Upsetting Day: The Trial of the Hamburglar

Nothing is funnier to me than the McDonaldland commercials. Sometimes I feel like I've thought about the concept of McDonaldland 10,000 times more than any person who was ever paid real advertising dollars to come up with the concept of a tiny jail for children that will entice them to purchase cheeseburgers.

The concept for McDonaldland was all stolen from the TV show H.R. PufNStuf, which is about a little boy who finds a magical island where everyday objects come to life. No one thought about how that concept is objectively terrifying when applied to a world where all of the objects that come to life are things you will be eating.

Sure, plenty of BBQ restaurants use a mascot that's some variation of a pig begging for death, but early Mcdonald's commercials get way weirder than that. They had a pair of twin trash cans that chased children around, trying to nibble their garbage. "It's a special little treat when we get to eat the paper, yes indeed!" They cry as the children flee in terror.

If anyone thought for even two seconds about the scarring effects of most of the Mcdonald's commercials in the 1990s they could have avoided so much trauma to me, personally. For instance, there's a 1992 commercial called wacky wedding, where two chicken McNuggets get married. The ceremony contains many of the hallmarks of a Christian wedding, a flower girl, a best man, and a white dress to symbolize the McNugget bride's virginity. As if the stink of Filet-O-Fish could be washed off or covered up.

This makes me ask, do the McNuggets worship a Christian God, and if so, is that God a man or is it a Chicken McNugget? Like, a big, floating white bearded McNugget with googly eyes and the power to create life but only in the shapes of a bell, a boot, a ball, or a bone.

The ceremony does have some differences from a typical Christian ceremony; for instance, most Christian weddings don't include a portion where the bride and groom jump into a vat or dipping sauce served by a fifty-story clown, which is why I don't attend more of them. It still bothers me that not a single advertising executive thought maybe getting people involved in the hopes, dreams, and romances of the McNuggets wasn't a good idea if they wanted us to eat them.

The McNugget wedding haunts me. It made me into a McNugget anthropologist, but what really terrifies me about McDonaldland is its justice system. I know these commercials are made for children, but if I had been a child in the 1970s, who got to ride my bike around the neighborhood after dark and ingest my share of lead paint, I would still be upset about the internal logic of the trial of the Hamburglar.

In the late '70s commercial, "Order In The Court," we finally brought The Hamburglar to court for his crimes. First of all, you know who plays the judge in this trial? Mayor McCheese in a wig. I'll assume this means that McDonaldland's justice system is based on one of the two places where you have to wear a wig to be a judge, the United Kingdom or RuPaul's Drag Race. No one does any death drops, so it's probably the UK.

If Mayor McCheese is also Judge McCheese, what type of government oversight does McDonaldland have? Working in two separate branches of the legislature would make it pretty easy for him to commit crimes. RIP the McDonaldland provincial budget. It's probably all been spent on purple tophats.

Officer Big Mac, the arresting officer in the case, is also the prosecutor, which seems like a conflict of interest, but I guess we'll ignore that too. I get it; they didn't want to make new puppets. Ronald is already playing the defense lawyer since Grimace was also a criminal who stole milkshakes at this time, and if The Professor and The Hamburglar are ever in the same commercial, their sinister energy sets TVs on fire.

What is the Hamburglar on trial for? Acquiring hamburgers. Officer Big Mac doesn't say outright that he stole them. He says that The Hamburglar was "caught red-handed sneaking off with a big bag full of Mcdonald's delicious cheeseburgers." So in this world, possessing cheeseburgers is illegal? That makes sense because the jury of Hamburgler's peers is entirely made up of cheeseburgers. In their world, this would be like being found with a sack of fingers.

So…Cheeseburgers are people in this universe, which means The Hamburglar is a whimsical human trafficker? Organ harvester? Either way it's serious, and Ronald McDonald agrees. He turns to the camera and breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience, "That's serious!" The internal logic of this commercial makes perfect sense to me at this exact moment, and I'm sure that will never change!

Officer Big Mac produces the stolen bag of cheeseburgers as evidence, and one of the jurors exclaims, "My nephew was in that bag!" Horrifying, tragic, again, a clear conflict of interest to have a victim's family member serve on their jury, but there is no true justice in Ronald McDonald's kingdom. That has become abundantly clear already.

Things are not going well for The Hamburglar. What jury wouldn't convict him on looks alone? He's got the face of Riff Raff from Rocky Horror and the sunhat of the evil stepmom from The Parent Trap. The man is a Frankenstein made from other monsters, named after his crime, and carrying a bag filled with his universe's version of people.

Ronald isn't called upon to defend The Hamburglar. Instead, Judge Mayor McCheese asks him what he has to say for himself, and The Hamburglar screams at him incoherently. Only the word cheeseburger is audible. Then Ronald points at him and sarcastically says, "A likely story." That is his entire defense! The McDonaldland law school is probably a single cartoon of a sassy skateboarding dog.

With no deliberation, the entire jury says, "He's guilty," all at once. We move immediately to sentencing. Here's where the logic of this universe dissolves like so many Mcdonald's delicious cheeseburgers in my stomach over the course of several weeks. The Hamburglar is sentenced to one week without Mcdonald's cheeseburgers. So, he was allowed to have the cheeseburgers all along; he just can't steal them? We know this man wasn't paying for the cheeseburgers in the first place! How is not allowing him to purchase them going to reform or even punish him? Nothing has changed for The Hamburglar.

Ronald McDonald steps in on The Hamburglar's behalf, saying he thinks the punishment is "rather severe." The sentence is then immediately commuted to a week without rutabagas. Are there even rutabagas in McDonaldland, and if so, are the rutabagas also sentient? Everyone should exclusively be eating rutabagas if they're not alive enough to serve on a jury like the cheeseburgers are.

The judge laughs the laugh of a madman, then yells, "Now let's all adjourn!" Roland McDonald throws open the courtroom doors to reveal a McDonald's right outside the courtroom, adding, "to McDonald's for cheeseburgers!" Everyone cheers and follows him to Mcdonald's, including the Hamburglar. Are they all going to commit crimes together right now?

McDonaldland is a place where a cheeseburger can arrest you for eating a cheeseburger, try you in a court with a jury of cheeseburgers, sentence you to cheeseburger deprivation, and then go celebrate with a round of cheeseburgers. It's like something Garey Busey would scream at you from an animated gif. This makes three puppets reaching into a mirror to choke their own reflections look like an episode of Muppet Babies. The faceless group of advertising executives behind this are the most compelling horror writers of their generation.

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