One of my favourite pieces of writing of 2021 was this Vice article by Amelia Tait, which posed the all-important question that might not have been at the forefront of our concerns in the current global climate, but had nevertheless lurked uneasily at the back of our skulls for quite some time - whatever happened to Ronald McDonald? Actually, I suspect that most of us kind of already knew the answer, but there is a fascinating yarn to be unpicked in delving into the specifics of his discreet decline - keeping in mind that, in the latter stages of the 20th century, the burger-hawking clown was on a par with Mickey Mouse in terms of American icons who'd effectively achieved world domination. It didn't take long for the 21st century to start getting rough on the once unassailable brand mascot, with his various McDonaldland cohorts - Grimace, Hamburglar, Officer Big Mac and co - facing eviction from McDonald's eateries and promotions in 2003. For the time being, Ronald himself was left standing, but has been officially retired from McDonald's advertising in the UK as of 2014, while his appearances have been largely scaled back in his native US. It's a significant comedown for a character who, according to a poll cited by George Ritzer in The McDonaldization of Society, was once identifiable among 96% of school children, an honor bested only by Santa Claus (p.8). So where did it all go wrong for Ronald?
As it turns out, Ronald McDonald was a casualty of not one, but two cultural shifts that made a smiling clown an undesirable thing to have at the forefront of your branding. Firstly, over the past two decades we've become a lot more leery about fast food marketing geared specifically and unambiguously toward enticing the very youngest of consumers. Traditionally, McDonald's has always been a family brand, a place you took the kids after swimming lessons when you were too exhausted to cook for them, when you were in another town and your offspring were way too fussy to be up for anything local and unfamiliar, or just when they really eager to get their hands on whatever giveaway was being offered in Happy Meals that week. By all counts it still fulfils all of those functions. But in the mid-2000s, McDonald's underwent a massive image overhaul designed to counteract the tidal wave of negative publicity they had accumulated with Morgan Spurlock's hit documentary Super Size Me and growing concerns about childhood obesity, a somewhat inevitable consequence of years of general indifference toward the messages children were actually receiving in between their favourite programming (I grew up in an era when junk food promotions were not only slapped over every inch of commercial children's media, but could get away with pushing themselves as healthy snacking options, if they were sneaky enough about it). Happy Meals and the promise of free plastic haven't gone away, but McDonald's was toning back on its kid-zeroed marketing, as the emphasis moved more toward courting the next most receptive demographic, ie: students. Secondly, in recent years we've undergone a drastic revamp in terms of how we look at clowns. The general consensus is that clowns are no longer benign purveyors of innocent birthday party capering, but sinister, grotesque deviants who signify something very corrupted in the childhood vista. The 2016 clown invasion and the popularity of the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's It appear to have cemented this notion in the public consciousness. Coulrophobia itself is hardly a novel phenomenon, but it's only relatively recently that clowns have effectively been ranked alongside spiders and vertical drops as something that people are almost expected to fear by default; nowadays, if you don't have any profound dislike of clowns, you can consider yourself the anomaly. All in all, the 21st century just hasn't been the kindest of climates for a grease-peddling joker.
One of the last notable artefacts of Ronald McDonald's uncontested reign of terror was The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald, a series of forty-minute direct-to-video animated adventures specially created to be sold as add-ons to consumers purchasing drinks and ice creams, beginning with a Halloween-themed video, Scared Silly, in October 1998 (a clip from the series was featured in Super Size Me, where Spurlock incorrectly identified it as a television cartoon). The cartoon was unmistakably the work of Klasky Csupo, the animation studio founded by husband and wife team Arlene Klasky and Gene Csupo in 1982 that went on to become a children's entertainment powerhouse in the 1990s/early 2000s, engineering such hit Nickelodeon shows as Rugrats, The Wild Thornberrys and As Told By Ginger. The studio was also responsible for animating The Simpsons during its first few years of life, before disputes between Klasky Csupo and Gracie Films prompted the latter to switch to Film Roman. Despite the company's ubiquitousness through many a millennial's childhood, in my experience Klasky Csupo are an extremely decisive studio; their output is fondly remembered by many, but just as many others are alienated by their visual style, rating it as ugly and unappealing. Additionally, a high number of millennials report having had their first logophobic experience by unwisely sticking around to the end of any Klasky Csupo production's closing credits and seeing just what horrors were lying in wait - particularly during the studio's peak years when they were using what has been affectionately dubbed the "Splaat" logo. If you think clowns are grotesque, then you should get a load of the nightmarish mouth they had blurt out the studio name, in eerily emotionless, computerised tones, at the end of each adventure with Eliza or Ginger (although it was at least handy for those who, myself included, were unsure of the pronunciation). Put a pin in that, because Klasky Csupo really are overdue their own Logo Case Study on these pages.
Like any Klasky Csupo production, The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald has built up its share of detractors and devotees, with some regarding them as junky promotional tools and others nostalgic essentials - such nostalgia tends to be less prolific than that for KC's Nickelodeon cartoons, however, due to the limited availability of the videos. A total of five VHS tapes were available in McDonald's restaurants between 1998 and 2001, with a belated sixth adventure finally seeing the light of day in January 2003, albeit exclusively through Klasky Csupo's official online store. The series was never upgraded into the DVD age, presumably owing to the decision to retire the McDonaldland characters soon after. I've also not seen a wild amount of evidence to suggest that the videos were sold in many, if any, locations outside of the US (they certainly never made it to UK restaurants), capping their impact even further. Their modern status as animated curios naturally makes them irresistible to me, although I did have another, slightly more esoteric motive for wanting to dust off the series at this point in time. We're currently in the early stages of 2022, a year that has long stood out to me as being of immense significance owing to the fact that it is the year in which Soylent Green takes place. It's been on my mind that I ought to do something to commemorate the Year of The Suspicious Foodstuff, and nothing struck me as more savoury than a year-round retrospective dedicated to particularly strange or unique fast food promotions.
Most of the classic McDonaldland characters appear, albeit adapted to fit the Klasky Csupo visual style. Grimace (Kevin Michael Richardson) looks more-or-less the same (I guess there aren't a whole lot of options when you're working with a giant purple blob). Hamburglar (Charlie Adler), on the other hand, looks nigh-unrecognisable, still favouring the striped convict motif but having swapped out the bulk of his burglar attire for dark glasses and a trendy sports coat, and looking for all the world like an all grown up Rocket Power reject (compared to previous Hamburglar incarnations, who spoke mostly in gibberish, he's also unusually articulate). Other familiar faces include Birdie the Early Bird (Christine Cavanaugh), a character originally introduced to plug breakfast menu items, and, more nightmarishly, the Fry Kids and the McNuggets. I say "nightmarish", because while I can handle more generic characters like Birdie and Hamburglar just fine, the McDonaldland residents who are meant to be physically comprised of McDonald's foodstuff have always struck me as aesthetically and conceptually disturbing (among other things, wouldn't it make cannibals of them to actually eat at McDonald's?). The Fry Kids are a mild example - in their case, it's not altogether clear to me if that shaggy matter hanging off of them is intended to be off-colour French fries, or if they're just walking puffballs nominally affiliated with processed potato sticks. But those McNuggets...here, they've been given little beaks, wings and combs so as to resemble the farmyard critter they're made of, and I seriously can't be the only person who finds that design choice a bit sick (puts me strongly in mind of Banksy's "Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill" exhibit). On that note, it's something of a relief that the two burger-headed characters are largely ignored - Mayor McCheese (Bob Joles) makes an appearance in just one of the adventures, Have Time, Will Travel, while Officer Big Mac is conspicuously absent. Oh well, nobody likes authority figures, right? There are also a handful of new characters, the most prominent being Ronald's sardonic talking mutt, Sundae (Dee Bradley Baker - for years, I harbored under the misconception that Sundae was voiced by the same actor who does Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants, but a quick check of the cast list reveals not), and a couple of human kids who are chummy with Ronald, Tika (Jazmine A. Corona) and Franklin (Alex D. Linz).
Each video opens and closes with live action segments
showing the familiar flesh-and-blood Ronald (Jack Doepke or David
Hussey, depending on what video you're watching) hanging out in his surreal McDonaldland residence. In the first three adventures, he is accompanied by Sundae (actually Verne Troyer, best known for playing Mini-Me in the Austin Powers films, in a Sundae suit), and there's a transitional sequence where Ronald and Sundae take a chute down into the world beyond, assuming their animated forms along the way. I've come across more than one person ascribing a bout of grisly childhood nightmares to the live action Sundae, and that's understandable enough. Because Sundae was a completely original character, his default design was in the Klasky Csupo style, and the efforts to translate that directly into live action aren't the easiest on the eyes (it doesn't help matters that the zipper on the Sundae suit is also very visible across his underside, making it look as though he's recovering from heart surgery). That said, I think the least appealing thing about Sundae visually applies to both his animated and live action forms, which is to say his unpleasant-looking mouth. Freaky pronounced animal lips are a bizarre design choice favoured by Klasky Csupo in general, as evidenced all throughout The Wild Thornberrys - here, they're also seen on a beaver, a sinister talking grizzly who stalks the gang at random intervals during the adventure, a stuffed and mounted swordfish, and those creepy deep fried miniature chickens - but Sundae's a particularly egregious example, what with his bright red lips, the coulrophobic-taunting layer of white clown make-up around his muzzle (albeit only really visible in his animated form) and his distinctly human-looking teeth. Between this and the Splaat logo, I'm detecting that Arlene and Gene have a possible fetish for ugly mouth visuals. Well, good for them.
Scared Silly opens with the revelation that both Ronald and Sundae are connoisseurs of vintage B-movie horror, which is honestly not a bad place to start. The film they're watching, identified by Ronald as Attack of The Dinosaurs, is actually the silent 1925 classic The Lost World, plucked safely from the public domain, and dubbed over with some comically hammy dialogue. Ronald then receives a video call from Tika, who invites him to go camping with her and the rest of the McDonaldland gang in Far-Flung Forest. She later reveals that she's always been too scared to venture into the forest, owing to local lore about it being haunted by a Phantom. The gang make it to nightfall without anything in the way of major incidents, but are caught off-guard in a rainstorm and decide to seek shelter in a suspicious-looking, seemingly abandoned manor that transpires to be riddled with various booby traps, causing the party to become increasingly splintered. What kind of nefarious forces will they discover pulling the strings?
The inevitable deal-breaker with Wacky Adventures for many viewers is going to be the odiously commercial, not-so-ulterior motive behind their productions - there is little getting around the fact that they were 40-minute long advertisements designed to make children hungry for empty calories, and I can wholly understand anybody disliking them on mere principle. The thing is, in an alternate universe where the McDonald's brand never existed and these were entirely original characters having wacky adventures in their own stand-alone world, I could see these titles becoming hot cult classics for their sheer weirdness. If you didn't know anything about McDonaldland and you saw this series, wouldn't this just strike you as the most random assortment of characters imaginable? Approached from that angle, the series offers a pretty enjoyable mix of visual strangeness (particularly in the live action segments) and quirky humor - nothing especially ground-breaking, but they are objectively stronger and more competently made than I had expected, given their dubious origins. And, for as mean as I've been about Sundae's character design, he's actually a pretty funny addition to the McDonaldland roster; his deadpan personality makes him a perfect foil to the perpetually upbeat Ronald. On a narrative level, my only real gripe with Scared Silly is that it could have stood to be at least ten minutes shorter. There is quite a lot of padding, particularly in the first half of the story which has the gang rambling somewhat aimlessly around the forest - it takes them a long time to get into the real heart of the adventure involving the haunted manor. Prior to that, the characters sing a couple of songs (pretty standard, inoffensive children's fare, but 100% filler) and Hamburglar pranks the others into thinking the Phantom has arisen, but all that goes on in the woods that's of any genuine import is its becoming increasingly apparent that a) the gang's every movements are being tracked by surveillance cameras and b) Tika clearly knows more about the situation than she's letting on (for one, she lets slip with Ronald that, contra her claims to have always been too terrified to set foot in the forest before, she actually knows her way around it pretty well). Still, Far-Flung Forest is kind of a screwy place, even before we get to the supposedly cursed section - in addition to that creepy talking bear Hamburglar inadvertently summons, there's an odd sight gag where Sundae chases after a squirrel, only to discover that that squirrel has one heck of an intimidating ally, namely a human-sized, body builder squirrel in army boots and khaki shorts, whom I just know, without googling, must be the subject of a ton of furry fan art.
The second half of Scared Silly is stronger than the first, as it's here that the story becomes focussed on a clearer objective, with the gang entering the manor and, on discovering that they're now trapped there and at the mercy of the so-called Phantom, having to navigate their way through its labyrinth of rooms, solving various puzzles in order to find the correct way out. You could say that it turns into a kid-friendly version of Christopher Manson's Maze, except that here the clues have the benefit of being halfway comprehensible. Characters who get it wrong get separated from the others, as the Fry Kids and McNuggets find out. Through it all, Ronald manages to keep his head, reassured that the manor is all an illusion, that the reality is a lot less nefarious than it seems, and that the gang can get through it with the use of teamwork and co-operation.
The most entertaining scene occurs at the climax, when the remaining characters are confronted by the Phantom, who challenges them to a final game of riddles. As a particularly fiendish touch, the Phantom uses the correct answer to each riddle to suck the losing contestant into oblivion. So, for example, Tika is challenged with the question: "What is it that the more you take away from it, the bigger it gets?" It's a fairly well-known riddle, and I suspect a good chunk of the video's target audience would be qualified to respond correctly, but Tika comes up with a completely different,more smart-alecky answer that, to her credit, actually does fit the criteria of the question: "A restaurant! The more you take out..." (I can't help but feel that this constitutes a slight Freudian slip on behalf of McDonald's, in admitting that their global empire depends on your insatiable custom). The Phantom still isn't having it. "Way too complicated - and wrong!" he bellows, before ejecting her down an actual hole. Next up are Birdie and Hamburglar, who are asked: "What is you can feel outside, hear inside, but never see it unless it's full of dust?" Again, a fairly easy riddle, but the participants once again manage to screw it up by overthinking - Birdie suggests a dust mop, and Hamburglar mothballs. Too bad, the answer was the wind, and they both get sucked away by a tornado. Finally, it's up to Ronald, Grimace and Sundae to turn things around, as the Phantom poses: "What is is that costs nothing, but is worth everything, weighs nothing, but lasts a lifetime, that one person can't own, but two people can share?" My guess would have been "love", but Ronald comes up with "friendship", which wins him the game, much to the Phantom's chagrin. I suppose love can be unrequited, whereas friendship is typically thought of as being a two-way thing (neither is guaranteed to last a lifetime, however), but still, I would argue friendship is a variation of love, so I could have gotten through on a technicality, right?
The twist in the tale is that the "Phantom" is actually a holographic simulation, and that the man (or boy) behind the curtain is none other than Franklin (he will become a recurring character throughout the series, but here the McDonaldland crew are clearly meeting him for the first time). He and Tika have been secretly manipulating Ronald and the gang into becoming unwitting participants in their elaborate room escape game (it also transpires that the McNuggets, of all characters, were in on the deception - as we'll see from the subsequent video, The Legend of Grimace Island, the zombie chickens are easily led). It's revealed that Franklin's father is a scientist who specialises in virtual reality technology, which accounts (kind of) for how he'd even have access to all of this funky equipment. Franklin concedes victory to Ronald, and Tika apologises for deceiving Ronald and the others, stating that she didn't think they could be persuaded to participate knowingly. Fortunately there are no hard feelings; everyone is reunited, and they resume their outdoor camping trip. Scared Silly ends with a live action epilogue, with Ronald and Sundae back in their living room, and Attack of The Dinosaurs II about to start up on the box. Ronald questions the wisdom of watching a scary movie this late at night, but Sundae assures him that he can handle the experience knowing that Ronald is with him. The adventure bows out with a somewhat less wholesome message, where Ronald directly addresses his audiences and makes explicit what blatantly been on the production's mind this entire time - that, next time, he wants to see them "live and in person at McDonald's". All the same, I give Scared Silly kudos for its refreshingly positive outlook on the horror genre, here celebrated as an opportunity for bonding between two friends. The final item on the tape (besides the credits and our good friend Splaat) is a preview for the next adventure, The Legend of Grimace Island, arriving in 1999. I'm assuming that they didn't have an awful lot of finished animation ready at the time, because the preview consists entirely of still images.
Note: efforts to develop the McDonaldland crew into animated characters actually weren't limited to their Klasky Csupo swansong. Everyone's favourite purveyors of 1980s animation, DiC, had already tried their hand in 1990, with a precursor to the Klasky Csupo series, a one-off direct-to-video special entitled The Adventures of Ronald McDonald: McTreasure Island (meaning that you can watch a Ronald McDonald adventure with an even dodgier closing logo than Splaat). Before that, there was an animated short, Ronald McDonald and The Adventure Machine, but that never received a commercial release, having been produced to be shown exclusively within McDonald's restaurants. The best animated depiction of Ronald McDonald, though, would have to be his turn in the 2009 short Logorama, which certainly caters better to contemporary perceptions of the character. Clowns in general too.
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