McDonald’s "Happy" Mascot

About

McDonald’s "Happy" Mascot is an anthropomorphic cartoon character of a Happy Meal box introduced as a new mascot for the fast food restaurant chain McDonald’s in the United States in May 2014. Upon its debut in the social media, the character became a target of online mockeries for its creepy facial expression

Origin

The mascot "Happy" was initially unveiled for the McDonald's brand in France in 2009 and was subsequently introduced in other European and Latin American countries.

On May 19th, 2014, McDonald’s announced in a press release that the mascot would be coming to the United States.^[1] The same day, an image of the mascot along with a link to the press release was tweeted by the @McDonalds Twitter feed.

Additionally, the McDonald's Facebook^[4] page posted a video featuring the animated character. In the next 24 hours, the tweet received more than 1,000 retweets and the Facebook post gathered upwards of 720 likes.

Spread

On the same day, many Twitter users replied to the @McDonalds tweet remarking that the mascot appeared creepy and disturbing.

Also on May 19th, NeoGAF Forums^[2] member LiK submitted a thread with a picture of Happy, to which many users replied with photoshopped and captioned versions of the image (shown below).

On May 20th, Redditor TurboBr0 submitted a picture of the mascot to the /r/CrappyDesign^[3] subreddit, where it gained over 180 upvotes and 20 comments within the first three hours. In the coming days, several news sites reported on the social media backlash to the new Happy Meal character, including The Verge,^[5] Time,^[6] Industry Leaders Magazine,^[7] E! Online,^[8] USA Today,^[9] The Daily Mail,^[10] Bloomberg^[11] and Mashable.^[12]

Search Interest

External References