The Great Grimace Mystery Revealed!!

Ever since I was a kid I would see this big purple thing in the McDonald's commercial. He reminded me of a purple Popsicle or something and had a funny name. Grimace would become a very common topic in discussion of pop culture. It became apparent that no one really knew what Grimace was suppose to be. Sure there have been many parodies, comedic guesses, assumptions and random back stories created to explain the history of the purple marketing agent. However, nothing really seemed logical (or as logical as a story on a fantastical commercial character could be.)

Last night while coming home with a bunch a friends the topic of Grimace came up once again. Heads were scratched and hypotheses discussed regarding the origins of Grimace. Finally, I decided to do something that for some reason I never thought of doing before. With today's technology it's very simple to look things up on the trusty Web, and you know the information discovered would be authentic because EVERYTHING posted on the web is true (*smiles*)

According to Wikipedia Grimace is:

"large, anthropomorphic taste bud with short arms and legs; he is known for his slow-witted demeanor. His most common expression is the word "duh."¹

HE'S A TASTE BUD!!! A PURPLE TASTE BUD!!!!!!!

This was the reaction I got when I read this description to my car riding companions, except there were question marks in addition to the exclamation points. Granted, in retrospect Grimace does look like a purple tongue but even that goes beyond peculiar 80's advertising and into just plain bizarre and borderline creepy. Ok, it's creepy. Someone actually had to sit through an advertising meeting and say "Hey, you know what we should have? A giant purple taste bud." Then there had to be someone or a group of someones who said "Yeah! That's a great idea."

According to Wikipedia, it use to be even worse:

"Originally, Grimace was the "Evil Grimace", with two pairs of arms with which to steal milkshakes. After that first campaign, the character was revised to be one of the "good guys", and his number of arms was reduced by two. Commercials and merchandise generally portrayed him as a well-meaning simpleton, whose clumsy antics provided a comic foil to Ronald McDonald."¹

So, yeah Grimace was suppose to be evil...and he's a giant taste bud. This is a perfect example of how marketing has change. Nowadays we have a talking gecko and sophisticated cavemen hawking car insurance, a giant king promoting hamburgers, and various screaming vendors trying to push everything from citrus based cleaning products to headache salves. I am not saying that today's characters are better. I'm just saying they're very different.

Then again, maybe that marketing team was on to something. After all, I have dedicated a whole blog entry to the history and evolution of their fictional burger character more than 20 years later. I really don't know if the same will be said about the Geico cavemen.

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¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldland