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- [00:00]
Ben Bullen
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you as always so much for tuning in. In let's hear it for our super producer, the man, the myth, the legend, the mascot, Mr. Max Williams.
- [00:39]
Noel Brown
Hello, I'm a Max like item. Yes, indeed, the big Big Max.
- [00:44]
Ben Bullen
Do you come with a combo though?
- [00:46]
Noel Brown
Only if you get the kids meal. I mean, what are they called? Happy, Happy Happy Meal, whatever. I haven't eaten McDonald's. Max condition. You're a human Happy Meal though. And I'm sorry I called you. I wouldn't. I say I hate when people call me Big man or Big Guy or whatever. Really big bugs me. So when I called you Big Max, it was just a referen to Big Macs, the sandwich. It wasn't saying that you're like some sort of stocky fellow. I have, I have this. My old friend Chelsea, I would call her. I'm like, what a big guy. I say big guy people all the time and she's like, stop calling me big guy. I was like, all right, big girl. That would not go over well. And I should probably stop taking it personally because it's probably not intended the way I'm hearing.
- [01:23]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, most people are kind of talking to themselves when they talk to folks. You know, I used to have a issue with people calling me buddy because in the United States it's usually deployed in a condescending tone, which is different, weirdly enough from Bud. Bud is like a respectful fist bump in a conversation. That dulcet tone you're hearing, by the way, ridiculous historians is none other than Mr. Noel Brown. And they have often called me Ben Bullen. On this show. Today we are exploring a story of ridiculous fast food history. It's just before our cutoff, right? Because historically, arbitrarily we determined history cuts off with Max the superhero apartheid gorilla.
- [02:19]
Noel Brown
That's right. What a guy.
- [02:22]
Ben Bullen
What a primate indeed. And you know, Noel, back not too, too long ago, we explored the mythology of McDonald's, of their excellent work with mascots, the pantheon of characters.
- [02:39]
Noel Brown
Right?
- [02:39]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, Pantheon. Just so. And now we're looking at, with the help of a research associate, Jeff Bartlett, we are looking at a guy we didn't talk much about in our two part episode on McDonald's and their mascots, which by the way featured Jonathan Strickland, AKA the Quister.
- [03:00]
Noel Brown
Oh my gosh. How long ago was that?
- [03:02]
Ben Bullen
Well, he was, he was, was behaving for most of it.
- [03:06]
Noel Brown
He was but a young quizter.
- [03:07]
Ben Bullen
Yes, yes, he was a quizzling. With a Z. Not the, not the very mean word. Do you know the word quizzling?
- [03:16]
Noel Brown
I don't think I do.
- [03:17]
Ben Bullen
S Quizzly with an S means a traitor who collaborates with the enemy.
- [03:24]
Noel Brown
Good to know. I mean that's not too far off from from the quiz term.
- [03:27]
Ben Bullen
I mean it is kind of in his character's DNA.
- [03:30]
Noel Brown
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- [03:39]
Ben Bullen
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- [03:42]
Noel Brown
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- [03:53]
Ben Bullen
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- [03:55]
Noel Brown
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- [04:02]
Cindy Crawford
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- [04:33]
Max Williams
Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox Onobotulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. Botox is not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Botox prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.
- [04:56]
Noel Brown
Botox is a prescription medicine injected by your doctor.
- [04:59]
Ben Bullen
Effects of Botox may spread hours to.
- [05:00]
Noel Brown
Weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk.
- [05:12]
Ben Bullen
Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck.
- [05:14]
Noel Brown
And injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthe, athenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [05:34]
Max Williams
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- [06:15]
Noel Brown
From life as a Gringo.
- [06:16]
Ben Bullen
No. Making smarter financial moves today secures your financial freedom for a successful tomorrow.
- [06:21]
Noel Brown
For me personally, I was one of those people who, like many of us, weren't taught about finances. You know, my parents didn't know, but now this is the time where I can become somebody who creates generational wealth. Or I just sort of end up being in the same hamster wheel that we've been in for generations. At this point, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [06:40]
Ben Bullen
State Farm, proud sponsor of my Cultura podcast network. Well, who is this missing character we're exploring tonight? Noel?
- [06:53]
Noel Brown
Oh, tonight indeed. We would be tonight for this episode for sure, because it is absolutely a nighttime character, a Nighttime figure, a McDonald's mascot for the grownups, you know, whereas all the other ones, The Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, the Grimace, all of that pantheon we previously mentioned, are much more geared towards children. But Mac Tonight, which is an odd name, it's like sort of like a concept more than a name, was Indeed a fictional McDonald's mascot, charact figure that was featured in commercials running for a pretty brief window of time from 1986 to 1989. He was a sort of a Sinatra esque fellow that wouldn't seem out of place in a cigarette advertisement. I've always pictured like he should have had like a cigarette hanging from his moon, not moon shaped lips. His head was moon shaped though, but his lips were normal. Wearing sunglasses, often seen sitting at a piano. Bit of a crooner.
- [07:53]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, yeah. Sort of a mix of Max Headroom and Kinski from Nightbreed, if you remember that adaptation of the Clive Barker novel.
- [08:03]
Noel Brown
Yeah, Moonface, I believe in the movie in any case. Right.
- [08:08]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, he's a cool guy. Tickling the keys, tickling the ivory. And his whole thing is, first off, he wears sunglasses at night. And secondly, he wants you to know that he, he very much wants you to know that McDonald's is a late night place. It's not just for the kiddos at 11am it's also McDonald's after dark.
- [08:35]
Noel Brown
McDonald's for dinner, y'all. Mac Tonight. Get it?
- [08:38]
Ben Bullen
Pretty.
- [08:39]
Noel Brown
Pretty smart. I mean, I totally understand it where sometimes companies get such a reputation for one thing that they need to remind consumers that, no, we're not just for the kids. We're. We're dangerous. Check out Mac Tonight. Look at this guy. He was even based on a song about murder most foul.
- [08:57]
Ben Bullen
Yes, yes. And as a fan of Bertell Brecht, this is especially interesting to me. At least some people found the guy charming. Some people found him off putting.
- [09:10]
Noel Brown
Yeah. Some found him downright Brechtian.
- [09:13]
Ben Bullen
Right. And there are machinery. A theater joke. And there is a mystery afoot. We are over the moon to show you why. Explore together how this character became so famous and then rejected and why Mac Tonight is possibly not coming back. But before we do that, we want to talk about the very first mascot for McDonald's, which is just a goofy guy. He's just lovable.
- [09:45]
Noel Brown
He's a goofy guy. We're talking about Speedy Ronald McDonald, the creepy clown, Hamburglar Grimace, all the hits, the pantheon we talked about. We're not always the ambassadors of McDonald's that we know them as. As of today, of course, this is out of the side of the scope of this episode, but McDonald's was in fact created initially by people with the name McDonald. Richard and Maurice McDonald introduced the concept of fast food and were then bought out and screwed over by Ray E. Kroc, which you can see the story of that portrayed in the excellent film the Founder, starring Michael Keaton as, I guess, the titular founder, Although he wasn't really the founder. In fact, the founders were Richard and Maurice McDonald's.
- [10:34]
Ben Bullen
He was like the popularizer.
- [10:36]
Noel Brown
That's right. He saw the vision that they already kind of had. But he saw dollar signs and like, he already, you know, was envisioning that however many billions served that you see on the McDonald's Golden Arches sign and.
- [10:50]
Ben Bullen
The crazy uniformity with the sesame seeds and so on. That's croc. I love that you're bringing this up. But when Richard and Maurice, when they introduce McDonald's as a concept, they also introduce what is called the Speedee Service system. S P E E D E E. And they sort of anticipated the rise of what we call fast food today. This system asked customers to walk up to a window to get their own food. You didn't sit at a table and get a server to come to you.
- [11:30]
Noel Brown
They got rid of the Middleman, more or less, and decided to serve the customers directly. You know, you'd pay it. I mean, I guess it evolved. But even today, you pay at one window. I mean, if you're doing the drive through thing and then you roll over to the next one and they hand you your bag, hopefully in a speedy fashion. But that Speedy system came with a character, a mascot of the same name, to kind of really hit home the message and clarify exactly what they were all about there at McDonald's, that speedy service life.
- [12:01]
Ben Bullen
Yeah. They also shed a lot of choice in favor of quick delivery. So McDonald's, unlike many other restaurants at the time, they stripped down their menu. Just burgers, fries, soft drinks, and occasionally they would branch out later to apple pies, things like that. But the point was, you get in, you get your food as quickly as possible. This was such a new idea that, as you were saying, they had to have some sort of friendly figure to explain this, so it didn't sound like a TED Talk. And when they got the Speedy service system, they wanted to humanize it or anthropomorphize it, I should say, with this guy who is. Who's. He's always kind of winking at you. He's a cook, but despite being a cook, he has a bow tie and he's got a hamburger for a head. And despite being very quick conceptually, he also has a pot belly because he's very well fed.
- [13:02]
Noel Brown
Right, yeah. He obviously pulls off little pieces of his own head and eats it, which is an abomination, if you ask me. But it did, you know, kind of bring that message home. People did understand what Speedy was about and what the Speedy service system was all about. And, you know, he was more of an on site kind of presence than a anthromorphic cartoon or person wearing a suit that would appear in television commercials. He was retired entirely in 1962, and before that time didn't appear in a single commercial.
- [13:34]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, yeah. Part of it was the fact that other companies were making mascots. In particular, Alka Seltzer had a mascot called Speedy, spelled S, P, E, E, D, Y.
- [13:50]
Noel Brown
So, yeah, little brand confusion potentially.
- [13:54]
Ben Bullen
Right, exactly. And if you go to folks like Alan Hess researching for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, you'll see something that Kroc and McDonald's recognized pretty immediately. Folks were identifying McDonald's with those golden arches, which came out in 1961. They were thinking of that more so than they were thinking of this weird warehammer burger that wants to give you fries very quickly. So as the story goes, they dropped this mascot, Speedy, and they replaced him with an absolutely terrifying guy named Ronald McDonald. Who wants to hang out with children across the world and make them eat french fries.
- [14:46]
Noel Brown
Yeah, exactly. It's a little weird. And actually it occurs to me, I wonder how far ahead of John wayne Gacy, Ronald McDonald was.
- [14:57]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, yeah, it's a point I brought up on stuff they don't want you to know in the past. The coulrophobia of the western world can be traced, in my opinion, to Gacy. To John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who was also a part time clown in other parts of the world. Clowns are still cool.
- [15:19]
Noel Brown
Totally. Yeah. It does appear that Gacy's crimes took place throughout the 70s and he didn't really come to light, you know, in a public way until 1978. So this whole Ronald McDonald thing was already going strong from the early 60s.
- [15:35]
Ben Bullen
And they took an L on that one. Yeah, no supersize there. Because America learned to fear clowns and associate them with very sinister things. Now if we go to Mashto, we'll see that our pal Felix Baer says there is one Speedy operating at its original location, as in one image or icon of this character. It's in Muncie, Indiana. The Muncie Speedy still has vertical neon lights between the bottom of the arch and at the top of the McDonald's logo.
- [16:12]
Noel Brown
Yeah, and that's definitely something you'll also see with other fast food brands like Arby's for example, in Athens, Georgia. There a classic giant neon Arby's sign that hasn't changed since, you know, the original days of that franchise. And that's something that like certain brands, you know, think about. They're like, oh, well, let's let there be this kind of like relic of the past that we don't mess with.
- [16:34]
Ben Bullen
And here's why we're telling you about Speedy. It's not an episode about Speedy himself. We wish him the best. It is to illustrate fellow ridiculous historians that McDonald's as a concept, as an enterprise, has no problem with abandoning mascots. With moving on to the next thing you know, let's acknowledge, obviously, Ronald McDonald. Please check out our two part series on the pantheon of McDonald's characters. Mac tonight shows up and he is a shot out of the blue. Right. He might as well be from deep space. That's a moon joke. Thank you. The whole idea was that there was this guy who's like a late night, cool, jazzy type singer and he says, hey, McDonald's it's not just for daytime. Your kids are asleep, you need something to eat, come on down to McDonald's. He does not appear in McDonaldland because that's for kids. He's too cool.
- [17:43]
Unknown
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- [18:46]
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- [21:16]
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- [21:53]
Noel Brown
Yeah, he's probably the one that distributed all the McDonald's branded ashtrays at all the locations. Remember that was a thing there used to be. You can probably still find them for sale, McDonald's ashtrays and matchbooks and all of that stuff from when everyone used to just smoke them if you got them in McDonald's locations, including the Play place, I would imagine, which is the ball pit and all of that good stuff. So yeah, I mean it was very much an attempt to. And they've done this other times, you know, without like they had like the. What was it? There was a ad campaign that Jason Alexander participated in where it was like some kind of like MC BLT thing. And it was like it's a grown up sandwich, you know, for, for grownups. And then there was like the. Oh gosh, it was, it was just called like the Mac Something or like it wasn't the Big Mac. It was the Something Deluxe. Arch Deluxe. That's what it was. That was also marketed towards grownups with its potato bun and like all this kind of faux gourmet trappings. And so this is something they definitely continued to do after Mac tonight. But yeah, you're absolutely right Ben. It was an attempt to let people know that McDonald's was not just for breakfast and lunch with the kiddos and happy Meals. It was also for a grown up dinner. Heck, cater your dinner party with McDonald's.
- [23:10]
Ben Bullen
If you want to propose. Why not take her to McDonald's after 9pm? She'll love that. Yeah, I'm sure she would. Mac Tonight would sit at his piano in the clouds and he would sing a song. And it's a song that we'll play for you later. It's all about how awesome McDonald's is at night. To the earlier point. There it is. A parody plagiarizing the melody of a previous song called Mack the Knife, which at that point had been performed by some of the most famous singers in the western world. Bobby Darin, Frank Sinatra. The Mac Tonight version is way less bloody, but it was purposely designed and deployed to leverage baby boomer nostalgia of the 1950s. And for a time, this was incredibly successful. Just for a reminder, because I don't think we mentioned it earlier, this guy Mac Tonight was only in play seriously for like three years, 1986 to 1989. So there's this advertising company that gets this pitch going with McDonald's. They get a budget of half a million dollars, which is huge money. And they say we're going to make four commercials. Each one has Mac the crescent moon faced guy front and center. He's playing his piano, he's singing his new jingle which is set to the tune of Mack the Knife. We'd love to play one example for you here, folks.
- [24:49]
Noel Brown
Oh, we must.
- [24:51]
Ben Bullen
When the clock strikes half past six, baby, time to head for golden light.
- [25:01]
Noel Brown
Night, it's a good time for the great chase dinner at McDonald's.
- [25:13]
Ben Bullen
This is McDonight. Come on, make it Mac Tonight.
- [25:21]
Noel Brown
Yeah, get it, sing it. Oh, my gosh. And the commercial that you found, Ben, it very clearly highlights salads and other things that adults might enjoy. I have to jump in. That's. That's what jumped out to me. That was the shittiest looking salad I've ever seen. Oh, it was glistening. Come on. McDonald's actually had. My mom always says they have great salads there. I haven't eaten McDonald's the years of stated condition, but I look at that thing, I'm like, oh, God, that looks like it's been in the fridge for three weeks. I mean, food picks in those days always looked kind of awful.
- [25:58]
Ben Bullen
The technology just wasn't there.
- [26:01]
Noel Brown
As someone who managed restaurants, it was one time tasked to take food pics and then was after he did the food picks. No longer tasked take food pics.
- [26:09]
Ben Bullen
Most of the food photography you see is not the actual food. A friend of the show and how stuff works back in the day. Lizzie Johnston is a food photographer, and learning all the tricks of the trade is fascinating.
- [26:28]
Noel Brown
Yeah, oftentimes that shine comes from, like, it being coated in, like, clear nail polish, you know, ice cream. If you see the perfect rolled, you know, spheres of ice cream, it's some sort of weird composite clay thing. The mixture may vary. There's tons of crazy tricks around that stuff and ways to get things to look kind of preternaturally crisp and fresh. But you don't want to eat any of that stuff. You would probably die instantly.
- [26:55]
Ben Bullen
Might be an episode history of food photography. Also, at some point, we might have to add a sound cue because I keep pitching new episodes while we're recording. We follow up on some of them. I think we got a good track record. Sort of like Mac Tonight had a good track record in their initial marketing campaign. It was so successful that the boffins, the C suite, the suits at McDonald's said, let's roll this out across the country. So they launched this nationw wide campaign and they had the mascot Mac Tonight appear in Boca Raton, Florida. Can I get some, like, high level, high drama, fancy city music? There we go. Bo Ko Ratol Lord. And it's kind of a big deal. It's not as big as when the Beatles perform on that rooftop, but you see Mac Tonight performing, performing on a rooftop, people go crazy. But the big question is, who created this crazy crooning Crescent Cranium?
- [28:07]
Noel Brown
Ooh, I wrote that alliteration. Yeah, it's good you said it. Brad Aball was the guy. Real Day was responsible for this. He really loved the melody of that song. He really loved the potential for nostalgia mining. And 1986 Mack the Knife, originally written by Kurt Weill and Bertholdt Brecht for the Threepenny Opera. Its original incarnation was very different from the kind of more hit parade version that made a number one hit for Bobby Darin in 1959. And there's something about this just screamed like this is adult. There's something. You're right, Ben. It's that baby boomer kind of nostalgia thing. Just that kind of crooning hepcat finger snap and melody really evokes. So he decided to pitch one of his biggest clients, which is an organization called the McDonald's Operators association of Southern California.
- [29:06]
Ben Bullen
That's kind of shady, right?
- [29:08]
Noel Brown
Which part?
- [29:09]
Ben Bullen
McDonald's Operators association of Southern California. Sounds like it's close to McDonald's but not McDonald's corporate.
- [29:17]
Noel Brown
It's true. But I also know that like, you know, McDonald's is all about franchisees, right? So it's. It seems like maybe this was pitched as more of a regional thing that would be participated in by folks in this part of the country in Southern California. They thought it would hit better there. Cause people are cooler or smarter or something or more adult. I don't know. And by the way, Brad A. Ball was the president of the ad organization or the ad agency. Davis Johnson, mogul and Columbato incorporated DJMC for short, which was a relatively speaking small advertising agency there in la. His creative director, a guy named Peter Katrulas, kind of took his homework assignment and ran with it, listening to tons of different versions, which there were many of this song Mack the Knife by folks ranging from Bobby Darin himself to Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Liberace even worked up a version. It was very, very popular. And he of course knew that it needed to have some McDonald's centric lyrics, you know, a la Weird Al, who was also pretty big at the time. So you gotta wonder if like there was something about that and his Waffle King's a banger.
- [30:33]
Ben Bullen
Dude, have you ever heard Waffle King by Weird Al?
- [30:35]
Noel Brown
No, I don't know.
- [30:36]
Ben Bullen
That's like a cute.
- [30:38]
Noel Brown
What's it a parody of?
- [30:41]
Ben Bullen
It is a guy calling himself the Waffle King who realizes that he is the God of waffles.
- [30:48]
Noel Brown
So it's just a one off. It's not a parody. It's just like one of his original songs.
- [30:52]
Ben Bullen
I don't know the full context. He has a weird banger song.
- [30:57]
Noel Brown
He definitely has those non parody Weird Al versions that usually do not. Yeah, do not stick. Of course not. Not quite stick to the public consciousness the way, you know, fat or Eat it or any of this other body shaming anthems go. But you know, he was hugely popular and I can only imagine that that may be figured in. So we need to do a great parody song incorporating McDonald's messaging into a song that the people of the generation we're trying to attract will no doubt be intimately familiar with.
- [31:28]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, because this is a war. They are in the trenches of what will later be called the Burger wars. The fast escalating fast food fight to get into the bellies of American consumers. This is where Mac Tonight comes from. And look folks, you. You don't have to delve too deep to realize the 1980s commercial culture was weird. It got the voice of Mac Tonight by a guy named Roger Behr. Bear passed away, unfortunately, in 2018. But he was a hugely talented actor. He did a lot of voice work. He also. Side note, thanks to our pal Jeff, he voiced two Transformers characters.
- [32:16]
Noel Brown
Is this in the motion picture or in the cartoon?
- [32:21]
Ben Bullen
Unclear.
- [32:21]
Noel Brown
Okay, fair enough. I'm not familiar with these. These seem like Deep Cut Transformers, Runabout and Run Amok. Are they, like, all one word each? Okay, so I guess they're a package deal. They can't be. They have to be, like, twinsies or something. I love this part of the story because we know and love here at Ridiculous History the work of Doug Jones, who is just an incredible physical actor. I mean, he has a background in mime, in theater, and has portrayed iconic kind of costumed characters ranging from the kind of creature from the Black Lagoon, Star of the Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro. He was the thin or the. Is it the thin man in Pan's Labyrinth with the creepy hands with the eyes on his and the eyes? Absolutely iconic.
- [33:14]
Ben Bullen
This guy's the physical actor. He's not the voice of Mac Tonight.
- [33:17]
Noel Brown
You know, he was this. This. This really was his. His first kind of breakout role led to what was to come for him, which included, like, playing bit parts on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
- [33:30]
Ben Bullen
He is Batman Returns.
- [33:33]
Noel Brown
Batman Returns, exactly. That's another. I think that's maybe his first big screen performance. He plays like an acrobatic clown in. In the Penguins crew in that film. But he gets his kind of big shot portraying the physical embodiment of adult McDonald's. Mac Tonight in this marketing campaign that, as you mentioned, Ben had a pretty hefty budget for the time. Half a million bucks. Mm.
- [34:01]
Ben Bullen
Yeah. And the. The guys at djmc, they choose Jones because he is tall and he is thin, and he has legit bona fide experience with mimery, with the arts of the mime. He's also very animated physically, which is essential for this character. And like you were saying earlier, Jones credits his stint as Mac Tonight doing these commercials as paving his way to overall success as an actor and entertainer. In 2013, he's talking to Collider, and he says, look, I played this Mac tonight character in 27 commercials over just those three years. And because of those 27 commercials, I got all these referrals. People kept coming to me and offering me new, more expansive, more substantive roles. We could also argue this nostalgia or this gratitude is why Doug Jones came back in the mid-1990s to do two more Mac Tonight commercials during a very short lived revival of the character for reasons and it's weird because backstory. I don't think any of this is on air, but on our other shows Stuff they don't want yout know, we were about to record we talked a little bit about Max Headroom and how influential Max Headroom was as a character later becoming a very strange and specific Playboy centerfold. Parody. Mac Tonight is inspired by Max Headroom.
- [35:43]
Noel Brown
Well, it came up in our conversation that you're referencing Ben. How come you don't ever see sexy Max Headroom costumes around Halloween time? Might be a little too much of a deep cut, but you pointed out that surely it's been done, it's had and definitely in the 80s when Max Hedren was inescapable. He's kind of this like computer generated sort of talk show host, like you said, kind of creep coat. And of course he was. You can see him portrayed in Back to The Future Part 2 When they go to that kind of like nostalgia diner or whatever. When Marty McFly gets punked by those kids, one of which is played by very baby little Elijah Wood for having to use his hands for playing a video game, the gun game. Or he's used to impressing the heck out of people with that. And these kids just roll their eyes and he doesn't have telepathy, I guess like everyone in the future does. That never really gets addressed again. It's always bugged me a little bit like you have to use your hands like what do you mean mean little Elijah Wood. But Max Headroom was also of course used in like a big old kind of early hacking kind of scam.
- [36:52]
Ben Bullen
Right, right. The Max Headroom incident. And you could check out stuff they don't want you to know. For more information on that, we think we may have solved the case. Shout out to the actor portraying Max Headroom, a guy named Matt Frewer. Max Headroom was computer generated, but still in the early 1980s or the idea was that he's an computer generated personality. They couldn't do that yet. The technology just wasn't there for a lot of industries, let alone a small LA based ad agency like djmc. And so the firm's executives were going back and forth and they were saying, well, should we just use real people, known human celebrities in the advertisements? Why not have Mr. Be the face of McDonald's for instance? I'm just pulling an 80s reference.
- [37:46]
Noel Brown
I pity the fool who doesn't go to McDonald's for dinner.
- [37:50]
Ben Bullen
And ultimately they said, no, McDonald's needs to have its own mascot. Let's look at original things. There was nothing they thought more original than Max Headroom. And so someone in that writer's room said, we need max headroom for McDonald's. And they nailed it. With Mac Tonight. He got so popular that he even got his own Happy Meal and toys, which used to be much more difficult. Now I feel like if you're a celebrity of a certain echelon, you automatically get a branded Happy Meal.
- [38:24]
Noel Brown
Yeah. And this also makes me think of the relatively recent kind of adult Happy meal thing that McDonald's been doing with the bigger box and the full size sandwiches and like the kind of more like adult Y collectible toys. I got a few of those. They were doing these, like, what was it? Like, like something cactus. I can't remember, but they had these cool. I'm a dorky collector of like, figures and like, you know, super plastic and stuff like that. And they had this whole thing where they had these like, very psychedelic, weird kind of more like hipster figurines of like different McDonald figures. And I bought a few of those for that. But if you think about it, this Mac Tonight Happy Meal and toy thing, if you, you know, look at what their whole branding play was, was kind of the first adult Happy Meal in a lot of ways.
- [39:07]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, I think that's an astute observation.
- [39:12]
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- [42:55]
Ben Bullen
Mac tonight gave McDonald's a crucial edge, a mission critical edge in the competition of the Burger wars. He was a moon size success for his time. Shout out to our friends at Retroist for putting it that way. During this halcyon short lived era, Mac Tonight had a higher recognition rate amid consumers than New Coke and spoilers Folks. New Coke was a huge Boondoggle. It was such a quagmire that there's an entire conspiracy theory about it. And they poured so much money poured. They poured so much money into advertising it all for naught. With way less money. Mac Tonight was way more successful.
- [43:43]
Noel Brown
All for not. You could also argue that per the conspiracy theory of New Coke, that they did it all so that they could then sell the public classic coke with corn syrup, of course, which has maintained that nostalgic play kind of ever since. Because as we know, nostalgia and cocaine are a hell of drugs. And I think both were at play in this Mac Tonight scheme. It just the 80s were big time for that. Big ideas, lots of ideas that maybe shouldn't have ever seen the light of day. But executives really thought quite highly of themselves in these days.
- [44:17]
Ben Bullen
Like who greenlit the song oh Mickey, you're so Fine.
- [44:22]
Noel Brown
I don't know, but it's a banger.
- [44:25]
Ben Bullen
The videos, the music video will take you places.
- [44:29]
Noel Brown
Also a Weird Al parody. Oh Ricky, you're so Fine made it about I Lucy.
- [44:35]
Ben Bullen
And as a result of Mac's overnight virality, his amazing success, the campaign as we said, extends way beyond this regional McDonald's operators deal. Real Life Mac Scott's. There we go. Real life Max Scotts. They would perform at restaurant locations across the United States and thousands of people would go to see Mac tonight. They would go watch him do like, do the song and I guess do some bit. It was huge.
- [45:15]
Noel Brown
Yeah, I think they even rolled out some animatronic versions like Chuck E. Cheese, Rock Afire Explosion Band style. And they were so popular that even when they like fell into disrepair, I guess they didn't think about the long game here. They just left them there as statues. Which is kind of creepy if you.
- [45:33]
Ben Bullen
Think about, oh, 100%. And also to your point about the short lived mania of the 1980s and cocaine. It feels like spending tons of money to make animatronic sculptures and pieces and then just abandoning them instead of fixing them. That feels very 80s to me.
- [45:54]
Noel Brown
There are these McDonald's coffee stirrers that I have seen come up in memes and things about this very topic that were apparently really, really pop for folks to use as coke spoons.
- [46:08]
Ben Bullen
Oh wow.
- [46:08]
Noel Brown
Because they're like, it's like this long thing with a McDonald's arch at one end and just a tiny little spoon on the other end.
- [46:16]
Ben Bullen
Oh no, I've never. I, I'm not about that life.
- [46:20]
Noel Brown
Neither am I. I. Just seen it pop up on the Internet more than, more than a few Times over the years.
- [46:25]
Ben Bullen
That's wild. Also what's wild is the fact that this is a show about ridiculous history. Mac Tonight is not around. You go to your local McDonald's, you're probably not going to see our favorite Moonface boy. And it turns out that we know why you're not going to see him. Noel, we have to go back to that song, Mack the Knife.
- [46:49]
Noel Brown
Yeah, I mentioned that it was about bloody murder at the top of the show, which it is. I mean, you got your bad, bad Leroy Browns, of course. The baddest man the whole town, 100%. And he did some bad things, but didn't outright kill people in the song as Mac the Knife, as evidenced by his name. Definitely did.
- [47:11]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, yeah, these, these ad execs, they're caught by the melody, the catchy tune of the song, not the lyrics. So when they repurpose it Al Yankovic style, they make it a PG rated thing. You know, it's all about how it's Mac Tonight instead of Mac the Knife. And they get confronted by the moral majority of the 80s and they say, look, it's totally fine for us to use the melody from this song. We're not touching the lyrics. The kids aren't going to know it. The baby boomers just remember they liked hearing it on their transistor radios.
- [47:50]
Noel Brown
Yeah. And you know, in their minds, too. I'm not sure. It's interesting because, you know, if. Even if you don't use the original recording of a song and you don't use the lyrics, if you're using the melody and it's exactly the same, you still have to pay publishing rights for something like that. There are parody laws and things like that. But a lot of that doesn't preclude you from being sued. It just is a defense you can use in court, like fair use or whatever.
- [48:17]
Ben Bullen
Like when Fogarty got sued for sounding too much like himself, like himself because.
- [48:22]
Noel Brown
He no longer owned the masters or the rights to the publishing of his actual catalog. And this comes into play. But first and foremost, to that Moral Majority point, they are calling into question the use of the song. To which the McDonald's defenders, the folks, you know, doing corporate PR, are saying, no, no, no, it's just the melody. We were trying to go for this nostalgia thing. It's a little hard to make that argument when the name of the character Mac Tonight is in Mack the Knife. And, like, I just have a hard time believing that the guy that thought of this and making these connections, you know, wasn't thinking about that play on words as well. I mean there's no question that that went in that figured into his thinking.
- [49:08]
Ben Bullen
Oh, it's, it's kind of to go dark with it. It's kind of like if Victoria's Secret had a new evil clown model mascot and they said, no, there's Jane Wayne Lacey has nothing to do with John Wayne Gacy. You guys are making it weird.
- [49:27]
Noel Brown
Ugh. Gaslight the public, why don't you? So, so that was one strike against the campaign. That was one strike against the character. What brought it even further into problematic territory was when the estate of the late great Bobby Darin filed suit against McDonald's for exactly what I was just describing. They're saying, no, this is the song and the style. Because again, this song is old and the Threepenny opera is from 1928. So even by this point that music would have fallen under fair use. I'm sorry, under public domain, if I'm not mistaken. So they weren't paying the estate of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill. But the problem is the hit came from Bobby Darin and his arrangement and his arrangement and his vocal stylings, all of which are completely mimicked in this ad campaign.
- [50:22]
Ben Bullen
Yeah. And so the estate of Darren says, Mac tonight, whatever you guys are doing to sling your burgers, it's too close to what Bobby was doing. You owe us 10. 10 million US dollars in damages. Right. And eventually the estate drops the suit. But it's still a bad look, you know what I mean? It's like walking into a room after someone has just ripped a fart. So it's a damper. It's not a good vibe for the character. And this is part of why McDonald's overall capital M, capital D, moves into the 90s without Mac tonight. He made a few more appearances every so often. We talked about that short lived revival commercial run. But now, unfortunately, he has become more associated with far right hate groups using him as a meme.
- [51:21]
Noel Brown
That's right. I mean, think Pepe the Frog, you know, I mean a lot of this stuff comes from like 4chan boards and it's hard to even trace where these things be begin because it's kind of that game of telephone we always talk about. And so many of those boards are populated by completely anonymous folks hiding behind their screen names. And these kind of alt right, weird comics end up circulating and then they end up taking a meaning in a kind of far right leaning, pretty gnarly group subgroup on the Internet.
- [51:53]
Ben Bullen
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's what Happened. Disinfo. Asymmetrical meme warfare. Forget the Burger wars, think about the meme wars. The infowars, not Alex's thing. So Mac Tonight did get revived for a ad campaign in Southeast Asia in 2007, but we're probably not going to see much of them in the US because to your point, he inspired an Internet spinoff called Moon man. This is 100%. Moon man is to Mac Tonight as Mac Tonight is to Mack the Knife. Like it's clearly coming from that place. And Mac's lookalike is classified as a hate symbol by the adl, the Anti Defamation League, because it's associated with all these memes about racism and homophobia and other nasty stuff. Particularly because there was a rapping version of the character that spread as a meme online sometime around like 2010. And like you said, Noel, it appeared on 4chan. And the first videos were harmless parodies, but they kept.
- [53:12]
Noel Brown
It's an early text to speech thing too, right? Like kind of like that Radiohead computer voice.
- [53:16]
Ben Bullen
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, good point. And this character gets repurposed for these increasingly depraved videos about white supremacy and, you know, anti Semitism, anti Islam stuff. All kinds of nasty things.
- [53:31]
Noel Brown
It kind of makes sense if you just see why they might have co opted this figure. Nothing whiter than the moon, you know, just saying.
- [53:40]
Ben Bullen
Oh, geez. Yeah, well, I'm, you know, partially colorful. I always thought it was blue. Wait, it changes colors depending on what, what, like time of year.
- [53:48]
Noel Brown
Yeah, and there's a certain kind of snark and pompousness that goes along with just like a still shot of this moon guy kind of grinning with his sunglass. You know, I can just picture some right wing Internet weirdo seeing that and being like, it's perfect.
- [54:04]
Ben Bullen
I've seen it from some of my previous research for different shows, different episodes. We do have to note this guy was falling down around 2010. He popped up. The Internet is so ephemeral. Shout out to Max. And then Mac Tonight was revitalized yet again. Re revitalized by the alt right in 2015. And this what prompted it was the proverbial fry on the camel's back. This is what prompted McDonald's to pull the last of all Mac Tonight themed decor from restaurants. And this is why internationally, I mean.
- [54:43]
Noel Brown
Even like there was just dunzo.
- [54:45]
Ben Bullen
And this is why you will still see a speedy maybe out in Muncie, Indiana, but you're not going to see a Mac tonight at a McDonald's near you. And maybe it was the right choice.
- [54:57]
Noel Brown
Maybe. I mean, it's just. It is a bummer. I thought it was an interesting character, but the whole story is so fascinating. What do I care about fast food mascots? But, you know, I think we're all fans of just following these kind of ridiculous pop culture moments. And I wouldn't be surprised, Ben, if like that Mac Tonight commercial that you found, if there's some, you know, McDonald's lawyers or whatever that do their best to get that stuff stripped from the Internet, you know, because they just don't want to be associated with it at all because of all the hate. Hate group stuff.
- [55:26]
Ben Bullen
Ooh, good point. And I think we have been very fair. But in case that does get scrubbed, we'll do, we'll do a punch in. But I, I think we're safe with that one. It's freely available. We are. Yeah. We're certainly not. I, I don't think we're going to be fast food mascots. I, I don't really eat fast food. I don't know what mascot we would be for that. Would we be the, like the Sad Salad Crew?
- [55:50]
Noel Brown
I'll be the bag man. You can put the fries in me.
- [55:53]
Ben Bullen
I'll be the face then.
- [55:55]
Noel Brown
Sounds good. Max. You wanna be the guy in the chair?
- [55:59]
Ben Bullen
We'll just call him the Condition.
- [56:00]
Noel Brown
You know what I mean? That's the guy that's behind the scenes doing all the hacking and computering and stuff. Just seems appropriate. Works with me. Great.
- [56:07]
Ben Bullen
All right, great. And we also literally work with you. So thank you so much for tuning in, fellow ridiculous historians. We love these pop culture culture stories. We love hearing more about it. If you are interested in learning the full pantheon or the rise and fall of the pantheon, we should say of McDonald's, tune into our two parter wherein we do light spoiler reveal the purported identity of Grimace, AKA what Grimace is supposed to be. Big, big thanks to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. Big, big thanks to Alex Williams, who composed this slap and bop and Noel. Let's. Let's crack on the quisr for a bit. We earned it.
- [56:49]
Noel Brown
I think so. I think that's right. Damn you. Quiz.
- [56:55]
Ben Bullen
There we go.
- [56:56]
Noel Brown
Stand for.
- [56:57]
Ben Bullen
You're like a salad at McDonald's in an 80s commercial.
- [57:00]
Noel Brown
I'm wilted but still a little shiny because I'm covered in nail polish.
- [57:04]
Ben Bullen
We only listen to the song the Grinch because it makes us think of you 100%. Big, big thanks to Christopher Odis, Eve's Jeffcoat, AJ Bahamas Jacobs. Who else? Who else? Who else.
- [57:19]
Noel Brown
Hey, the rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime with Zarin and Elizabeth and who else? Gabe Luzier. Check him out.
- [57:29]
Ben Bullen
Ah yes, Gabe Luzier. And of course Noel Super Size. Thanks to you my friend.
- [57:36]
Noel Brown
Thanks bud. I appreciate that bud. See, I said bud. We'll see you next time folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
- [57:54]
Unknown
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