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These 1980s McDonald's Ads Perfectly Predicted Our Future

Watch the restaurant take everything from a miserable old man in this serialized corporate dystopia.

It's a world where one corporation controls every aspect of your life. You turn to them for love. You turn to them for life. It's where you turn when they've taken everything away from you.

It might sound like every cheesy cyberpunk premise you've ever seen, but you never saw this movie at the cinema. This was the world as McDonald's saw it in the 1980s. This was the hellish corporate dystopia its commercials earnestly offered to America with an open hand.

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Culturally, the 1980's were a weird time in America. Due in equal measure to a desire to get past the turbulence of the last two decades, and the new strategy of the country's conservative movement to combine corporate and christian values, American society was marked by a return to wholesomeness under a new corporate aegis. In their advertising, brands began to insert themselves into the picture of family-friendly Americana, as they burrowed deeper into the fibre of our public and private lives.

It's at this time that McDonald's ads also started to take on a darker undertone, presenting a horrible world in which the restaurant had subsumed all aspects of society. But when viewed as a series, McDonald's commercials of this era tell an even greater story about the decline of the American century through the eyes of one sad old man, and the suffering of people in his life.

In 1986's Golden Time, a musical McDonald's commercial, two elderly customers who go to the restaurant often enough (presumably because they can't afford to eat anywhere else on a fixed income) to notice each other, quietly fall in love.

At this point, the commercial is done, but what if the story continues to unfold? As you watch the subsequent commercials, remember that these all came from the same creative regime, and were reflective of a consistent branding. They position McDonald's as a reliable constant in your life, and it's not too far a jump to imagine that the narrative continues as well. For argument's sake, let's look at this commercial as the first instalment of a tragic story that unveils over the next five years—a story that sees McDonald's follow this man through his remaining miserable years.

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Three years later, in The New Kid, our lovers from "Golden Time" are now married—albeit, portrayed by different actors. Though all of his friends are retired and free to go fishing, our protagonist is just really excited to be starting his new job as a McDonald's cashier. Even though he and his wife had been keeping to a modest budget all these years by eating at McDonald's, they still can't keep their heads above water, and now he needs to get a service industry job to provide. He comes home, thrilled that he did well, and it makes sense that he'd be so good at knowing the menu, since he eats there enough to have married another customer.

Looking at this hypothetical saga that's unfolding from McDonald's perspective, it plays out like the logical conclusion of what the restaurant's branding has always pushed toward: that McDonald's is a part of your life at all stages and for all occasions. In fact, McDonald's is the only positive thing about your shitty life. It's never really acknowledged how awfully sad it is that this man isn't able to retire. No one involved in the development of this commercial saw that as potentially depressing, and that's terrifying.

But what about the rest of this dark, fictional world? Surely there are other people with their own stories. Well, it turns out, they are equally miserable, thanks to McDonald's.

In 1990's First Date, Law and Order SVU's Christopher Meloni shows up at a woman's house to pick her up on a blind date and just starts laying in to her about all her probable expectations. This is what men used to do before they were able to write out their diatribes on an online profile. They had to go through the trouble of getting a date and showing up in person and only then were they able to spew all of their personal complexes on a nice lady.

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So Stabler gets to this lady's door and basically calls her garbage for probably wanting to date a doctor or a lawyer, and then fuck you, lady, I'm taking you to McDonald's, and she's totally into it! McDonald's invented negging!

In 1991's Moving On, two years have passed when we check back in with our nice elderly couple who live below the poverty line because of how McJobs have affected the nation's late capitalist economy. Here, the saga comes to an end as the man's wife (who he met at McDonald's, then worked at McDonald's to support) is dead.

The grieving man looks at her photo and tucks it away into a suitcase as his son and grandson appear and invite him to come and live with him, and the boy promises to take the old man to McDonald's "everyday."

The man who worked so hard and gave so much to McDonald's, in the end, is consoled through the loss of his wife with the promise that he'll be taken to the restaurant that has taken everything from him. We can only assume the only reason we never saw his McDonald's catered funeral was a change in the chain's marketing in the mid-1990s to messaging that focussed on new menu items and comparatively low prices.

When you look at the theme McDonald's developed through the 1980s and 1990s, it's hard to miss the overt message—that the restaurant is an inexorable part of your life. It's where you meet the love of your life. It's where you work. It's where you'll go when you realize that you need to settle, and it's where you go to McMourn.