Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/29/mcdonaldland-commercial-from-1.html
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So Ronald was wearing jodhpurs back then.
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Right?! This commercial appears to have been fueled by lots of weed, possibly LSD and maybe a low dose of quaaludes. Only weed is easy to come by these days.
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Ray Kroc must’ve done A LOT of lsd around this time
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I suspect 90% of all creative decisions in television and film for the 70’s and 80’s were fueled by cocaine.
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i miss the yacht rock days of McDonald’s. this commercial has a serious H.R. Puffnstuff vibe about it. or actually, this might be where H.R. Puffnstuff got ITS vibe.
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My good friend the late Wes Cook designed the 70s “McDonaldLand” stuff - and he also did design work for Sid and Marty Krofft on H.R. Puffnstuff - it’s no coincidence! He told me there was a big lawsuit about it, at which he had to testify…
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oh yes, the lawsuit was (in)famous. i didn’t realize they had the same designer. that makes so much sense.
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It actually makes its way into Law School textbooks on Intellectual Property.
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I really miss the cherry pies.
Arthur Treacher’s used to have good lemon-flavored ones, too.
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Seriously, was EVERYONE tripping balls in the late 60’s/early 70’s? As a kid I remember all the McDonald’s characters, and many commercials. They did try to create an HR Puffinstuff kind of show feel for the advertising. I mean, as a kid, I watched them almost as if they were TV shows. But as an adult, yeah, they were all tripping balls back then. And look where that got us…
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I almost certainly saw this one back in the day, and a couple of bits of lyrics seem familiar.
There are two McDonaldland commercials that stand out.
In one, Ronald is leading two kids through the land, and says something like “LOOK!” or “LET’S GO” and grabs the girl’s arm, and she gives him a bit of a dirty look.
In another, Ronald is leading us through the McDonaldland town hall, which has offices for various virtues that make the restaurants pleasant. A chorus sings a little ditty: “The department of clean, the department of ____, and the department of polite!”
Ronald looks at the camera at this point and says something which made no sense to me at the time: “That’s the department department!”
I realized, years later, that I heard it wrong. It was:
“That’s the DEPORTMENT department.”
Which . . . which is kind of clever, actually.
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I was… .
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Yes! This Peewee.com post about it was approved by the Krofft brothers: https://peewee.com/2015/04/08/the-mcdonalds-ads-that-mimicked-h-r-pufnstuf/
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Only original creepy Hamburglar with the weird nose is the true Hamburglar! I deny the legitimacy of cutesy small-nosed Hamburglar!
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I don’t remember this myself, but a friend of mine of similar age remembers that Grimace was first introduced as the Evil Grimace, whose appetites led him to hunger after children until he was introduced to McDonald’s hamburgers.
This was also around the same time that Frito-Lay had the ‘Frito Bandito’ as a mascot, no doubt a foundational inspiration for a certain President’s attitudes about Mexican-Americans.
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