Latest / Ridiculous History / Whatever Happened to Mac Tonight?
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
- 0:27Speaker 1: the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
- 0:31Speaker 1: for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer,
- 0:34Speaker 1: the man, the myth, the legend, the mascot, mister Max Williams.
- 0:39Speaker 2: Hello, I'm a Max like item. Yes, you are the
- 0:43Speaker 2: Big Max.
- 0:44Speaker 1: Do you come with a combo?
- 0:45Speaker 2: Though?
- 0:46Speaker 3: Only if you get the kids meal?
- 0:48Speaker 1: I mean, what are you happy?
- 0:50Speaker 2: Happy happy meal whatever?
- 0:52Speaker 3: I haven't eaten McDonald's Max edition.
- 0:54Speaker 4: You're a human happy meal though, And I'm sorry I
- 0:57Speaker 4: called you when I said I hate when people call
- 0:58Speaker 4: me big man or big guy what ever?
- 1:00Speaker 2: Really big bug bugs me?
- 1:01Speaker 4: So when I called you Big Max, it was just
- 1:03Speaker 4: a reference to Big Max the sandwich. It wasn't saying
- 1:07Speaker 4: that you're like some sort of stocky fellow.
- 1:10Speaker 3: I have my old friend Chelsea. I would call her
- 1:13Speaker 3: oll there. I'm like, what a big I say big
- 1:14Speaker 3: guy people all the time. She's like, stop calling me
- 1:16Speaker 3: big guy. Was like, all right, big girl. That would
- 1:18Speaker 3: knock over well.
- 1:18Speaker 4: And I should probably stop taking it personally because it's
- 1:21Speaker 4: probably not the way I'm here.
- 1:22Speaker 1: Yeah, most people are kind of talking to themselves. When
- 1:26Speaker 1: they talk to folks. You know, I used to have
- 1:28Speaker 1: an issue with people calling me buddy because in the
- 1:32Speaker 1: United States, it's usually deployed in a condescending tone, which
- 1:38Speaker 1: is different, weirdly enough, from Bud. Bud is like a
- 1:41Speaker 1: respectful fist bump in a conversation. That that dulcin tone
- 1:46Speaker 1: you're hearing. By the way, ridiculous historians is none other
- 1:50Speaker 1: than mister Noel Brown because and they they have often
- 1:56Speaker 1: called me Ben Bullen. On this show. Today we are
- 2:01Speaker 1: exploring a story of ridiculous fast food history. It's just
- 2:07Speaker 1: before our cutoff, right, because historically, arbitrarily we determined history
- 2:14Speaker 1: cuts off with Max the superhero apartheid Gorilla. That's right,
- 2:19Speaker 1: what a guy, what a prime Indeed, and you know
- 2:24Speaker 1: Noel back. Not too too long ago, we explored the
- 2:30Speaker 1: mythology of McDonald's, of their their excellent work with mascots,
- 2:36Speaker 1: their yeah pantheon just so, and now we're looking at
- 2:44Speaker 1: with the help of our research associate Jeff Bartlett, we
- 2:48Speaker 1: are looking at a guy we didn't talk much about
- 2:51Speaker 1: in our two part episode on McDonald's and their mascots,
- 2:56Speaker 1: which by the way, featured Jonathan Strickland aka the quister.
- 3:00Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, how long ago is that?
- 3:02Speaker 1: Well, he was, he was behaving for most of it.
- 3:05Speaker 2: He was but a young quister.
- 3:07Speaker 1: Yes, yes, he was a quizzling uh with a Z,
- 3:11Speaker 1: not the not the very mean word. Do you know
- 3:14Speaker 1: the word quizzling?
- 3:15Speaker 2: I don't think I did. S.
- 3:17Speaker 1: Quizzling with an s uh means a trader who collaborates
- 3:22Speaker 1: with the enemy.
- 3:23Speaker 2: Good. I mean, that's not too far off from from
- 3:26Speaker 2: the quist.
- 3:27Speaker 1: I mean it is kind of in his character's DNA. Well,
- 3:37Speaker 1: who is this missing character we're exploring tonight?
- 3:41Speaker 2: Noel, Oh tonight.
- 3:43Speaker 4: Indeed, we would be tonight for this episode for sure,
- 3:46Speaker 4: because it is absolutely a nighttime character, a nighttime figure, uh,
- 3:51Speaker 4: a McDonald's mascot for the for the grown ups, you know,
- 3:54Speaker 4: whereas all the other ones, the Hamburglar, mayor mccheese, the
- 3:59Speaker 4: Grimace of that pantheon we previously mentioned, they're much more
- 4:02Speaker 4: geared towards children. But mac Tonight, which is an odd name,
- 4:07Speaker 4: it's like sort of like a concept more than a name,
- 4:10Speaker 4: was indeed a fictional McDonald's mascot character figure that was
- 4:15Speaker 4: featured in commercials running for a pretty brief window of time.
- 4:18Speaker 4: From nineteen eighty six to nineteen eighty nine. He was
- 4:22Speaker 4: a sort of a Sinatra esque fellow that wouldn't seem
- 4:27Speaker 4: out of place in a cigarette advertisement. I've always pictured
- 4:30Speaker 4: like he should have had, like a cigarette hanging from
- 4:33Speaker 4: his not moonshaped lips.
- 4:34Speaker 2: His head was moonshaped, though, but his lips were normal.
- 4:37Speaker 4: Wearing sunglasses, often seen sitting at a piano. Bit of
- 4:40Speaker 4: a crooner, m hm yeah, yeah, sort of a mix
- 4:44Speaker 4: of Max's Headroom and Kinski from Night Breed if you
- 4:48Speaker 4: remember that adaptation of the Clive Barker novel.
- 4:53Speaker 2: Yeah, Moon Moonface, I believe in the movie in any case.
- 4:56Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, he's he's a cool guy, tickling the keys,
- 5:03Speaker 1: tickling the ivory. And his whole thing is, first off,
- 5:07Speaker 1: he wears sunglasses at night, and secondly, he wants you
- 5:11Speaker 1: to know that he very much wants you to know
- 5:15Speaker 1: that McDonald's is a late night place. It's not just
- 5:19Speaker 1: for the kiddos at eleven am. It's also McDonald's after Doug.
- 5:24Speaker 2: McDonald's for Danner, y'all mac tonight. Get it? See pretty smart?
- 5:28Speaker 2: I mean I totally understand it.
- 5:30Speaker 4: Where sometimes companies get such a reputation for one thing
- 5:34Speaker 4: that they need to remind consumers. No, we're not just
- 5:38Speaker 4: for the kids. We're dangerous. Check out mac Tonight. Look
- 5:42Speaker 4: at this guy.
- 5:43Speaker 2: He was even based on a song about murder most foul.
- 5:46Speaker 4: Yes.
- 5:47Speaker 1: Yes, And as a fan of Bertil Breckt, this is
- 5:51Speaker 1: especially interesting to me. At least some people found the
- 5:55Speaker 1: guy charming, some people found him off.
- 5:59Speaker 2: Putting, some found him downright Brechtian right.
- 6:02Speaker 1: And there are machinery, a theater joke, and there is
- 6:05Speaker 1: a mystery afoot. We are over the moon to show
- 6:11Speaker 1: you why, explore together how this character became so famous
- 6:16Speaker 1: and then rejected, and why mac Tonight is possibly not
- 6:22Speaker 1: coming back. But before we do that, we want to
- 6:25Speaker 1: talk about the very first mascot for McDonald's, which is
- 6:32Speaker 1: just a goofy guy. He's just lovable.
- 6:34Speaker 2: He's a goofy guy.
- 6:35Speaker 1: Uh.
- 6:35Speaker 4: We're talking about Speedy McDonald, McDonald, the creepy clown, Hamburglar, Grimace,
- 6:41Speaker 4: you know, all the hits the pantheon we talked about.
- 6:44Speaker 4: We're not always the ambassadors of McDonald's that we know
- 6:48Speaker 4: them as today. Of course, this is out of the
- 6:51Speaker 4: side of the scope of this episode, but you know,
- 6:54Speaker 4: McDonald's was in fact created initially by people with the
- 6:58Speaker 4: name McDonald. Richard and Maurice McDonald introduced the concept of
- 7:03Speaker 4: fast food and were then bought out and screwed over
- 7:07Speaker 4: by ray E Krock, which you can see the story
- 7:10Speaker 4: of that portrayed in the excellent film The Founder starring
- 7:14Speaker 4: Michael Keaton as I guess the titular founder, although he
- 7:18Speaker 4: wasn't really the founder. In fact, the founders were Richard
- 7:21Speaker 4: and Maurice McDonald's.
- 7:23Speaker 1: He was like the popularizer, that's right.
- 7:26Speaker 4: He saw the vision that they already kind of had,
- 7:28Speaker 4: but he saw dollar signs and like he already you know,
- 7:32Speaker 4: was envisioning that. However, many billions served that you see
- 7:36Speaker 4: on the McDonald's golden arches sign.
- 7:39Speaker 1: And the crazy uniformity with the sesame seeds and so on.
- 7:43Speaker 1: That's croc. I love that you're bringing this up. When
- 7:46Speaker 1: Richard and Maurice mac McDonald, when they introduce McDonald as
- 7:53Speaker 1: a concept, they also introduce what is called the Speedy
- 7:57Speaker 1: Service System spe DE, and they sort of anticipated the
- 8:05Speaker 1: rise of what we call fast food today. This system
- 8:10Speaker 1: asked customers to walk up to a window to get
- 8:14Speaker 1: their own food. You didn't sit at a table and
- 8:17Speaker 1: get a server to come to you.
- 8:19Speaker 4: They got rid of the middleman more or less and
- 8:22Speaker 4: decided to serve the customers directly.
- 8:25Speaker 2: You know, you'd pay it.
- 8:27Speaker 4: I mean, I guess it evolved, but even today you
- 8:29Speaker 4: pay it one window, I mean, if you're doing the
- 8:31Speaker 4: drive through thing, and then you roll over to the
- 8:33Speaker 4: next one in the hand of your bag, hopefully in
- 8:35Speaker 4: a speedy fashion. But that speedy system came with a character,
- 8:40Speaker 4: a mascot of the same name, to kind of really
- 8:43Speaker 4: hit home the message and clarify exactly what they were
- 8:47Speaker 4: all about there at McDonald's, that speedy service life.
- 8:50Speaker 1: Yeah, they also shed a lot of choice in favor
- 8:56Speaker 1: of quick delivery. So McDonald's and like many other restaurants
- 9:01Speaker 1: at the time, they stripped down their menu just burgers, fries,
- 9:05Speaker 1: soft drinks, you know, and occasionally they would branch out
- 9:09Speaker 1: later to apple pies things like that. But the point
- 9:12Speaker 1: was you get in, you get your food as quickly
- 9:15Speaker 1: as possible. This was such a new idea that, as
- 9:18Speaker 1: you were saying, they had to have some sort of
- 9:22Speaker 1: friendly figure to explain this so it didn't sound like
- 9:26Speaker 1: a ted talk. And when they got the speedy service system.
- 9:30Speaker 1: They wanted to humanize it or anthropomorphize it, I should say,
- 9:34Speaker 1: with this guy who is who's he's always kind of
- 9:37Speaker 1: winking at you. He's a cook, but despite being a cook,
- 9:41Speaker 1: he has a bow tie, and he's got a hamburger
- 9:44Speaker 1: for a head, and despite being very quick conceptually, he
- 9:49Speaker 1: also has a pot belly because he's very well fed.
- 9:51Speaker 4: Right, yeah, he obviously pulls off little pieces of his
- 9:54Speaker 4: own head and eats it, which is an abomination if
- 9:57Speaker 4: you ask me.
- 9:58Speaker 2: But it did, you know, kind of bring that message home.
- 10:01Speaker 4: People did understand what Speedy was about and what the
- 10:04Speaker 4: Speedy service system was all about.
- 10:06Speaker 2: And you know, he was more of an on site
- 10:09Speaker 2: kind of presence.
- 10:10Speaker 4: Than a anthromorphic cartoon or person wearing a suit that
- 10:15Speaker 4: would appear in television commercials. He was retired, you know,
- 10:19Speaker 4: entirely in nineteen sixty two, and before that time didn't
- 10:21Speaker 4: appear in a single commercial. Yeah.
- 10:24Speaker 1: Yeah. Part of it was the fact that other companies
- 10:29Speaker 1: were making mascots. In particular, Alka Seltzer had a mascot
- 10:35Speaker 1: called Speedy spelled speed Y, So yeah, and confusion potentially,
- 10:43Speaker 1: right exactly. And if you go to folks like Alan
- 10:47Speaker 1: Hess researching for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
- 10:53Speaker 1: You'll see that you'll see something that Kroc and McDonald's
- 10:59Speaker 1: recognize pretty immediately. Folks were identify McDonald's with those Golden
- 11:07Speaker 1: arches which came out in nineteen sixty one. They were
- 11:10Speaker 1: thinking of that more so than they were thinking of
- 11:12Speaker 1: this weird ware Hamburger that wants to give you fries.
- 11:17Speaker 1: Very quickly, so as the story goes, they dropped this
- 11:22Speaker 1: mascot Speedy and they replaced him with an absolutely terrifying
- 11:27Speaker 1: guy named Ronald McDonald who wants to hang out with
- 11:31Speaker 1: children across the world and make them eat French fries.
- 11:35Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, it's a little weird, and actually it occurs
- 11:39Speaker 4: to me, I wonder how far ahead of John Wayne
- 11:44Speaker 4: Gacy Ronald McDonald was.
- 11:47Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's a point I brought up on stuff
- 11:49Speaker 1: they don't want you to know. In the past. The
- 11:52Speaker 1: colorophobia of the Western world can be traced, in my opinion,
- 11:57Speaker 1: to Gacy, to John WAYN. Gasey, the serial killer who
- 12:01Speaker 1: was also a part time clown. In other parts of
- 12:05Speaker 1: the world, clowns are still cool, totally.
- 12:09Speaker 4: Yeah, it does appear that Gaysey's crimes took place in
- 12:11Speaker 4: the throughout the seventies, and he didn't really come to lights,
- 12:15Speaker 4: you know, in a public way until nineteen seventy eight.
- 12:18Speaker 4: So this whole Ronald McDonald thing was already going strong
- 12:22Speaker 4: from the early sixties.
- 12:24Speaker 1: And they took an l on that one. Yeah, no
- 12:27Speaker 1: supersize there, because America learned to fear clowns and associate
- 12:33Speaker 1: them with very sinister things. Now, if we go to
- 12:37Speaker 1: mash dot com, we'll see that our pal Felix Bear
- 12:41Speaker 1: says there is one Speedy operating at its original location
- 12:47Speaker 1: as in one you know image or icon of this character.
- 12:51Speaker 1: It's in Monsey, Indiana. The Monthly Speedy still has vertical
- 12:57Speaker 1: neon lights between the bottom of the arch and at
- 12:59Speaker 1: the top the McDonald's logo.
- 13:01Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's definitely something you'll also see with other
- 13:04Speaker 4: fast food brands like Rby's. For example, in Athens, Georgia,
- 13:09Speaker 4: there is a classic giant neon ARB's sign that hasn't
- 13:12Speaker 4: changed since you know, the original days of that franchise.
- 13:16Speaker 2: And that's something that like certain brands.
- 13:18Speaker 4: You know, think about they're like, oh, well, let's let
- 13:20Speaker 4: there be this kind of like a relic of the
- 13:21Speaker 4: past that we don't mess with.
- 13:23Speaker 1: And here's why we're telling you about Speedy. It's not
- 13:27Speaker 1: an episode about Speedy himself. We wish him the best.
- 13:31Speaker 1: It is to illustrate fellow ridiculous historians that McDonald's as
- 13:36Speaker 1: a concept as an enterprise has no problem with abandoning mascots,
- 13:42Speaker 1: with moving on to the next thing. You know, let's
- 13:46Speaker 1: acknowledge obviously, Ronald McDonald. Please check out our two part
- 13:51Speaker 1: series on the pantheon of McDonald's characters. Mac Tonight shows
- 13:57Speaker 1: up and he is He is a shot out of
- 14:01Speaker 1: the blue, right, he might as well be from deep space.
- 14:05Speaker 1: That's a moon joke, thank you. The whole idea was
- 14:10Speaker 1: that there was this guy who's like late night cool
- 14:13Speaker 1: jazzy type singer, and he says, hey, McDonald's, it's not
- 14:18Speaker 1: just for daytime. You know your kids are asleep, you
- 14:21Speaker 1: need something to eat, come on down to McDonald's. He
- 14:25Speaker 1: does not appear in McDonald land because that's for kids.
- 14:29Speaker 1: He's too cool.
- 14:36Speaker 4: Yeah, he's probably the one that distributed all the McDonald's
- 14:39Speaker 4: branded ashtrays.
- 14:41Speaker 2: At all the locations. Remember that was the thing they
- 14:44Speaker 2: used to be.
- 14:44Speaker 4: You can probably still find them for sale McDonald's ashtrays
- 14:48Speaker 4: and matchbooks and all of that stuff from when everyone
- 14:51Speaker 4: used to just smoke them if you got them in
- 14:54Speaker 4: McDonald's locations, including the Playplace I would imagine, which is
- 14:58Speaker 4: the ballpit and.
- 14:59Speaker 2: All that good stuff.
- 15:00Speaker 4: So yeah, I mean it was very much an attempt
- 15:02Speaker 4: to and they've done this other times, you know, without
- 15:05Speaker 4: like they had like the what was it? There was
- 15:07Speaker 4: an ad campaign that Jason Alexander participated in where it
- 15:11Speaker 4: was like some kind of like mic blt thing and
- 15:14Speaker 4: it was like it's.
- 15:14Speaker 2: A grown up sandwich, you know, for grown ups.
- 15:17Speaker 4: And then there was like the oh gosh, it was
- 15:20Speaker 4: just called like the Mac something or like it wasn't
- 15:22Speaker 4: the Big Mac. It was the Something Deluxe Arch Deluxe,
- 15:25Speaker 4: That's what it was. That was also marketed towards grown
- 15:28Speaker 4: ups with its potato bun and like all this kind
- 15:31Speaker 4: of faux gourmet trappings, and so this is something they
- 15:35Speaker 4: definitely continued to do after Mac Tonight. But yeah, you're
- 15:39Speaker 4: absolutely right, Ben, it was an attempt to let people
- 15:42Speaker 4: know that McDonald's was not just for breakfast and lunch
- 15:45Speaker 4: with the kiddos and happy meals. It was also for
- 15:48Speaker 4: a grown up dinner. Heck, cater your your dinner party
- 15:51Speaker 4: with McDonald's.
- 15:53Speaker 1: If you want to propose, why not take her to
- 15:56Speaker 1: McDonald's after nine pm? Yeah, or she would mac Tonight
- 16:02Speaker 1: would sit at his piano in the clouds and he
- 16:06Speaker 1: would sing a song. And it's a song that we'll
- 16:09Speaker 1: play for you later. It's all about how awesome McDonald's
- 16:12Speaker 1: is at night. To the earlier point there, it is
- 16:15Speaker 1: a parody plagiarizing the melody of a previous song called
- 16:21Speaker 1: Mac the Knife, which at that point had been performed
- 16:25Speaker 1: by some of the most famous singers in the Western world,
- 16:28Speaker 1: Bobby Darren, Frank Sinatra. The mac Tonight version is way
- 16:32Speaker 1: less bloody, but it was purposely designed and deployed to
- 16:39Speaker 1: leverage baby boomer nostalgia of the nineteen fifties, and for
- 16:44Speaker 1: a time this was incredibly successful. Just for a reminder,
- 16:49Speaker 1: because I don't think we mentioned it earlier, this guy
- 16:54Speaker 1: mac Tonight was only in play seriously for like three
- 16:59Speaker 1: years nineteen eighty six to nineteen eighty nine. So there's
- 17:03Speaker 1: this advertising company that gets this pitch going with McDonald's.
- 17:09Speaker 1: They get a budget of half a million dollars, which
- 17:12Speaker 1: is huge money. And they say we're going to make
- 17:15Speaker 1: four commercials. Each one has Mac the crescent moon faced
- 17:20Speaker 1: guy front and center. He's playing his piano. He's singing
- 17:24Speaker 1: his new jingle, which is set to the tune of
- 17:28Speaker 1: Mac the Knife. We'd love to play one example for
- 17:31Speaker 1: you here, folks.
- 17:32Speaker 2: Oh we must when.
- 17:35Speaker 3: The club starts half that six.
- 17:40Speaker 2: Term to hit fun go line, it's a good time.
- 17:48Speaker 1: For the.
- 17:50Speaker 4: Dinner.
- 17:51Speaker 2: McDon come on back tonight.
- 18:04Speaker 1: Yeah, I get it. Same.
- 18:07Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
- 18:09Speaker 4: Well, and you know, and the commercial that you found
- 18:12Speaker 4: ben it very clearly highlights salads and other things that
- 18:18Speaker 4: adults might enjoy.
- 18:19Speaker 3: I have to jump in that. That's what jumped out
- 18:22Speaker 3: to me. That was the shittiest looking solid of ever.
- 18:27Speaker 2: Come on, McDonald's.
- 18:28Speaker 3: Actually at my mom always says they have great salads there,
- 18:31Speaker 3: mcdonaldsley here is a stated condition.
- 18:34Speaker 2: But I looked at that thing.
- 18:35Speaker 3: I'm like, oh god, that looks like it's been in
- 18:37Speaker 3: the fridge for three weeks.
- 18:38Speaker 4: I mean, food picks in those days always looked kind
- 18:41Speaker 4: of awful.
- 18:42Speaker 1: The technology just wasn't there.
- 18:44Speaker 3: As someone who managed restaurants, it was one time task
- 18:46Speaker 3: to take food picks and then was after take after
- 18:49Speaker 3: he did the food picks. No longer task to take
- 18:51Speaker 3: food picks.
- 18:52Speaker 1: There was most of the food food photography you see
- 18:56Speaker 1: is not the actual food. I got a friend of
- 18:59Speaker 1: the show and how stuff works back in the day.
- 19:02Speaker 1: Lizzie Johnston is a food photographer and learning all the
- 19:07Speaker 1: tricks of the trade is fascinating.
- 19:11Speaker 4: Yeah, Oftentimes that shine comes from like being coded in,
- 19:14Speaker 4: like a clear nail polish, you know, ice cream. If
- 19:18Speaker 4: you see the perfect rolled you know, spheres of ice cream,
- 19:22Speaker 4: it's some sort of weird composite clay thing.
- 19:25Speaker 2: That mixture may vary.
- 19:27Speaker 4: There's tons of crazy tricks around that stuff and ways
- 19:30Speaker 4: to get things to look kind of preternaturally crisp and fresh.
- 19:34Speaker 4: But you don't want to eat any of that stuff.
- 19:36Speaker 4: You would probably die instantly.
- 19:38Speaker 1: Might be an episode history of food photography. Also, at
- 19:43Speaker 1: some point we might have to add a sound cube
- 19:45Speaker 1: because I keep pitching new episodes while we're recording. We
- 19:49Speaker 1: follow up on some of them. I think we got
- 19:51Speaker 1: a good track record, sort of like mac Tonight had
- 19:54Speaker 1: a good track record in their initial marketing campaign. It
- 19:58Speaker 1: was so successful that the boffins, the c suite, the
- 20:02Speaker 1: suits had McDonald said, let's roll this out across the country.
- 20:07Speaker 1: So they launched this nationwide campaign and they had the
- 20:12Speaker 1: mascot Mac Tonight uppear in Bocovertad in Florida. Can I
- 20:17Speaker 1: get some like a high level, high drama, fancy city music.
- 20:30Speaker 1: They were good Buco Ratal Flora. And it's kind of
- 20:34Speaker 1: a big deal. It's not as big as when the
- 20:36Speaker 1: Beatles performed on that rooftop. But uh, but you see
- 20:40Speaker 1: Mac Tonight performing performing on a rooftop, people go crazy.
- 20:46Speaker 1: But the big question is who created this crazy crooning
- 20:49Speaker 1: crescent cranium.
- 20:50Speaker 4: Ooh I wrote that. Yeah, it's good, he said it.
- 20:56Speaker 4: Brad A Ball Real Days was responsible for this. He
- 21:01Speaker 4: really loved the melody of that song. He really loved
- 21:04Speaker 4: the potential for nostalgia mining. In nineteen eighty six, Mac
- 21:09Speaker 4: the Knife originally written by Kurt Viile and Berthold Brett
- 21:12Speaker 4: for the Three Penny Opera. Its original incarnation very different
- 21:18Speaker 4: from the kind of more hit parade version that made
- 21:21Speaker 4: a number one hit for Bobby Darren in nineteen fifty nine.
- 21:24Speaker 4: And there's something about this, you know, just screamed like
- 21:27Speaker 4: this is this is adult, this is you know, there's
- 21:31Speaker 4: something You're right, Ben it's that baby boomer kind of
- 21:33Speaker 4: nostalgia thing that just that kind of crooning, you know,
- 21:38Speaker 4: hepcat finger snap and melody really evokes. So he decided
- 21:43Speaker 4: to pitch one of his biggest clients, which was an
- 21:45Speaker 4: organization called the McDonald's Operators Association of Southern California.
- 21:49Speaker 1: Ye, that's kind of shady, right, which part McDonald's Operators
- 21:54Speaker 1: Association of Southern California sounds like it's close to McDonald's
- 21:58Speaker 1: but not McDonald's.
- 22:00Speaker 2: That's true.
- 22:01Speaker 4: But I also know that, like you know, McDonald's is
- 22:03Speaker 4: all about franchisees, right, So it seems like maybe this
- 22:09Speaker 4: was pitched as more of a regional thing that would
- 22:12Speaker 4: you know, be participated in by you know, folks in
- 22:15Speaker 4: this part of the country, in southern California. They thought
- 22:17Speaker 4: it would like hit better there because people are like
- 22:20Speaker 4: cooler or smarter or something or more adult, I don't know.
- 22:23Speaker 2: And by the way, Brad A.
- 22:25Speaker 4: Ball was the president of the ad organization or the
- 22:28Speaker 4: ad agency Davis.
- 22:29Speaker 2: Johnson, Mogul and Colombato.
- 22:32Speaker 4: Incorporated DJMC for short, which was a relatively speaking small
- 22:38Speaker 4: advertising agency there in La. His creative director, a guy
- 22:43Speaker 4: named Peter Kutrulis kind of took his homework assignment and
- 22:47Speaker 4: ran with it, listening to tons of different versions, which
- 22:50Speaker 4: there were many of this song, Mack the Knife by
- 22:53Speaker 4: folks arranging from Bobby Darren himself to Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra.
- 22:58Speaker 4: Liberachi even worked up a a version that was very,
- 23:01Speaker 4: very popular, and he of course knew that, you know,
- 23:04Speaker 4: it needed to have some MacDonald's centric lyrics, you know,
- 23:08Speaker 4: weird Al who was also pretty big at the time.
- 23:11Speaker 2: So you got to wonder if, like there is something
- 23:13Speaker 2: about that and.
- 23:14Speaker 1: His Waffle King's a banger? Have you ever Waffle King.
- 23:18Speaker 2: At What's what's that parody of?
- 23:23Speaker 4: Uh?
- 23:23Speaker 1: It is a It is a guy called himself the
- 23:27Speaker 1: Waffle King who realizes that he is the god of waffles.
- 23:31Speaker 2: So it's just a it's not a parody. It's just
- 23:34Speaker 2: like one of his original songs.
- 23:35Speaker 4: Don't know the full context. He just has a weird
- 23:39Speaker 4: banger song. He definitely has those non parody weird al
- 23:43Speaker 4: versions that usually do not go, yeah, do not stick,
- 23:45Speaker 4: of course, not quite stick to the public consciousness the
- 23:49Speaker 4: way you know, fat or Eat It or any of.
- 23:52Speaker 2: His other anthems go.
- 23:55Speaker 4: But you know, he was hugely popular, and I can
- 23:57Speaker 4: only imagine that that maybe figured into we need to
- 24:00Speaker 4: do a great parody song in incorporating McDonald's messaging into
- 24:05Speaker 4: a song that the people of the generation we're trying
- 24:07Speaker 4: to attract will no doubt be intimately familiar with.
- 24:11Speaker 1: Yeah, because this is a war. They are in the
- 24:16Speaker 1: trenches of what will later be called the Burger Wars,
- 24:20Speaker 1: the fast escalating fast food fight to get into the
- 24:26Speaker 1: bellies of American consumers. This is where macdnight comes from.
- 24:31Speaker 1: And look, folks, you don't have to you don't have
- 24:34Speaker 1: to delve too deep to realize the nineteen eighties commercial
- 24:38Speaker 1: culture was weird.
- 24:40Speaker 2: Okay.
- 24:42Speaker 1: He got the voice of macdnighte by guy named Roger Bear.
- 24:46Speaker 1: Bear passed away unfortunately in twenty eighteen, but he's a
- 24:50Speaker 1: hugely talented actor. He did a lot of voice work.
- 24:53Speaker 1: He also side note, thanks to our pal Jeff, he
- 24:57Speaker 1: voiced two Transformers characters.
- 25:00Speaker 2: Is this in Transformers the motion picture or in the cartoon? Unclear?
- 25:04Speaker 4: Okay, fair enough, I'm not familiar with these. These seem
- 25:07Speaker 4: like deep cut Transformers run about and run amok Are
- 25:10Speaker 4: they Okay?
- 25:12Speaker 2: So I guess they're a package deal. They can't.
- 25:15Speaker 4: They have to be like I love this part of
- 25:19Speaker 4: the story because we know and love here ridiculous history
- 25:23Speaker 4: the work of Doug Jones, who is just an.
- 25:27Speaker 2: Incredible physical actor.
- 25:30Speaker 4: I mean, he has a background in mime in the
- 25:33Speaker 4: theater and has portrayed iconic kind of costumed characters, ranging
- 25:40Speaker 4: from the kind of creature from The Black Lagoon, Star
- 25:45Speaker 4: of the Shape of Water by Guillelmo del Toro. He
- 25:48Speaker 4: was the thin or is it the thin man in
- 25:52Speaker 4: Pans Labyrinth with the creepy hands and the eyes of
- 25:55Speaker 4: his palms. Absolutely, guy is the physical actor. He's not
- 25:59Speaker 4: the d mac tonight. You know, he was this this
- 26:02Speaker 4: this really was his first kind of breakout role that
- 26:06Speaker 4: led to what was to come for him, which included
- 26:09Speaker 4: like playing bit parts on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
- 26:13Speaker 1: He is what returns.
- 26:16Speaker 4: Batman returns exactly. That's another I think that's maybe his
- 26:19Speaker 4: first big screen performance. He plays like an acrobatic clown
- 26:23Speaker 4: in the Penguin's Crew in that film, but he gets
- 26:29Speaker 4: his kind of big shot portraying the physical embodiment of
- 26:34Speaker 4: adult McDonald's mac Tonight in this marketing campaign that as
- 26:38Speaker 4: you mentioned, Ben had a pretty hefty budget for the
- 26:41Speaker 4: time half a million bucks.
- 26:43Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
- 26:44Speaker 1: Yeah. And the the guys at DJMC, they choose Jones
- 26:50Speaker 1: because he is tall, and he is third and he
- 26:53Speaker 1: has legit bona fide experience with mymery, with the arts
- 26:59Speaker 1: of the mind. He's also very animated physically, which is
- 27:04Speaker 1: essential for this character. And like you were saying earlier,
- 27:08Speaker 1: Jones credits his stint as Mac Tonight doing these commercials
- 27:13Speaker 1: as paving his way to overall success as an actor
- 27:17Speaker 1: and entertainer. In twenty thirteen, he's talking to Collider and
- 27:21Speaker 1: he says, look, I played this Mac to Night character
- 27:24Speaker 1: in twenty seven commercials over just those three years. And
- 27:29Speaker 1: because of those twenty seven commercials, I got all these referrals.
- 27:34Speaker 1: People kept coming to me and offering me new, more expansive,
- 27:39Speaker 1: more substantive roles. We could also argue this nostalgia or
- 27:45Speaker 1: this gratitude is why Doug Jones came back in the
- 27:49Speaker 1: mid nineteen nineties to do two more Mac Tonight commercials
- 27:54Speaker 1: during a very short lived revival for the character reasons.
- 28:01Speaker 1: And it's it's weird because backstory, I don't think any
- 28:06Speaker 1: of this is on air, but on our other show
- 28:09Speaker 1: stuff they don't want you to know. We were about
- 28:11Speaker 1: to record. We talked a little bit about Max Headroom
- 28:14Speaker 1: and how influential Max Headroom was as a character, later
- 28:19Speaker 1: becoming a very strange and specific Playboy Centerfold parody. Mac
- 28:24Speaker 1: Tonight is inspired by Max Headroom.
- 28:26Speaker 4: Well, it came up in our conversation that you're referencing, man,
- 28:29Speaker 4: how come you don't ever see sexy Max Headroom costumes
- 28:33Speaker 4: around Halloween time? Might be a little too much of
- 28:35Speaker 4: a deep cut, but you pointed out that surely it's
- 28:38Speaker 4: been done and definitely in the eighties when Max Headroom
- 28:42Speaker 4: was inescapable. He's kind of this like computer generated sort
- 28:46Speaker 4: of talk show host.
- 28:47Speaker 2: Like you said up kind, and of course he was.
- 28:53Speaker 4: You can see him portrayed in Back to the Future
- 28:57Speaker 4: Part two when they go to that kind of like
- 29:00Speaker 4: nostalgia diner or whatever, when Marty McFly like gets punked
- 29:04Speaker 4: by those kids, one of which is played by a
- 29:06Speaker 4: very baby little Elijah Wood for having to use his
- 29:09Speaker 4: hands for playing a video game of the gun game
- 29:13Speaker 4: or he's used to impressing the heck out of people
- 29:15Speaker 4: with that, and these kids just roll their eyes, and
- 29:17Speaker 4: you know, so he doesn't have telepathy. I guess like
- 29:19Speaker 4: everyone in the future does. That never really gets addressed again.
- 29:21Speaker 4: It's always bugged me a little bit, like you have
- 29:23Speaker 4: to use your hands, Like what do you mean, Little
- 29:26Speaker 4: Elijah Wood. But Max Headroom was also of course used
- 29:31Speaker 4: in like a big old kind of early hecking kind
- 29:34Speaker 4: of scam.
- 29:35Speaker 1: Right right the Max Headroom incident, and you could check
- 29:38Speaker 1: out stuff they don't want you to know. For more
- 29:40Speaker 1: information on that, we think we may have solved the case.
- 29:43Speaker 1: Shout out to the actor portraying Max Headroom, a guy
- 29:46Speaker 1: named Matt Frewer. Max Headroom was computer generated, but still
- 29:52Speaker 1: in the early nineteen eighties, or the idea was that
- 29:56Speaker 1: he's an AI computer generated personality. They couldn't do that yet.
- 30:02Speaker 1: The technology just wasn't there for a lot of industries,
- 30:06Speaker 1: let alone a small LA based ad agency like DJMC.
- 30:12Speaker 1: And so the firm's executives were going back and forth
- 30:15Speaker 1: and they were saying, well, should we just use real people,
- 30:19Speaker 1: known human celebrities in the advertisements. Why not have mister
- 30:24Speaker 1: t be the face of McDonald's for instance. I'm just
- 30:27Speaker 1: pulling an eighties reference.
- 30:29Speaker 2: I pity the fool who doesn't go to McDonald's for dinner.
- 30:33Speaker 1: And ultimately they said, no, McDonald's needs to have its
- 30:38Speaker 1: own mascot. Let's look at original things. There was nothing
- 30:42Speaker 1: they thought more original than Max Headroom, and so someone
- 30:46Speaker 1: in that writer's room said, we need a Max Headroom
- 30:51Speaker 1: for McDonald's and they nailed it with Mac tonight. He
- 30:55Speaker 1: got so popular that he even got his own happy
- 30:58Speaker 1: meal and toys, which used to be much more difficult.
- 31:01Speaker 1: Now I feel like, if you're a celebrity of a
- 31:03Speaker 1: certain achelon, you automatically get a branded happy meal.
- 31:07Speaker 4: Yeah, and this also makes me think of the relatively
- 31:10Speaker 4: recent kind of adult happy meal thing that McDonald's been
- 31:14Speaker 4: doing with the bigger box and the full sized sandwiches
- 31:16Speaker 4: and like the kind of more like adulty collectible toys.
- 31:20Speaker 2: I got a few of those.
- 31:21Speaker 4: They were doing these like what was it, like something cactus,
- 31:24Speaker 4: I can't remember, but they had these cool I'm a
- 31:26Speaker 4: dorky collector of like figures and like you know, super
- 31:28Speaker 4: plastic and stuff like that. And they had this whole
- 31:31Speaker 4: thing where they had these like very psychedelic, weird, kind
- 31:35Speaker 4: of more like hipster figurines of like different mcdonald'land figures,
- 31:39Speaker 4: and I bought a few of those for that. But
- 31:41Speaker 4: if you think about it, this mac Tonight happy meal
- 31:43Speaker 4: and toy thing, if you you know, look at what
- 31:46Speaker 4: their whole branding play was, was kind of the first
- 31:48Speaker 4: adult happy meal in a lot of weeks.
- 31:51Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's an astute observation. Macdnight gave McDonald's
- 32:03Speaker 1: a crucial edge, a mission critical edge in the competition
- 32:07Speaker 1: of the burger wars. He was a moon size success
- 32:12Speaker 1: for his time. Shout out to our friends at Retroist
- 32:15Speaker 1: for putting it that way. During this halcyon short lived era,
- 32:20Speaker 1: mac Tonight had a higher recognition rate of mid consumers
- 32:25Speaker 1: than New Coke and spoilers, folks. New Coke was a
- 32:29Speaker 1: huge boondoggle. It was such a quagmire that there's an
- 32:33Speaker 1: entire conspiracy theory about it, and they poured so much money, poured,
- 32:41Speaker 1: they poured so much money into advertising it all for not.
- 32:44Speaker 1: With way less money, mac Tonight was way more successful.
- 32:48Speaker 2: All for not.
- 32:49Speaker 4: You could also argue that for the conspiracy theory of
- 32:52Speaker 4: New Coke, that they did it all so that they
- 32:54Speaker 4: could then sell the public Classic coke with of course,
- 33:00Speaker 4: has maintained that nostalgic play kind of ever since, because
- 33:04Speaker 4: as we know, nostalgia and cocaine are a hell of
- 33:08Speaker 4: drugs and I think both were at play in this
- 33:10Speaker 4: Mac Tonight's scheme. It just the eighties were the big
- 33:14Speaker 4: time with that big ideas, lots of ideas that maybe
- 33:16Speaker 4: you shouldn't have ever seen the light of day, but
- 33:19Speaker 4: executives really thought quite highly of themselves in these days.
- 33:23Speaker 1: Like who greenlit the song oh make it You're so Fine?
- 33:27Speaker 1: I don't know, but it's the video, the videos, the
- 33:32Speaker 1: music video will take you places.
- 33:34Speaker 4: Also a weird ol parody Ricky You're So Fine, A
- 33:38Speaker 4: minute about I Love Lucy.
- 33:40Speaker 1: And as a result of Mac's overnight virality is amazing success.
- 33:47Speaker 1: The campaign, as we said, extends way beyond this regional
- 33:54Speaker 1: McDonald's operators deal, real life Mac Scott's. There we Go
- 34:03Speaker 1: in real life Max Scott's. They would perform at restaurant
- 34:07Speaker 1: locations across the United States and thousands of people would
- 34:12Speaker 1: go to see Mac Tonight.
- 34:15Speaker 2: They would go.
- 34:15Speaker 1: Watch them do like do the song and I guess
- 34:18Speaker 1: do some bits. It was huge.
- 34:21Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 34:21Speaker 4: I think they even rolled out some animatronic versions like
- 34:24Speaker 4: Chuck E Cheese, Rock of Fire Explosion band style and
- 34:27Speaker 4: they were so popular that even when they fell into disrepair,
- 34:31Speaker 4: I guess they didn't think about the long game here.
- 34:34Speaker 4: They just left them there as statues, which is kind
- 34:37Speaker 4: of creepy if you think about it.
- 34:39Speaker 1: Oh, one hundred percent. And also to your point about
- 34:42Speaker 1: the short lived mania of the nineteen eighties and cocaine,
- 34:48Speaker 1: it feels like built spending tons of money to make
- 34:51Speaker 1: animatronic sculptures and pieces and then just abandoning them instead
- 34:56Speaker 1: of fixing them. That feels very eighties to me.
- 35:00Speaker 4: There are these McDonald's coffee stirrs that I have seen
- 35:04Speaker 4: come up in memes and things. Is about this very
- 35:07Speaker 4: topic that were apparently really really popular for folks to
- 35:11Speaker 4: use as coke spoons. Oh wow, because they're like it's
- 35:15Speaker 4: like this long thing with a McDonald's arch at one end.
- 35:18Speaker 2: And just a tiny little spoon on the other end.
- 35:21Speaker 1: Oh no, I've never I'm not about that life.
- 35:25Speaker 4: I've just seen it pop up on the internet more
- 35:28Speaker 4: than a few times over the years.
- 35:30Speaker 1: That's wild. Also what's wild is the fact that this
- 35:34Speaker 1: is a show about ridiculous history. Mac Tonight is not around.
- 35:39Speaker 1: You go to your local McDonald's, you're probably not going
- 35:43Speaker 1: to see our favorite moonface boy, and it turns out
- 35:47Speaker 1: that we know why you're not going to see them. No,
- 35:50Speaker 1: we have to go back to that song, Mac the Knife.
- 35:55Speaker 4: Yeah, I mentioned that it was about bloody murder at
- 35:58Speaker 4: the top of the show, which it is. I mean,
- 36:00Speaker 4: aint the got your bad bad Leroy Brown's of course
- 36:02Speaker 4: the baddest man the whole town, undred percent, and he
- 36:05Speaker 4: did some bad things, but didn't outright kill people in
- 36:08Speaker 4: the song as Mac the Knife, as evidenced by his name,
- 36:13Speaker 4: Uh definitely did.
- 36:16Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, these uh, these ad execs, they're caught by
- 36:21Speaker 1: the melody, the catchy tune of the song, not the lyrics.
- 36:25Speaker 1: So when they repurpose it Al Yankovic style, they make
- 36:28Speaker 1: it a PG rated thing. You know, it's all about
- 36:31Speaker 1: how it's Mac Tonight instead of Mac the Knife. And
- 36:36Speaker 1: they get confronted by the moral majority of the eighties
- 36:40Speaker 1: and they say, look, it's it's totally fine for us
- 36:44Speaker 1: to use the melody from this song. We're not touching
- 36:48Speaker 1: the lyrics. The kids aren't gonna know it. The baby
- 36:51Speaker 1: boomers just remember they liked hearing it on their transistor radios.
- 36:56Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know in their minds too, I'm not
- 36:58Speaker 4: sure it's interesting because you know, if even if you
- 37:01Speaker 4: don't use the original recording of the song and you
- 37:04Speaker 4: don't use the lyrics, if you're using the melody and
- 37:07Speaker 4: it's exactly the same, you still have to pay publishing
- 37:10Speaker 4: rights for something like that. There are parody laws and
- 37:14Speaker 4: things like that, but a lot of that doesn't preclude
- 37:16Speaker 4: you from being sued. It just is a defense you
- 37:19Speaker 4: can use in court, like a fair use or whatever.
- 37:22Speaker 1: Like when Fogerty got sued for sounding too much like himself.
- 37:27Speaker 4: Like himself because you know, owned the masters or the
- 37:30Speaker 4: rights to the publishing of his actual catalog. And this
- 37:34Speaker 4: this comes into play. But first and foremost to that
- 37:36Speaker 4: moral majority point. They are calling into question the use
- 37:41Speaker 4: of the song, to which the McDonald's defenders, the folks
- 37:45Speaker 4: you know, doing corporate pr are saying, no, no, no,
- 37:48Speaker 4: it's it's just the melody. We were trying to go
- 37:51Speaker 4: for this nostalgia thing. It's a little hard to make
- 37:53Speaker 4: that argument when the name of the character Mac is
- 37:58Speaker 4: in Mac the Knife, Like, I just have a hard
- 38:01Speaker 4: time believing that that the guy that thought of this
- 38:04Speaker 4: and making these connections, you know, wasn't thinking about that
- 38:08Speaker 4: play on words as well. I mean, there's no question
- 38:11Speaker 4: that that went in, that figured into his thinking.
- 38:13Speaker 1: Oh, it's it's kind of to go dark with it.
- 38:15Speaker 1: It's kind of like if Victorious Secret had a new
- 38:20Speaker 1: evil clown model mascot and they said, no, there's Jane
- 38:26Speaker 1: Wayne Lacy. Has nothing to do with John Wayne Gacy.
- 38:31Speaker 1: You guys are making it weird.
- 38:32Speaker 4: Ough gaslight the public, why don't you. So that was
- 38:36Speaker 4: one strike against the campaign. That was one strike against
- 38:40Speaker 4: the character. What brought it even further into problematic territory.
- 38:46Speaker 2: Was when the estate of the late great Bobby.
- 38:49Speaker 4: Darren filed suit against McDonald's for exactly what I was
- 38:54Speaker 4: just describing, Like they're saying, no, this is the song
- 38:58Speaker 4: and the styles, because again, you know, the song is
- 39:01Speaker 4: old and the three penny operas from nineteen twenty eight.
- 39:04Speaker 4: So even by this point that music would have fallen
- 39:08Speaker 4: under fair EUSt I'm sorry, under public domain if I'm
- 39:10Speaker 4: not mistaken. So they weren't paying the estate of Bert
- 39:13Speaker 4: Hoolbrett and Kurt Vile. But the problem is the hit
- 39:18Speaker 4: came from Bobby Darren and his arrangement, and his arrangement
- 39:21Speaker 4: and his vocal stylings. All of which are completely mimicked
- 39:25Speaker 4: in this ad campaign.
- 39:27Speaker 1: Yeah, and so the Estate of Darren says, mac tonight,
- 39:31Speaker 1: whatever you guys are doing to sling your burgers, it's
- 39:35Speaker 1: too close to what Bobby was doing.
- 39:37Speaker 2: You owe us.
- 39:38Speaker 1: Ten million US dollars in damage, right, and eventually the
- 39:43Speaker 1: estate drops the suit. But it's still a bad look,
- 39:47Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It's like walking into a
- 39:49Speaker 1: room after someone has just ripped afart. So it's a damper.
- 39:55Speaker 1: You know, it's not a good vibe for the character.
- 39:58Speaker 1: And this is part of why McDonald's overall capital M
- 40:02Speaker 1: capital D moves into the nineties without mac Tonight. He
- 40:07Speaker 1: made a few more appearances every so often. We talked
- 40:10Speaker 1: about that short lived revival commercial run. But now unfortunately
- 40:17Speaker 1: he has become more associated with far right hate groups
- 40:24Speaker 1: using him as a meme.
- 40:26Speaker 2: That's right, I mean, think Pepe the Frog, you know.
- 40:29Speaker 4: I mean a lot of this stuff comes from like
- 40:31Speaker 4: four Chan boards, and you know, it's hard to even
- 40:33Speaker 4: trace where these things begin because it's you know, it's
- 40:38Speaker 4: kind of that game of telephone we always talk about,
- 40:40Speaker 4: and so many of those boards are populated by completely
- 40:42Speaker 4: anonymous folks hiding behind their screen names, and you know,
- 40:46Speaker 4: these kind of like kind of alt right weird comics
- 40:49Speaker 4: end up circulating and then they end up taking a
- 40:51Speaker 4: meaning in a kind of far right leaning, pretty gnarly.
- 40:56Speaker 2: Group sub group on the Internet.
- 40:59Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, that's what happened dis info asymmetrical meme warfare.
- 41:05Speaker 1: Forget the Burger Wars. Think about the the meme wars.
- 41:09Speaker 1: The info wars, not Alex. Not Alex's thing. So mac
- 41:15Speaker 1: Tonite did get revived for an ad campaign in Southeast
- 41:20Speaker 1: Asia in two thousand and seven, but we're probably not
- 41:23Speaker 1: going to see much of them in the US because
- 41:26Speaker 1: to your point, he inspired an internet spin off called
- 41:30Speaker 1: moon Man. This is one hundred percent Moonman is to
- 41:38Speaker 1: mac Tonight as mac Tonite is to Mack the Knife Like,
- 41:43Speaker 1: it's clearly coming from that place. And Max lookalike is
- 41:48Speaker 1: classified as a hate symbol by the ADL, the Anti
- 41:51Speaker 1: Defamation League, because it's associated with all these memes about
- 41:56Speaker 1: racism and homophobia and other nasty stuff, particularly because there
- 42:03Speaker 1: was a rapping version of the character that spread as
- 42:07Speaker 1: a meme online sometime around like twenty ten, and like
- 42:11Speaker 1: you said, Nola appeared on four Chan and the first
- 42:14Speaker 1: videos were harmless parodies, but they kept.
- 42:17Speaker 4: An early texta speech thing too, right, like kind of
- 42:19Speaker 4: like that radiohead computer voice exactly.
- 42:22Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, good point. And this character gets repurposed for
- 42:26Speaker 1: these increasingly depraved videos about white supremacy and you know,
- 42:31Speaker 1: anti semitism, anti Islam stuff, all all kinds of nasty things.
- 42:36Speaker 4: It kind of makes sense if you just see why
- 42:39Speaker 4: they might have co opted this figure.
- 42:41Speaker 2: Nothing whiter than the moon, you know, sa geez.
- 42:46Speaker 1: Yeah, well i'm you know, partially colorable. I thought it
- 42:49Speaker 1: was blue. Wait it changes colors depending on what time
- 42:52Speaker 1: of year.
- 42:53Speaker 4: Yeah, And there's a certain kind of snark and pompousness
- 42:58Speaker 4: that goes along with just like a still shot of
- 43:00Speaker 4: this moon guy kind of grinning with his sunglasses.
- 43:03Speaker 2: You know.
- 43:03Speaker 4: I can just picture some right wing internet weirdo seeing
- 43:07Speaker 4: that and being like it's perfect.
- 43:09Speaker 1: I've seen it from some of my previous research for
- 43:14Speaker 1: different shows, different episodes. We do have to note this
- 43:17Speaker 1: guy was falling down around twenty ten. He popped up
- 43:22Speaker 1: The Internet is se ephemeral shout out to Max, and
- 43:25Speaker 1: then mac Tonight was revitalized yet again, re revitalized by
- 43:31Speaker 1: the Old Rights in twenty fifteen, and this is what
- 43:35Speaker 1: prompted it was the proverbial fry on the camel's back.
- 43:39Speaker 1: This is what prompted McDonald's to pull the last of
- 43:43Speaker 1: all Mac Tonight themed decor from restaurants.
- 43:46Speaker 2: And this is why nationally, I mean, even like it
- 43:49Speaker 2: was just Donzo, and.
- 43:50Speaker 1: This is why you will still see a speedy maybe
- 43:54Speaker 1: out in Munsey, Indiana, but you're not going to see
- 43:57Speaker 1: Mac Tonight at a McDonald's new or you. And maybe
- 44:01Speaker 1: it was the right choice.
- 44:02Speaker 2: Maybe, I mean, it's just it is a bummer.
- 44:04Speaker 4: I thought it was an interesting character, but the whole
- 44:06Speaker 4: story is so fascinating. What do I care about fast
- 44:08Speaker 4: food mascots? But you know, I think we're all fans
- 44:11Speaker 4: of just following these kind of ridiculous pop culture moments.
- 44:14Speaker 2: And I wouldn't be surprised.
- 44:16Speaker 4: Ben if, like that Mac the Tonight commercial that you found,
- 44:20Speaker 4: if there's some you know, McDonald's lawyers or whatever that
- 44:24Speaker 4: do their best to get that stuff stripped from the internet,
- 44:27Speaker 4: you know, because they just don't want to be associated
- 44:29Speaker 4: with it at all because of all the hate group stuff.
- 44:31Speaker 1: Oh good point, and I think we have been very fair.
- 44:35Speaker 1: But in case that does get scrubbed, well, we'll do
- 44:38Speaker 1: a punch in, but I think we're safe with that one.
- 44:40Speaker 1: It's freely available. We are compresting. Yeah, we're certainly not.
- 44:45Speaker 1: I don't think we're going to be fast food mascots.
- 44:48Speaker 1: I don't really eat fast food. I don't know what
- 44:50Speaker 1: mascot we would be for that. Would we be the
- 44:53Speaker 1: like the Sad Salad crew. I'll be the bag man,
- 44:56Speaker 1: you put the fries in me, I'll be the face.
- 44:59Speaker 2: Then sounds good. Max, who you want to be? The
- 45:03Speaker 2: guy in the chair?
- 45:04Speaker 1: We'll just call him the condition, you know what I mean.
- 45:06Speaker 4: That's that's the guy that's like behind the scenes doing
- 45:08Speaker 4: all the like hacking and computering and stuff.
- 45:10Speaker 2: It just seems appropriate.
- 45:11Speaker 1: Works with me, great, all right, great, and we also
- 45:15Speaker 1: literally work with you. So thank you so much for
- 45:17Speaker 1: tuning in. Fellow ridiculous historians. We love these pop culture stories.
- 45:23Speaker 1: We love hearing more about it. If you are interested
- 45:26Speaker 1: in learning the full pantheon or the rise and fall
- 45:29Speaker 1: of the Pantheon, we should say of McDonald's, tune into
- 45:33Speaker 1: our two parter, wherein we do light spoiler reveal the
- 45:38Speaker 1: purported identity of Grimace aka what Grimace is supposed to
- 45:43Speaker 1: be big, big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams.
- 45:46Speaker 1: Big big thanks to Alex Williams, who composed this slap
- 45:49Speaker 1: and bop and uh no, let's uh, let's crack on
- 45:52Speaker 1: the Quist for a bit.
- 45:53Speaker 2: We earned it, I think so. I think that's right.
- 45:58Speaker 2: Damn you Quist. Dare we stand for?
- 46:02Speaker 1: You're like a salad at McDonald's in an eighties commercial.
- 46:05Speaker 4: I'm wilted and it's still a little shiny because I'm
- 46:08Speaker 4: covered in nail polish.
- 46:09Speaker 1: We only listened to the song The Grinch because it
- 46:13Speaker 1: makes us think of you. Big big fakes to Christo
- 46:17Speaker 1: rasiotis Eve's Jeffcoat, a j Bahama's Jacobs?
- 46:22Speaker 2: Who else? Who else?
- 46:23Speaker 1: Who?
- 46:23Speaker 4: Ell? Hey, the rude Dude's over at ridiculous crime with
- 46:28Speaker 4: Saren and Elizabeth and who else?
- 46:31Speaker 2: Gabe Luesier check him out?
- 46:34Speaker 1: Ah yes, Gabe Luesier and of course no super sized.
- 46:40Speaker 1: Thanks to you, my father.
- 46:41Speaker 4: Thanks Buddy, I appreciate that, but see I said, but
- 46:45Speaker 4: we'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
- 46:55Speaker 4: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
- 46:58Speaker 4: to your favorite shows.