Prior to the cultural shifts of the 21st century, McDonald's had lived quite comfortably as a predominantly kid-orientated brand, and for a while there was most in its element pitching itself as a place to bag free plastic, undergo family bonding rituals and celebrate younger rites of passage. When it came to placating the adult set, who might not have kids in tow and were less likely to be won over by the grotesque revels of a certain Ronald McDonald, the company occasionally had some strange ideas (the Arch Deluxe fiasco springs to mind), but few more disarming, I'll wager, than this ad devised by Chicago-based ad agency Leo Burnett for UK television in 1997. It also doubled, apparently, as an attempt to launch a new pop act, and while that aspect of the campaign effectively sunk without a trace, the ad itself is to be regarded as a classic. It follows a young motorist who pulls over to adjust the roof of his convertible during heavy rainfall, only for the roof to jam. Whereupon our protagonist whole-heartedly accepts his waterlogged fate and resumes his journey. Along route, he goes on a mind-bending power trip involving a Godzilla-sized lemur, the Bognor Regis International Birdman rally and comedian Tommy Cooper, before finally pulling up outside a McDonald's eatery; there, he finds refuge from the rain, but not from the sardonic observations of the attendant on duty, who exercises the last word in having the "Caution: Wet Floor" sign accompany him around the building.
The appeal of the ad lies in how it transforms what is a mundane drive for fast food wrapped in greaseproof paper into a celebration of LIFE - or at least life in which all roads inevitability lead to McDonald's. The protagonist's life is represented as a veritable scrapbook of second-hand memories, culled from a variety of stock and archival footage, few if any of which have very much to do with McDonald's. It is, in many respects, an arbitrary mishmash, but with the golden arches crowbarred into enough places (the lemur footage has been manipulated so as to appear as though the creature is carrying a paper bag bearing their trademark logo, whilst fries and shakes appear elsewhere) to posit McDonald's as the underpinning of this deluge of positive energy. The rain represents what is unpredictable and permanently outside of the protagonist's control, with McDonald's being the stabilising constant that makes it ultimately all weatherable. Come rain or shine, there'll always be a Mickey Dee's around the corner, ready to greet you, shelter you from the elements and accept all major credit cards. What's a little wet hair when you can anticipate a full belly at the end of it all?
The visual collage is accompanied by a pop-reggae version of everybody's favourite meteorologically-inclined standard, "Singing In The Rain", performed by Gazebo. No, not the Italian guy who likes Chopin. This Gazebo was a duo comprised of Dee Jacobee and Sean Andrews, and the track was released as a single by EMI in September 1997, with proceeds going to the companies' respective charities, EMI's Music Sound Foundation and Ronald McDonald Houses. According to Discogs, this was their only release under the Gazebo banner, but then their Discogs page seems a mite confused and falsely lists the act as being part of The Shirehorses parody project (I remember The Shirehorses, and I'm reasonably positive that this had nothing to with them). Despite the popularity of the ad, the single itself was not a massive success, peaking at no. 78 on the UK Singles Chart. I suspect this could either be attributed to lacklustre promotion (I certainly don't recall those aforementioned Shirehorses plugging it on their Radio 1 breakfast show), or to the likelihood that most consumers didn't consider the track to be anything special beyond the context of this ad. Myself, I have a lot of affection for Gazebo's take on "Singing In The Rain", but then I have to admit that a chunk of that affection might be tethered to my fondness for the ad itself. Whenever I hear Jacobee's "I'm happy again!", I've a leaping lemur running through my brain, and I can't be certain that the quirkiness of that image isn't responsible for a good part of that serotonin rush. Nevertheless, it's a track that works a certain magic on me, in transporting me back to a very different place - by which I refer not just to the simpler times (for me, anyway) of 1997, but to the more abstract sense of giddy delirium I always identified as lurking within the ad's eccentricities. The combination of non-stopped drizzle, upbeat reggae and plundered imagery really cut through my defences as a pre-teen, making something as routine as a rain-drenched road trip in the rain feel as though it could be a portal to a whole new world. It didn't translate into enthusiasm for the product on my part, but there was something about the ad in itself that I always found strangely reassuring.
A paradox presented throughout the montage has to do with the fine line depicted between euphoria and absurdity - the intoxication of soaring to the most dizzying of emotional heights is tempered by the acknowledgement that, sooner or later, everything must succumb to gravity and come crashing back down to Earth. The ad is structured around an intermittent interplay between the more down-to-earth reality and the protagonist's enraptured state, so that a brief encounter with an umbrella-bearing pedestrian flashing him a bemused smile is processed as a recreation of the "V-J Day in Times Square" photograph (which is less disturbing than the real thing, given that he doesn't have her in a headlock). The peak of his exhilaration is incorporated largely through footage of sporting victories, in which both players and spectators are seen celebrating; his euphoria also gets him as high as moon, where, somewhat conversely, we see an astronaut stumble. Pratfalls are as integral to this montage as are jubilation - a jockey is also propelled off his horse by the same beam of energy we saw trip up the astronaut, and the protagonist drives all the way to Bognor Regis to knock a Birdman contender off his perch (the Birdman rally being a competition based around who can defy gravity for furthest before taking an inevitable tumble). The importance of the pratfall, one suspects, is in affectionately underscoring a certain playful foolishness to human endeavour, which asserts that we should only take ourselves so seriously. The higher we fly, the more ridiculous we look when we fall, something the ad proposes should be embraced as part of the process of weathering that metaphorical rainfall - a willingness to look foolish is essential in order to experience the view from aloft, however ephemeral. This is borne out in the punchline of the ad, when the protagonist strolls into McDonald's, that most ubiquitous and prosaic of fast food restaurants, apparently still on top of the world in his head, only for his visibly sodden state to get him branded a hazard by the staff therein. It is a humbling reminder of the tensions between the protagonist's internal world and the more mundane realities, and yet the joke is not entirely at his expense. Consider that the protagonist is never jarred out of his reverie; instead, the world bends to accommodate him, the attendant's adjustment of the Wet Floor sign being service as much as anything he is going to receive at the counter. In addition, the attendant's sardonic wit, in relocating the sign, is depicted as a continuation of that same spirit of fun, albeit in a more low-key fashion. The message is very much that McDonald's is a haven for the fun-loving, in a world that does not see the fun embedded in enough places, even if that zest for living is inevitably expressed through the textures of everyday banality.
While the ad's heavy reliance on archival footage, intended to carry a ready-made cultural currency for the viewer, enables it to be creative and charming (some of the interweaving is implemented so shoddily, but perhaps that only caters to those charms), it might also speak to the homogeneity of the experience, the sense that participating in a consumerist culture means ingesting a universal purview that leaves no effectual room in which to express originality on our part. The limitations of the protagonist's reverie are that he is having to filter it through the lens of images that are not his own, incorporating himself into pre-existing archetypes rather than establishing himself as his own person. Despite his plucky individuality in embracing the rain, the driver is a consumer much like any other - as evidenced by the fact that he's living off a diet of Big Macs and recycled memories.
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