We got a lot of hits on our Where Are They Now: Iraq War post, so we thought we’d tackle the next most pressing issue of our era: the fictional characters created to sell McDonald’s food to children. The idea came to us when we were remarking on hipsters of a certain age wearing clothing with, say, Mayor McCheese on it (or making a Facebook page for him). This struck us as odd and led to a long conversation about the significance of ad icons, particularly those of the McDonald’s corporation directed at fast food-consuming children.
While there’s a certain ilk of irony-loving young people that will happily sport, say, a Lucky Charms cereal shirt displaying a smiling corporate Leprechaun, there’s something unique about the McDonaldland gang, who sort of exist in a world with no backstory, no real personality, no context, and yet, universal recognizability by way of endless commercials, plastic Happy Meal toys, menu mazes and word jumbles, computer games, and various other cultural leavings.
Consider by way of contrast, the message being conveyed by someone wearing a Trix Rabbit t-shirt: I am festive, whimsical, and have a childlike sense of mischief. Sure, the icon may be designed to whore for fruit-flavored ground corn, but at least there is a cultural narrative attached to this rabbit, constantly thwarted in his attempts to secure the prize. A person wearing this shirt promotes the idea of the hopeless romantic, outsmarted constantly by lesser foes, but endlessly chasing.
Or say someone is wearing a Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs shirt. They invoke a saga about both jubilation (the orgasmic mania resulting from the taste of the tooth-rotting chocolate coated sugar bombs), but also about desperation and addiction. Someone who sports a Cocoa Puffs logo is both promoting the idea of orgiastic immediate gratification, but is also perhaps manifesting a silent plea for help. How far we have come from the idea of cold cereal as a suppressant for sexual desires.
But what of these McDonaldoids, these featureless (mostly) meat-hawking beings no more fleshed out than Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Pep Boys, or the Jolly Green Giant? What of the McDonaldland cadre?
Ronald McDonald — The ring leader of the bunch. The most well known, and yet, somehow, the least interesting. He shows up at children’s birthday parties making balloon animals, but he also stars in commercials. He inspired Krusty the Clown. He is quite well known in Japan. He inspired the portion of the famous McLibel lawsuit that discussed the effects of marketing on children. He preys upon the greasy skin of the young.
Check out this McDonald’s video game. And this one. And this one.
Ronald remains at large, still the centerpiece of a vast marketing empire.
Grimace — In some ways, people are obsessed with discussion about what Grimace is. This is the least interesting conversational topic in the world. Grimace, once a fixture of childhood mindscapes, is now seen less often than he once was, but remains a feature of Happy Meal promotions and the few remaining playgrounds at McDonald’s not yet closed by lawsuits.
Hamburglar — The ultimate recidivist. Consumerism makes criminals of us all, whether we steal the product in question or merely intentionally overlook the costs of manufacturing. Klosterman points out that a vast number of child-oriented ads operate under the premise that certain products are so delicious that fictional characters engage in crime to procure them. It’s not just the Trix hare and the Lucky Charms leprechaun, but also Cookie Crisp and the various problems of the Flintstones cast regarding acquisition of morning sustenance. Ultimately, the Hamburglar was sentenced to LWOP due to New York’s Rockefeller drug laws and died in prison of congestive heart disease.
Birdie — The only female of the bunch (taking a cue from noted “single woman amongst all-male tribe,” Smurfette), she never did much besides fly around aimlessly. I think she preferred the cookies and the breakfast food. Birdie, doomed to never lay eggs destined to become McMuffin fodder, was rumored to be sexually involved with Wendy, the gay daughter of lunatic anti-abortion hamburger empressario Dave Thomas. She met a tragic end that was obviously not much publicized by the McDonald’s corporation.
Mayor McCheese — Why are their heads made of meat and bread? Do ants eat them? Do they themselves eat other hamburgers and other McDonald’s products? Culturally speaking, Mayor McCheese was the first symbol of municipal tyranny for a lot of children. His tough-on-crime policies resulted in the constant harassment of the Hamburglar and led to many questions about how he maintained his power in the sparsely populated electoral districts of McDonaldland.
Officer Big Mac — According to Wikipedia, “As the main source of law and order in McDonaldland, he spent most of his time chasing the Hamburglar and Captain Crook. He was featured in several of the campaign’s commercials throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s. The character was dropped during the streamlining of the characters in the ’80s.” What most people might remember is the weird part of the playgrounds that had an Officer Big Mac piece resembling a jail that you could climb up into. Obviously Officer Big Mac has since his commercial heyday been discharged from the force and is now a drug and gambling addict seeking redemption on the hard streets of McDonaldland.
The Fry Guys — These are the black people of McDonaldland. They have (and are comprised only of) dreads. They are never given speaking roles. If I recall the commercials properly, they appear like flies or maggots whenever french fries are produced. More recently, they were put in Gitmo during the war on terror Global Contingency Operation (see also: fries, freedom) and have not been heard from since.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with having feelings about ad campaigns, much less the products being shat out into the world. If you want to have a t-shirt promoting the Filet O’ Fish, go for it. The world is running out of fish and you look like a fool, but go for it. And if you want to write fiction devoted to the repellent McGriddle sandwich, go for that too (Seriously, click on that link. It’s disturbing.)
But it’s just weird to affix some nostalgia to these vacant shells of characters, these empty signifiers representing only manufactured desire to consume unhealthy food. It perhaps makes sense to carry with you into your 30s some sort of wistfulness about the adventures you once scripted for G.I. Joe or Barbie to enact, but did anyone really ever engage their imaginations by interpolating with the world of H.R. Pufnstuf (see also: Sid & Marty Krofft Television Productions, Inc. v. McDonald’s Corp., 562 F.2d 1157, decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1977) er, Ronald McDonald and his friends?
We realize other people have reflected on this. Considerable collective Internet time has been devoted to McDonald’s in general. But what “hip” McDonaldland cultural reprocessing ultimately boils down to is the need to be “cool” (exclude others) and the need to latch on to some floating bit of nostalgia in the name of a shared experience of consumerism (most often one chosen for the children of the 1970s-1990s by generations of parents and grandparents). And that’s the ultimate implication of the McDonaldland gang: people are so desparate to have something, anything in common (because we are blinded to our shared humanity) that they latch on to pathetic shreds of ad campaigns — clowns, greasy meat, magic, and rainbows — instead of creating new threads to connect us all.
Oh, so good.
Too often we don’t notice the disturbing narrative under the painfully obvious question: Why is there so much addiction-fueled crime in McDonaldland?
[...] 8, 2009 by stetson23 It’s well known that were are interested in the McDonald’s here at Toxic Culture. Heck, you could have a blog called Toxic Culture that only talked about the [...]