Hey, Jason Toon here. Ever get into alternate history? Well, prepare to tremble as you consider how the course of human events would have been altered had we been ruled by the monsters in this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture.
Despite his thin characterization and insipid personality, Ronald McDonald is recognized by upward of 90% of Americans, including kids. His supporting cast in McDonaldland can’t be far behind, from Grimace to Mayor McCheese to the Hamburglar. I’m skeptical that any kid actually likes these characters - a suspicion confirmed anecdotally by my own kids - but every kid knows who they are.
“Our move to the suburbs was a conscious effort to go for the family business. That meant going after the kids,” said McDonald’s president Fred Turner in 1973, a decade after Ronald made his debut. “We decided to use television, so we created our own character, Ronald McDonald.”
It’s hard to argue with the results. So when competitors Burger King and Jack-in-the-Box started “going after the kids”, they created their own extended universes of characters - nonentities so vacuous, they make McDonaldland look like Yoknapatawpha County.
Trapped in the box
If you think Ronald McDonald is lame, meet Jack the Clown, leader of the Jack in the Box Bunch, who debuted in 1971. The imagination saved on thinking up clever names for him and his crew was not spent developing any other aspect of these characters.
Jack himself is a generic clown head on top of the most nondescript outfit imaginable: white shirt, blue pants, black shoes, drawn with a level of detail that makes you wonder if the early 1970s suffered through an ink embargo. OK, so the name “Jack in the Box” has a more coherent claim to a clown mascot than McDonald’s. But that’s all the more reason to do something with it. Ronald’s boring but at least he wears giant red shoes. Jack is the kind of sketchy, low-effort clown you’d send home from your kid’s party. He’s giving twelve-step program, not three-ring circus.
As depicted in a charmless series of commercials, the rest of the Bunch was also in no danger of displacing Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse in children’s hearts. There’s Hamburgermeister, an elderly German man in lederhosen who never addresses the question of what he did during the war. There’s Small Fry, a boy who has mistaken liking French fries for a personality. There’s the Secret Sauce Agent, whose trenchcoat, evil snicker, and shifty demeanor seem to be aiming for the Hamburglar quasi-villain role, but he never does anything that would reveal a motivation even as developed as “I want to steal hamburgers”.
Most disturbing is the Onion Ring Thing, who has a raging jones for onion rings, yet appears to be an onion ring himself. What’s going on there? The only faint signs of life come from the Shakes, a band of three first-draft Muppet sketches who specialize in sub-Merseybeat close-harmony jingles a decade too late, and from the legendary Paul Winchell’s voice acting, which is too good for this flimsy material.
These lazily conceived characters never had a chance of breaking through, and not for lack of trying on Jack in the Box’s part. Along with the commercials, they made cardboard cutouts, rubber bendy toys, and a series of PSA comic-book-and-record sets, including one with the disturbing title “How Pain Helps Us”. But the pain of us knowing these characters didn’t help Jack in the Box. Within a couple of years, the Bunch quietly went to that big grease trap in the sky. They were not missed. Another try, the Jack Pack, around 1990, was basically just food with sunglasses on.
Where’s a peasant revolt when you need one?
Burger King took a different tack: if you can’t charm ‘em, disturb ‘em. Their namesake mascot started as a cartoon, then became a rudimentary puppet, then a different cartoon. When he evolved into the live-action Marvelous Magical Burger King in 1976, the titular king himself was standard fairytale fare. His subjects in the Burger King Kingdom were not, unless you’re talking about the kinds of fairytales that stern Bavarian parents used to keep their children in a state of constant terror.
The King’s naysaying nemesis the Duke of Doubt labored under the most disturbing facial prosthetics this side of Eraserhead. No wonder this pessimistic nobleman had trouble believing in the Burger King’s magic tricks; after what had been done to him, how could he believe in anything at all?
The royal allies were scarcely more comforting. The relentlessly twitching Sir Shake-A-Lot delivers an Oscar-worthy portrait of a hopeless addict, while The Burger Thing is a talking hamburger bun in a picture frame for some reason. The Wizard of Fries is many things: a really strained play on “Wizard of Oz”, a robot with an order of Burger King fries under a dome, and a fry-dispensing slot machine. Why hone one good idea when you can execute several half-assed ideas at once?
Once again, this grotesque menagerie somehow failed to delight the youth. After their initial burst onto the scene, the Burger King Kingdom was gradually shuffled off into the attic like an embarrassing, demented great-uncle. They were fully replaced in the late ‘80s by the no more inspired but far less unsettling BK Kids Club campaigns.
If you’ve heard of any of these characters, it’s most likely in their later, satirical versions. Jack in the Box would revive the “clown head + normal clothes” bit in 1994, this time as a sort of shlubby everyman CEO who can’t pronounce the word “chipotle”. In 2004, the Burger King would return as “Creepy King”, wearing a similar regal outfit but, like Jack, with a dead-eyed, permanently grinning giant plastic head.
Both are still with us today, vastly outliving their straight ancestors. It says something that both companies realized the only way to salvage these misbegotten mascots was to make fun of them. Are they more interesting and funny than Ronald McDonald? Of course, who isn’t? But the fact that you can’t imagine McDonald’s ever making Ronald McDonald a parodic creep tells you all you need to know about which fast food chain succeeded in “going after the kids”.
I was never scared of clowns as a kid, but I gotta say, Grimace always freaked me out. I just couldn’t get my head around what he was supposed to be. What weird mascots creeped you out as a kid? Let’s talk in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Retreat to the comforting embrace of reality with previous Shoddy Goods stories:
Cheez Kisses: gross name for a snack or the grossest name for a snack?
People in the 1920s drank radium for health. It didn’t go well.
And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!
Now... if I remember correctly, Grimace is supposed to be a taste bud. Also, he originally had four arms, if I'm not mistaken.
“OK, so the name “Jack in the Box” has a more coherent claim to a clown mascot than McDonald’s.”
This line made me laugh. It struck me as quite funny, but I don’t think I will ever actually know why.