Encyclopedia Hearsay | McDonaldland

McDonaldland was created as part of an advertising campaign for McDonald’s sometime in the 1970s. It is a literal nightmare hellscape filled with monsters and mutants and some Lovecraftian god’s discards. Most of McDonaldland was inspired by H.R. Pufnstuf

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, which is already in itself an LSD fever dream. The “star”, if we’re being liberal enough to call him that, of McDonaldland is the honcho himself, Ronald McDonald

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Ronald was originally joined by Birdie, the Hamburglar, Mayor McCheese, Officer Big Mac and the Grimace

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. Other characters were added later, but those few remained as the mainstays. Hamburglar was the most popular one

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. He’s basically the only antagonist in the entire canon. His name, apparently

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, is Hamilton B. Urglar. Let that sink in a moment. Anyways, Hamilton had an intense speech impediment or a learning disability and could only Hodor his way around McDonaldland repeating the same inane phrase over and over, instilling fear in the general populace: robble robble. In the mid-2010s, McDonald’s tried updating Hamilton into being a sexy hipster with tight pants and a six-pack. If McDonald’s can be known for anything, it might as well be for confusing fetishes.

Mayor McCheese and Officer Big Mac were the hamburger-headed bureaucrats keeping McDonaldland running. Big Mac was obviously pretty ineffective, since Hamburglar terrorized the citizens over and over without end. If I can implore you to do me one favor, check the Wikipedia for McDonaldland and scroll most of the way down to see the “Officer Big Mac climb-in jail playground” photo. It is a gorgeous piece of work.

Birdie was fucking boring and no one cared about her. Moving on.

That brings us to the Grimace. Originally introduced as a bad guy, McDonald’s quickly realized having an amorphous blob creature that could potentially be an unstoppable and undefined monster

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may not be the best bad guy to have for a campaign targeted at kids, so they quickly made him a good guy. When I was a kid, it was rumored that the Grimace was the personification of a milkshake, but thinking back on that, how many purple milkshakes did you have? When McDonald’s brought on Shamrock Shakes, they introduced Grimace’s uncle, Uncle O’Grimacey, because by this point they were barely trying anymore. I can just imagine the Madison Avenue pitch meeting:

Executive 1: We need to sell these fucking shakes. What if Grimace had an Irish uncle?

Executive 2: Okay fine. But what’s his name?

Executive 1: Uh, shit. I don’t know. Uncle… O… Grimacey?

Executive 2: Genius. Let’s do a ton of cocaine because it’s the 80s.

And scene.