Aha! Thanks for letting me know how to get the cheese into it! However, I think I much prefer the “pickin’ bunions” variant to “Pickled Onions”, which doesn’t make much of an effort.
Glad to help out. I must admit I like the pickin’ bunions, too. It adds a sort of “grotesque image burned onto the retinas” feel to the whole situation, doesn’t it?
MissDavis102: I remember them as two separate ads - a firefighter one and a circus one, but youre right, they did always end up in the sauce right before Ronald made the snazzy little golden arches sign. i also remember that they had to be rescued from something/one else (the Hamburglar?), but I cant remember the details.
While the Religious Right has in the past singled out Sesame Street, suggesting overtones of a homosexual relationship between Bert and Ernie, I’ve always been far more troubled by the barely concealed, smouldering sexual tension between Mayor McCheese and the HamBurglar.
In the August '97 “TV Sucks” column of Total Obscurity (under August 11) was a description of a McNuggets commercial that I almost wish I’d seen. I suppose it’s better in my imagination that it was in real life:
Now all other questions aside [exactly how big is a ‘life-size’ McNugget; and what does it means when a ‘chick’ runs down the beach clutching her McNuggets?) this really description really has me wondering… what are they trying to do here?
Frighteningly, according to the
UAW, The Department of Agriculture gave McDonalds $460,000 to show these 1997 McNugget commercials in Turkey…
Too…many…punchlines…must…fleee…
Kara, you’re absolutely right about the firefighters being separate from the circus. I strongly suspect Hamburgler did at one time kidnap the Nuggets as well.
KP, the nugget in the commercial you mention looked to be about 6’, maybe a little more. And about a foot thick. The chick was holding his(?) hand.
Anyone seen the new commercial with Ronald opening a Happy Meal or something, and when he hands the fries to a nearby child, a green character that looks like a reincarnation of a Fry-Guy pops out of the package and says something to the effect, “I’m so hungry!”? I wasn’t paying very close attention until too late, and I haven’t managed to see the commercial again. It’s really the green character I’m most concerned about - Is he a new generation Fry-Guy? And if memory serves me, weren’t the original Fry-Guys yellow and a bit more fry-like (as opposed to a small mobile green mop)?
I hope I don’t sound like some kind of McDonalds Commercial Expert - somehow that would be a comedown from my regular position as “office drone”.
As regard the Green Dude – he may be a throwback to the original series of ads. I seem to recall that there was a rather Grimace like character (clearly a related species) who represented “envy” - specifically ‘fry envy’
I don’t recall his name, though I do recall that it was some rough synonym for envy or Malice (it may well have been “Malice” - though that might be some character from some entirely different series)
This was, if I recall correctly, in the very early days of the McDLand commercials, and indeed the character may have predated the series proper. At the time I thought it was a cynical plan to sell more fries: the moral was that sharing fries led to kids turning green and evil, you cheapskate!
[A classic 60’s ‘Bewitched’ pathophysiology. that Ronald cured by bringing a tray with Your Very Own Fries ™. As I type this I am being informed that Sebrina (current show) has similar metaphysics)-- though actually I don’t sharing was ever an option in the “Malice” commercials, you either had a pack in all its pristine glory or you didn’t. I recall thinking that was rather stupid]
Then again, my private frie traumas are already too well documented in the public domain.
My main problem is that for some reason, everyone of you seem to not see the absurdity of your endeavours.
I have recently come to the realization that the people on our planet are beginning to become hyper-reflexive to the point of absurdity. What makes you want to spend this much time examining commercials and dissecting the thoughts of advertising executives?
The marxian saying “Religion is the opiate of the masses” is over. Now, the liturgy we all should sing is “Television is the opiate of the masses”.
Try turning off your television one evening and walk around for an hour. Look in the windows. What do you see? Hundreds upon hundreds of glowing blue vacuum tubes coming out of people’s houses. Everywhere you go, there is a television. You cannot escape it.
We are a country of life-wasters. Not only is is necessary to work full time in order to live or support a family, but to come home and virtually ignore the ones you love in favor of some hypnotizing eye is sad.
I pray that people will wake up and realize how much of their short, short lives they have wasted.
Think about it. We live on average 6 to 7 decades. That’s it. ONE HALF of that time is WASTED on television.
I personally am saddened by the fact that we all have only televized memories. Everyone remembers the most useless crap like Hee Haw or Seinfeld or Friends or soaps or whatever fake lives they cling to. In what way is our life enriched? Even religion doesn’t fight of the loss of time, the waste of brain cells and the cost of living a vacant life.
I wish you all the best of luck.
The secret to life is life. Live it.
Oh, c’mon, Dr. Prozacula…cheer up… While in general I am in total agreement with you about the average American wasting entirely too much time on television, this thread is about reminiscing about our childhood! In a country as big as the US,
with so many subcultures, especially when so many of us move so often in our lifetimes, tv shows and commercials are frequently the
only childhood memories we can have in common with whoever we find ourselves sharing our lives (work, social, whatever) with as adults.
I’ll climb off my soapbox now and hope I havent sent this thread off on a way too philosophical tangent.
Kara’s Bizarre Movie Quote for the Day:
“And if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.”
While I certainly agree with much of what Dr. Prozacula said (who wouldn’t?), for me, at least, this is part of a general approach to life - questioning and playing with the shared reality.
His message about excessive television meets only with an amused grin here – since I started ‘time-shifting’ TV shows back in the 80’s, I quickly developed a high level of resistance to the general inanity of TV.
Long ago Tv seemed to have an immediacy (if you missed a bon mot, it was lost, possibly forever, into the ether) However, once I began to watch only shows I’d pre-selected and recorded - with the ability to fast forward - I became far more picky. The immediacy returned to the normal interactive portions of my life - the people around me.
Shushing a loved one so you can attend to a machine is rude at best, yet the machine forced us to adopt it almost universally (I still notice this behavior when people watch videotapes, as if people crave the forced immediacy, to give some weight to the otherwise shallow experience)
Soon, I found I had little patience for even shows that I had previously thought I enjoyed. It’s easy to skip a show when you know you have weeks or months of backlogged shows - all preselected for presumed interest. (I highly recommend this practice, it will reclaim many hours of your life each week, and dramatically improve the quality of the shows you actually end up viewing)
I almost entirely lost the ability to watch TV ‘live’ – it simply didn’t hold my interest any longer. It is a mistake to presume too much from the fact that I spend a few minutes each week in an on-going conversation on an obscure topic in TV.
Then again, we all have our hot-buttons. I, for example, am utterly befuddled by the preoccupation with spectator sports – which, I am convinced, is discussed solely because it is so palpably meaningless. Yet a single player’s salary may exceed the cost of an international disaster relief mission and a new nine-figure stadium complex is routinely embraced with enthusiasm where a dozen much cheaper health care or urban revitalization initiatives may be viewed as too expensive.
While I certainly agree with much of what Dr. Prozacula said (who wouldn’t?), for me, at least, this is part of a general approach to life - questioning and playing with the shared reality.
His message about excessive television meets only with an amused grin here – since I started ‘time-shifting’ TV shows back in the 80’s, I quickly developed a high level of resistance to the general inanity of TV.
Long ago Tv seemed to have an immediacy (if you missed a bon mot, it was lost, possibly forever, into the ether) However, once I began to watch only shows I’d pre-selected and recorded - with the ability to fast forward - I became far more picky. The immediacy returned to the normal interactive portions of my life - the people around me.
Shushing a loved one so you can attend to a machine is rude at best, yet the machine forced us to adopt it almost universally (I still notice this behavior when people watch videotapes, as if people crave the forced immediacy, to give some weight to the otherwise shallow experience)
Soon, I found I had little patience for even shows that I had previously thought I enjoyed. It’s easy to skip a show when you know you have weeks or months of backlogged shows - all preselected for presumed interest. (I highly recommend this practice, it will reclaim many hours of your life each week, and dramatically improve the quality of the shows you actually end up viewing)
I almost entirely lost the ability to watch TV ‘live’ – it simply didn’t hold my interest any longer. It is a mistake to presume too much from the fact that I spend a few minutes each week in an on-going conversation on an obscure topic in TV.
Then again, we all have our hot-buttons. I, for example, am utterly befuddled by the preoccupation with spectator sports – which, I am convinced, is discussed solely because it is so palpably meaningless. Yet a single player’s salary may exceed the cost of an international disaster relief mission and a new nine-figure stadium complex is routinely embraced with enthusiasm where a dozen much cheaper health care or urban revitalization initiatives may be viewed as too expensive.
KP:
I’m with you on the pre-recorded stuff.
Everything I watch is stuff that I’ve taped. I doubt that I see an hour a month in real-time TV.
And once I got a VCR that could change my cable box, I didn’t have to set my alarm to wake up at 3:00 AM to change the channels!
I’m with you guys - the only thing I can really watch on “live” television is PBS because it has no commercials. And even with that, I prefer to tape it to view at my leisure. I didn’t realize there was a phrase for it; my assignment for the week will be to use “time-shifting” in a sentence not related to this discussion.
As an aside, when my vcr was struck by lightening, I found I was unable to even look at the television (off or on) without some feelings of anger until I replaced it.
Early '70s children’s parody, complete version, I think:
McDonalds is your kind of place
Hamburgers in your face
French fries between your toes
Pickles stuffed up your nose
Try some of our delicious shakes
They come from polluted lakes
McDonalds is your kind of place!
I have to thank you for the bit about the polluted lakes, Lawrence.
I seem too recall that we had a ‘polluted lakes’ reference in Atlanta, too (and definitely something about shakes). You gave me a flashback to the way we viewed water pollution back then (and at that age). I can’t really frame the difference in words, but it’s been interesting pondering how my i (and I presume, the general culture’s) image of water polution evolved over the late 70’s and early 80’s.
From Erie and Love Canal to eutrophication and oil spills to parts-per-million ground water contaminants… what a long strange trip it’s been!
(And some people thought this thread was just about TV!)
Ok, if we’re gonna branch out into other tv jingles, who remembers the dancing Phillips MoM bottle? or the Big, Fig, Newton dancing fig? or “have another nutter butter peanut butter sandwich cookie”?
Is this impending senility, a scary example of how easily our psyches can be penetrated, or do we all really need to get a life? 
I can’t find anything on the web to back this up, but I swear I remember a McDonald’s (or might have been BK) breakfast commercial that used the tune from The Beatles’ “For No One”, which starts with the lines “the day breaks, your mind aches” (but they probably changed that to “your mind wakes” or something). The tune is at http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/2729/for_no_one.mid if you aren’t familiar with it. Am I totally making this up or what? I’ve only recently become acquainted with Revolver, but as soon as I heard that song I had flashes of Egg McMuffin…
By the way, those green mint St. Patrick’s Day shakes were called “Shamrock Shakes”. Do they still do them every year?
Does anyone remember the Burger King? There may have been other incarnations, but I remember a little cartoon character with a big crown. Was it just a logo, or were there animated commercials?
Craving a Yumbo,
–Doug