Evil Grimace was born on June 12, 1971, a day that will now live in infamy forever. This is also the date, according to representatives at McDonald's, that Grimace starred in his first commercial. Looking back at these early commercials, Grimace is played for a fool. But make no mistake, there is more to this purple blob of evil than meets the eye. In the early 70s, Grimace started off as one of the three main antagonists of Ronald McDonald lore, stealing shakes and Coca Cola from children. He doesn't seem to be in league with the other antagonist, such as the Hamburglar, who fittingly stole hamburgers, or Captain Crook, who bizarrely only stole the filet of fish. Captain Crook did not survive past the 1980s, so do with that information what you will. While the Hamburglar, disturbing in his own right, was certainly the most infamous of the three, it would be Grimace who persevered as a modern horror. What is Grimace? Where did he come from? And how did he become the face of the scandal that allegedly killed hundreds, no, thousands of teens in 2023? What is in the Grimace shake? The answers may cause you to Grimace. For all of that and more, stick around to the end of this video. 🎵 Metal Music 🎵 At first, I was like Charles Entertainment Cheese was likely born sometime in the early 1970s as a joke, but, bro, I don't think it's a joke anymore. Welcome to Horror History. You may think that the recent wave of reports about a Grimace would be the first time that McDonald's lore crossed over here onto my horror channel. No, it's not. Other than that offhand remark I made in my Billy Hargrove analysis. Or what if it caused him to slowly turn into Grimace from the McDonald's commercial? Let's not forget that Pennywise's infamous interaction with Georgie is based off of an early commercial with Ronald McDonald. -[Ronald McDonald] Well hi! Isn't that McDonald's hamburger delicious? -[Kid] Mom told me never to talk to strangers. -[IT] Hi, Georgie. Don't you want a balloon?
-[Georgie] I'm not supposed to take stuff from strangers. The McDonald's characters are more closely tied to horror than you may have thought. From urban legends about the mascots to one of the all time classic creepypastas Ronald McDonald house, to this set of alleged Japanese McDonald's commercials uploaded to YouTube in 2015. [Ronald McDonald] McDonalds. There's no way that's real. But whoever made this made it specifically for my sense of humor. -[Ronald McDonald] McDonald's. But we're not here to talk about Ronald. We're here to talk about Grimace. I've always thought Grimace was a creepy character as is, but as we look back in time, it gets even worse. The original commercial portrayed Grimace as a dopey but crazed addict living in a cave with four arms. However, this was actually a less scary version of Grimace than what they had originally come up with. In a 2012 interview with QSR magazine, former McDonald's VP of advertising Roy T. Bergold said the original Grimace was scaly, mean looking, had four arms, and had no charm whatsoever. In the first ad campaign, he's literally referred to as the Evil Grimace. -[Commercial VO] It was a gloomy day in McDonald's land because the evil Grimace -[Commercial VO] had grabbed all the cups. But over the years, the character transitioned into the softer, plush, two armed blob that we know today. But despite the more unnerving aspects being kicked down a notch, there's still something very disturbing about Grimace if we dig into the details of his lore. But to fully understand Grimace, we've got to take it back to his homeland and his people. Yeah, there's more than one Grimace. 🎵 Mysterious Music 🎵 Grimace's ancestry dates back to Grimace Island, the homeland of the Grimace race. In the 2001 episode The Legend of Grimace Island, Grimace explains that it's the original home of all Grimaces, a great big island that's been lost for hundreds of years, meaning the island has been lost since at least the 1800s. According to Grimace legend, no one in the entire world knows the current whereabouts of Grimace Island. The Grimaces lived in harmony, dressing up in tribal clothing and living in these giant hives. Imagine you're an explorer in the 1800s. After sailing the seas by moonlight, you come across an island and seek shelter, and you notice these great big caves sitting on the hill. You go inside, but then you hear breathing. You start to see the whites of eyes blinking all around, and that's when you realize you're standing in a huddle of Grimaces. It's not such a far fetched story. One day, a tribe of humans appeared on the island in search of treasure and made off with much of it. But the most valuable of the treasure was hidden away underground to protect what they had the Gorons. I mean, the Grimaces performed a sacred dance, causing the island to break away from its moorings and float away into uncharted waters. This is probably a good time for me to emphasize just how massive these creatures are. At the time of The Legend of Grimace Island in 2001, Grimace is stated to be a crushing 900 pounds, or 408 kg, which I'm guessing is the weight of a fully grown Grimace. However, even as a 16 year old, Grimace's first driver's license states that he's 9ft, eight inches and 320 pounds, or 145 kilograms. Result is that a herd of Grimaces can produce an earthquake like blast. But what about our Grimace? Well, McDonald's has detailed some of his lineage in a press release, because this is just the timeline that we live in. Grimace is from Grimace Island and comes from a huge family, including his grandma Winky, his aunts Millie, and Tilly, and his uncle O'Grimacey. However, for unknown reasons, Grimace was sent off on a pilgrimage from a very young age, and it wouldn't be long before he would be indoctrinated. (IMPACT) Are you ready to cut out the hassle of meal planning and preparation? It's time to get to know Factor, a meal service that provides fresh, never never frozen dietitian approved meals right to your doorstep. Factor is your personal chef and nutritionist, curating each meal with carefully chosen ingredients to help you feel your best all day long. Imagine enjoying bruschetta shrimp risotto or grilled steakhouse filet mignon in just two minutes. Factor eliminates the need for grocery shopping, chopping, prepping, and cleaning up. You can savor the flavor and nutritional quality you need with fresh and delicious meals. I have tried them. They are CZ approved. You can heat, enjoy, and get back to soaking up the warm weather. 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They would eventually be joined by other well known characters like Birdie, the early Bird, because every kid focused fast food establishment needs a giant bipedal bird sidekick thing. There was also a character named Iam Hungry in the trivia section. On the Wiki page, it says Iam Hungry's name is a play on the phrase I am hungry. Wow. I never would have figured that out on my own. Thanks, McDonald's Wiki. Okay, real talk. Who are the people documenting and archiving the histories of Z-list McDonald's characters? I thought my life of analyzing horror movie timelines was sad. Anyway, McDonald Land is sort of a preserve where fast food items can be found growing in nature. -[Commercial] There's thick shake volcanoes. -[Commercial] You even find a French fried patch. -[Commercial] Now just turn around and see if you won't find a hamburger patch. And at the center is a McDonald's restaurant. I don't know who in their right mind is paying money to eat at McDonald's when you can just go outside and pick all of the same items for free. So when did Grimace first appear in McDonald land? There is a 1981 commercial about how Ronald met Grimace when they were babies. Grimace was in a runaway baby carriage, which Ronald helped stop by offering him a bag of McDonald's, and they became friends. However, as we know, that's not what Grimace even looked like as a baby. This is clearly a PR move by McDonald's corporate trying to rewrite history and cover up the way they treated the evil Grimace in the early going. As we know, Grimace's earliest appearances portrayed him as a cave dwelling monster who steals shakes and cola from children. However, early Grimace is easily outwitted by Ronald, who uses a disguise. And really, who would be fooled by this disguise? It's literally just a hat and a mailbag. But it's enough to convince Grimace that he's been selected for a beauty contest. You know, Grimace, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but if you look like this and someone says you've won a beauty contest, it's a scam. It's a scam Grimace. Then he basically falls for the same trick again. When this happens. -[Commercial] Ronald and his friends spotted evil Grimace running off -[Commercial] with loads of shakes and fries.
-[Grimace] Feisty. -[Commercial] Thinking quickly, Ronald disguised himself as a big Hollywood movie director. Ronald claims he's going to make the evil Grimace a star and tricks him into falling into a lake. But by the time we next see Grimace in 1973, things have changed. He's no longer referred to as the Evil Grimace, but rather just The Grimace, which to me sounds like ten times more horrifying. He's also lost his second set of arms and seems to now be friends with Ronald and the gang. It's not clear to me if losing arms is part of the aging process for Grimaces, like how we lose our baby teeth, or if this was a result of the McDonald's corporation torturing and experimenting on him to create a kid friendly mascot. The latter would not surprise me, given what we learned from this commercial. Grimace is headed to the beach to do some tanning, but the heat of the sun causes him to literally deflate, shrivel, and dry out, and they have to feed him McDonald's shakes in order to essentially rehydrate him back to health. So in the previous commercials, where they steal back the shakes and drinks from him, they were actually putting him at risk of having some kind of major medical episode. This commercial also has a brief cameo from Huggy the Tree, who may be even more creepy than Ronald or Grimace, but we'll get back to him in a little bit. Throughout the early 70s, the citizens, or whatever you want to call them, of McDonald Land were starting to skyrocket with fame. As a result, the McDonald's corporation integrated the characters into restaurants with areas known as McDonald's Playlands, and in 1976, Grimace and the others were even developed into action figures. These were horrifying in their own right. I don't know why Ronald has black eyes. I don't know how Huggy the tree manages to look even creepier. And Grimace's status of an action figure is debatable. The only part of him that moved was the fur, giving him a completely different and somehow unsettling feel from the other characters. It also became an annual tradition for Grimace to celebrate his birthday at McDonald's. In these photos, we can see what appears to be a rare glimpse of Grimace's mother, suggesting the possibility of more Grimaces on the mainland, some of whom we would meet before long. But in 1977, disaster struck McDonald Land when Mayor McCheese was sued for his resemblance to the children's show HR Pufnstuf, and had to step down from holding political office. At this time, many other citizens were forced to rethink their life of fame, and Officer Big Mac, Captain Crook, and The Professor chose to step back from the limelight and end their careers as commercial performers to live quiet lives of solitude. Grimace, however, chose to continue making McDonald Land commercials, even moving to Malibu when he got his license at age 16. In 1978, the world was introduced to Uncle O'Grimacey, a green variant of Grimace, who helped promote the Shamrock Shake and also appeared on the cup. Near the beginning of the 80s, Grimace got braces and grew out a mullet, which raises some serious questions about how his hair growth and grooming routine works. One of the most horrifying iterations of Grimace would have to be in 1984. It seems as if the Hamburglar had recently had some work done to appear younger, and Grimace, perhaps in an effort to keep up, gets this very creepy lip job giving the appearance of human lips. This is also something I talked about in my Chuck E. Cheese video. The human lips on a children's entertainment character be will never not creepy like A Trip to the Moon (1902) That should have been the end of it. Another thing I always find creepy is mixing animation styles, and that's exactly what would happen with Grimace and the gang next in 1998, when they starred in the documentary series The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald. Are we sure they're not doing this on purpose? This was a series of VHS tapes given out with Happy Meals, and one of the episodes focuses on Grimace's homecoming to Grimace Island. It starts with Ronald receiving a video call from Grimace about a letter he received inviting him to come home and help out his people. And can I just point out how during this call, Grimace's video feed is constantly glitching, like some kind of analog horror found footage? Just keep that in mind, as it would become kind of a trend for him. -[Commercial] Oh, boy. -[Commercial] At the edge of a universe, humming a tune for merely dreaming. Birdie and Hamburglar call in as well, but they don't glitch out nearly as much as Grimace does. The rest of the episode switches to a Rugrat style, and they set sail, not realizing they're being tailed by pirates. Grimace doesn't quite know how to get there until Hamburglar finds the map. -[Hamburglar) Hey, what's that in your pocket, Grimace? Hold up. Grimace is not wearing any clothing, therefore he does not have any pockets. I personally would not be reaching into a Grimace like that. I mean, that's a little... So everyone touches the map, and it basically says that they have to go straight through this channel that they're going through. So after getting whale yeeted, going through a storm, and also having to battle a King Kraken, they get sucked into a whirlpool that spits them out in this underground cavern under Grimace Island, where there are just Grimaces huddled in the shadows, watching them. Absolutely terrifying. However, when they see one of their own kind, they celebrate, but later scold him for bringing illegal aliens across the border. They're all forced to team up, though, when the pirates attack seeking the treasure. The Pirates blast raw fish at the Grimaces, which seems to be their weakness. And I have a theory about why, which I'll get into in a little bit. But in the end, Grimace leads the charge of bravery against the pirates, and he's awarded with a piece of treasure, a golden cup, calling back to his first ever appearance, where he's addicted to collecting shake and cola cups. During the ending segment, Grimace shares a montage of the Grimace home movies, which is exactly the kind of nightmare fuel you'd expect, but also showing us a rare glimpse of Grimace's parents, grandmother, and greatgrandmother, which begins to raise the question of how long does a Grimace live? The trend of introducing family members would continue in a commercial the next year, when Grimace's, Aunts Millie and Tilly show up at a burger picnic. The wacky adventures of Ronald McDonald ended in 2003, and after this, Grimace disappeared from the public eye for almost a decade. This gave people time to reflect on his rise and fall, and the questions started cropping up. What exactly is a Grimace? I mean, Mayor McCheese was obviously a Cheeseburger, Birdie is a McChicken, and they're even talking McNuggets and trash bins. But what facet of McDonald's was Grimace born to represent? The answer was about to come out, and it would be truly horrifying. (IMPACT) -[CBS News] Forget Blogging and MySpace. -[CBS News] If you really want to stay connected, there is a new service, -[CBS News] and supposedly it is the next big thing. -[CBS News] It's a name you can't forget. With social media making it easier than ever for fandoms to connect online, people began to speculate about what happened to Grimace. Other than a rumored appearance at a Dodger game in 2012, he seems to have just vanished from public life. Had he retired? Was he dead? Was the McDonald's corporation keeping him quiet? Well, ironically, it would be the McDonald's Corporation that would break the silence on Twitter in May 2012. Grimace is the embodiment of a milkshake, though others still insist he's a taste bud. So the two options here are rather grim. Either he's a milkshake who loves drinking milkshakes, thus making the Grimace's cannibals, or he's a taste bud, which means any bodily contact you have with him is him tasting you. Don't touch Grimace. This idea gives a disturbing new context to scenes of Grimace past. During the trip to Grimace Island, when Ronald surfs on top of Grimace. He's laughing in a bliss and delight, not because it tickles, but because he enjoys the way that Ronald tastes. Number 15 McDonald's foot Grimace. Remember those chairs that children would sit on in the McDonald's Play Place? Bros literally drooling? Of course. The Grimace themed addition to those Play Places are literally a child cage. Can't let them get away before Grimace gets a taste. And if you think about it, the scene with the pirates shooting the dead fish at the Grimaces, and that seemingly being their weakness makes sense because being taste buds, they wouldn't like to make contact with rotting fish. Speculation continued to swirl for several years, but Grimace still did not make an appearance until 2020, when he got out to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. The science is still not settled on whether or not a Grimace can get COVID. But a year later, the science on what exactly a Grimace is would be confirmed when Brian Bates, a McDonald's manager in Windsor, Canada, did an interview where he was asked what a Grimace is, he told them, and I quote, he is an enormous taste bud, but a taste bud nonetheless. This sent the Internet into a frenzy. My entire world has been upended. I mean, I never knew what the hell Grimace was, but I didn't think it was this. Another user chillingly noted, Grimace can taste with his whole body. But perhaps the best point came from this woman. If Grimace is a taste bud, why on earth would you name the damn thing after an expression of disgust? But the confirmation of Grimace as a taste bud starts to make other Grimace mysteries make more sense. Primarily, the whole understanding that seemed to be reached between the Evil Grimace and the McDonald's corporation around 1973. McDonald's would stop villainizing the creature, and he would stop stealing all of their shakes. Instead, he would work for them as a corporate mascot and appear in ad campaigns, which gave him the opportunity to satisfy his hunger by tasting the kids in the restaurant during meet and greets and other events. This would also explain his disappearance as McDonald's shifted away from the Play Place to focus more on drive through orders. In the 2000s, Grimace wouldn't have the opportunity to taste as many children and thus had no incentive to do the ads. It seems like this discussion of what Grimace is made him nostalgic for his days in the spotlight, and he took to the McDonald's twitter account in September 2021 to say this - it's always what is Grimace? And never, how is Grimace? Then, in January 2022, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted, I will eat a happy meal on TV if McDonald's accepts Dogecoin. To which McDonald's, seemingly hijacked by Grimace, again responded, only if Tesla accepts Grimace coin. As of recording, tesla still does not accept Grimace coin, as far as I know. But this tweet got a lot of attention and may have given the McDonald's marketing team an idea to bring Grimace out of the dark, pun intended, for a new ad campaign. In June 2023, it was time to celebrate Grimace's 52nd birthday. And that's where things get weird. -[Commercial] Happy birthday. Surprise. -[Commercial] Since he was born, Grimace has always had a birthday. -[Commercial] And since he's had a birthday, he's always had it at McDonald's. -[Commercial] So this June, we're all invited to the party -[Commercial] with a special shake to celebrate. Now, I personally have a feeling that McDonald's wanted to leverage the creepy aspect of Grimace for their campaign, but wanted to do so in a subtle way that doesn't harm their clean company image. They probably saw the free publicity that the rat in the child casino across town was getting when Shane Dawson went all Victor Frankenstein on their pizzas and thought they could leverage some of that energy to their advantage. If you look closely, the evidence is right there in the commercial. The first thing we actually see is the creepiest McDonald's character Huggy the tree, and he appears again later in the ad. Add in the fact that they use old photos, it's commonly known that any media plus time can equal creepy. Then, when Grimace skates into the McDonald's on its birthday look at this girl's reaction. I don't know about you, but to me, she looks terrified. And I guess it's for a good reason. Ever since the Grimace shake became available, TikTok has been filled with people, mostly teenagers, toasting the purple big boy, sipping the shake and suffering disturbing reactions. Again, this is probably a case of any publicity as good publicity, because even as these videos gain more traction with now over 1.3 billion views on the hashtag GrimaceShake alone, the beverage seems to be growing in popularity. Which leaves the question, what exactly is in the Grimace shake? According to McDonald's themselves, the delicious Grimace's birthday shake is inspired by Grimaces's iconic color and sweetness. It features creamy vanilla soft serve, blended with Grimace shake syrup and finished with whipped light cream. So what about this Grimace shake syrup? The McDonald's website lists several ingredients, but offers no clue as to where the syrup comes from or why it's called a Grimace shake syrup. That's when I realized the answer has been there all along. Grimace is the embodiment of a milkshake, though others still insist he's a taste bud. Maybe that's because he's both. He is the taste bud of a living milkshake. He likes milkshakes. They literally inflate his mass and keep him healthy, and he likes tasting everything around him. Not only does this explain the tweets, but it also explains why some of the videos show consumers reacting poorly to the shakes because they're literally consuming Grimace matter. And some of the videos show Grimace coming after them. He simply wants to steal the shakes, just as he had as evil Grimace way back at the very beginning. But with the success of the Grimace shake and Grimace now out on the loose rampaging in public. It'll be interesting to see what becomes of Grimace next year on Grimace's birthday. -[Commercial] Happy birthday, Grimace. And with that, there's only one thing left for me to do. Remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring the death bell and select all notifications, and I will see you in the next one, assuming we both survive.
