McDonald's

Fandom
Name(s):	McDonald's
Abbreviation(s):	McD
Scope/Focus:	Fast-Food Restaurants Mascots
Date(s):
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Manga-fy McDonald's Characters by mclelun lee.

McDonald's is an American fast food restaurant chain. Several of its mascot characters show up in fanworks, and sometimes its commercials and ads are sources of memes. Its commercial songs are often parodied or used ironically in fandom. Ronald McDonald is sometimes shipped with the Burger King or Jack-in-the-Box, two other well-known fast-food mascots. Sometimes characters from other fandoms are shown as McDonald's characters.

Characters

McDonaldland

• Ronald McDonald
• The Hamburglar
• Grimace
• Birdie the Early Bird
• Mayor McCheese
• Officer Big Mac

Others

• Happy
• Mac Tonight
• Speedee

Controversies

Grimace wiki page controversy

On June 14, 2023, McDonald's paid Fandom to turn Grimace's wiki page on the McDonald's wiki into an advertisement for Grimace's Birthday Meal. Two days later, the editor who originally wrote most of the page, Nathan Steinmetz made a tweet on this, which gathered 1,954 reposts and 39.7K likes. The reactions from other sites like reddit were the same.

McDon*ld's took over the Grimace wiki page and removed all the real world information, appearances, and citations that I've added over the years and turned the whole page into one big in-universe ad for the birthday promotion :(

Nathan Steinmetz 

Later, Steinmetz had an interview with Luke Plunkett from Kotaku, where he talked about how it set a really bad precedent for both companies.

“I think that wikis are a bastion of the old internet where people get together to share information simply for the sake of it”, Nathan tells me. “Unfortunately that is not directly monetizable. While The Grimace is a very silly page for this to whole thing to be about, I think it probably sets a really bad precedent that an IP holder can approach Fandom or whoever and have user generated content basically ‘suppressed’ and replaced with a press release.”

“I get how dramatic it sounds to talk about the suppression of Grimace lore, but just about every pop culture property has thousands of hours of work put into these wikis” he says, while adding he’s “not that avid of a wiki editor” (“I mostly just edit this one particular page as kind of a bit because I think it’s funny to be a Grimace Expert”).

“But I am an avid wiki reader and have half a dozen bookmarked. If you want the rundown on the continuity of Doctor Who audio dramas or all the pop culture references in an episode of the Venture Bros you pretty much have to go to a Fandom wiki. I think these wikis are an incredibly important resource and it just feels really gross that any company can step in and do that.”

Luke Plunkett 

Example Fanworks

Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.

Fanart

• 

  Fanart of Mayor McCheese and Officer Big Mac by MacDuckBeat

• 

  Fanart of Mac Tonight by raggedfollower

Fanvids

• McDonalds Kid all endings(original) by wowowawa

Fangames

• McDonald's Dating Sim
• Five Nights with Mac Tonight - a popular FNaF fangame series
• Five Nights at Ronald's - an another FNaF McDonald's fangame
• The Treasurous Journey of Ronald
• Grimace Shaker

Fanfics

• San Ysidro: 90 Minutes at McDonald's by L.A. Carr (Simon and Simon) (the setting is the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald's massacre) (1985)
• Mayor McCheese’s Cease as Mayor by Tiger Trotter (2023)
• Performance by sillyjester (2021)

Fannish Links

• McDonald's Wiki
• r/McDonalds
• McDonaldland tag Archive of Our Own
• mcdonalds and mcdonaldland on Tumblr