McDonald’s New Mascot is the Jar Jar Binks of Fast Food
The new McDonalds mascot is a giant toothy Happy Meal box with wire arms and suspicious eyes. He wants to talk to kids about nutrition, but I think he should stay at least 50 feet from all children and schools.
From the DailyMail here:
Its been described as everything from terrifying to terrifc – and, with an estimated 68 million daily customers over 35,000 stores across the world, chances are you’re going to meet ‘Happy’ eventually.
For the singing, dancing, talking (and teethy) red box is McDonald’s official new ambassador, even if the initial reaction has been anything but, well, happy.
The slightly-menacing if very-simple mascot – an animated Happy Meal box with Gumby-like arms, a massive mouth and huge teeth – was introduced to America via Twitter on Monday as part of the chain’s continual healthy image-based overhaul.
But the reception was hardly as warm as the fast food giant was expecting.
Entertainment site The A.V. Club called it ‘an effective deterrent to both appetite and sleep’.
According to Bloomberg, other reactions included ‘THAT! Is scary’, ‘Epic fail’ and ‘This makes me crave Burger King’.
‘So creepy,’ added another user, Onika Abbott.
‘Nightmare food,’ offered another, John Estey.
But the mega-restaurant’s primary market for ‘Happy’ – as is a lot of the time with McDonald’s – is children.
Happy was designed as an attempt to encourage to kids to think about food in a more healthy fashion, coinciding with the release of a new 50-calorie serving of yoghurt and applie slices that can, on request, be served with a Happy Meal instead of fries.
Look, you can eat really healthy at McDonalds. They have great salads, and if you take the buns off the burgers, the protein is fantastic. Just cut out the fries and sugary drinks. And the more McDonalds bows to pressure to feel guilty about the products they serve, the more they face going out of business. If parents want their kids to eat healthy, they will take them to Salad King.
I wonder if Happy the Box will rap or speak with a ghetto accent to appeal to black folks? History shows it will.
