuan, and Szchuan is a part of China. Therefore, Chinese culture is finally getting the respect it deserves from the West.

That may all seem like hyperbole ... if McDonald's China's didn't say this in their own promotional material.

In one commercial, a group of Chicken McNuggets give a hero's welcome to the "Praiseworthy Sauce of Sichuan" with cheers and a sign that reads "Welcome home from overseas, returning internet sensation":

In another promotional commercial, the adoring gaze of the West gets a ham-fisted metaphor in the form of a Western male photographer taking photos of a Chinese woman wearing the overly-exoticized cheongsam:

If that wasn't clear enough, the voice-over narration says:

When Western tastes meet Chinese charm, the collide in a crazy intrigue ... The flavor that has conquered Western tongues has arrived.

To ensure that no one misses the direct reference to the sensation caused by Rick & Morty fans, McDonald's China even features fake news headlines to link them all together.

The promotional material name "Rachel Marie" as the R&M fan who received a used Volkswagen Golf Mk4 in exchange for her Szchuan sauce. Already having made Chinese headlines, the promotional material boasts that the sauce is "famous worldwide" and is worth USD 50,000 (though Western media peg the eBay sale at around USD 15,000).

For a Chinese market that craves legitimacy from the West, this could all be impressive ... were it not all predicated on a joke (spoilers ahead).

In the first episode of the latest season of Rick & Morty, fan favorite Rick admits to grandson Morty that he staged an elaborate ruse involving intergalactic jail and mind control in order to break up the marriage of his daughter and her husband. And, for his own gratification, Rick only desires one thing for himself, that being the McDonald's dipping sauce.

Though the show uses this as a joke to satirize Rick's lack of humanity in an amoral world, diehard R&M fans have taken another interpretation: if the character often employed as the show's villain likes it, then it must be good, thereby sparking a crazed demand for the Szchuan sauce during McDonald's USA's limited promotion that ended up causing a fan backlash.

And, now, like a series of perfectly-nestled Matryoshka dolls (or "car batteries" to use the show's parlance), the joke-within-a-joke finally arrives at its "source" in China, but not without one last guffaw: because the sauce is tailored to the Western concept of Chinese food, it is not at all suitable for the Chinese market to which it's being promoted.

We tried out McDonald's China's Szchuan sauce for ourselves and found it to be underwhelming. But more significantly, the sugary, sharp citrus flavor that counter-balances the thick, salty soy sauce flavor is made to appeal to Western tastes and doesn't resemble Chinese cuisine, Szchuan/Sichuan or otherwise.

But, that neither here nor there to a Chinese customer because according to the McDonald's China promotion, Szchuan sauce tastes like "victory."

McDonald's China Szchuan Sauce comes with an order of Chicken McNuggets for RMB 10; get 50 percent off for a double order. Other flavors provided include such Western favorites as "Sweet and Sour" and "Gongbao flavor" (as in gongbao jiding). Available at McDonald's throughout China for a limited time.

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E-Mail: charlesliu1 (at) qq (dot) com
Twitter: @Sinopath

Images: McDonald's, Jieman