Hamburglore podcast hosts unpack the ‘Grimace shake’ internet sensation and the bloodshed in its wake

Hamburglore podcast hosts Nate and Kam, moments before Kam spilled his ice cream all over his cargo shorts and multiple people. // Courtesy photo

If you’ve taken a glance at the internet in recent weeks, there’s a chance you’re familiar with a sizeable purple creature by the name of Grimace.

Created by McDonald’s as an addition to their family of mascot-like characters, Grimace’s friends include Birdie the Early Bird and Uncle O’Grimacey. While we know basic background info on Grimace’s creation, the question mark surrounding his origins, intentions, and overall existence only continues to grow.

In celebration of his birthday month, the fast food franchise released The Grimace Birthday Meal for a limited time, which includes the now well-known berry-flavored Grimace Shake, which is of course the same color as Grimace. The shake in particular  is the reason for Grimace’s current celebrity status,

Today, the creature is the topic of endless memes, various hashtags, and a viral, amusingly violent trend that took a turn nobody expected. As all trends do, Grimace’s spotlight is on its way out, but we are still left with many unanswered questions.

We got to sit down with the hosts of Hamburglore: Corporate Mascot Lore, Kam Konek and Nate Brandt, to chat about all things Grimace and unravel the critter’s secrets.

The Pitch: Who is Grimace, really? What’s his origin story?

Brandt: I guess you’d say he’s sort of a nemesis of Ronald McDonald, like The Hamburglar, but he originally had four arms. His whole thing is, I got the milkshakes, you can’t have the milkshakes. I’m keeping the thing away from the protagonist of the commercial, silly rabbit kind of thing. He’s sort of like how Bowser is there playing tennis with everybody even though he tried to kill Mario like 15 minutes ago. It’s the same vibe with Grimace where it’s like, weren’t you literally in a cave hoarding milkshakes and now you’re just like, hi, Ronald?

Grimace is sort of like any mascot that’s around right now, like a relic of a bygone era. It’s base-level brand recognition of, I know that big purple guy, he’s from the hamburger place. That lack of knowledge, that lack of lore about Grimace, is what is so perfect for a social media trend where anybody can just kind of pick it up and go with whatever. It’s core to this weird, Gen Z sense of humor thing that’s happening. These people are aping the tropes and the cinematography of good horror movies and making funny, surprising short-form content about the purple guy from McDonald’s that used to have four arms and now has a vanilla milkshake.

I looked up the, is Grimace a tastebud thing, and he’s not a tastebud. Apparently, some manager of a McDonald’s in Canada just decided that. I mean he looks like what I would imagine a tastebud would look like. It turns out I know even less about him than I thought. On the McDonald’s Grimace Wiki page, the species is listed as unknown even though it is hinted that he wrote the Wiki article. Maybe Grimace doesn’t even know.

Konek: It’s been so long since they’ve done that, do whatever you want; he’s a good guy now, it’s fine, buy our burgers thing. That’s kind of the thing about a lot of mascot stuff that I appreciate. They leave a lot of room to fill in those blanks because they’re just like, fucking who cares just buy our stuff. People will recognize him and that’s all we need. Courtney Cox made one that had CG where she like spills the milkshake on her dog, and it becomes this monster thing.

I did like a little bit of digging to see if I could find where this whole thing started. It was just a dude, a TikTok comedian I think, who basically just did a video saying, hey guys, I’m trying the new grimace shake, and then drank it and died. That was the entire thing.

Why do you think the internet is so obsessed with him?

Brandt: You could hyper-analyze it as much as you want, like we’ve taken these benign things and made these not-scary horror stories about it so that we can laugh at something scary. You could say that. I went to film school, by the way. Or you could just go with the base level of, like, I think it’s funny that this lady drank the milkshake and then she got a purple nosebleed and fell down and turned feral.

You just might, as you’re scrolling on TikTok, see one of the most weirdly affecting short horror films you’ve ever seen. It’s about a taste bud thing that has half as many arms as it used to, making a purple shake that made Courtney Cox’s dog a monster. Like, I should be institutionalized for saying that sentence. I should be given the grippy socks for saying that. But that’s what is happening right now and a weirder thing is probably going to happen next week, because that’s how the internet works.

Humburglore podcast image.

Another aspect is the weird and unknowing thing that people just ran with and turned it into this Eldritch horror-type thing. It’s based on everybody knowing who Grimace is and almost nobody knowing a damn thing about him. Every video I’ve seen is unique, doing the same basic core concept, but trying to one-up each other in terms of how ridiculous they can make it. It’s this weirdly beautiful charming thing of people being creative for the sake of it. Nobody’s like, I’m going to make a Grimace TikTok and get famous and rich off of it. It’s like, I’m just going to experiment with visual storytelling and a hard cut to black, and then we see four people shoved into a car or whatever.

It’s a really cool thing to see so many people being creative in a way that resonates with our hyper-fixations on weird products and characters and these 100-year-old marketing things that for some reason stuck around. McDonald’s has a huge roster of characters that are not used at all. There’s a pancakes mascot, and she’s a weird bird, a pancakes bird, then there’s the children that are made out of fries, so yeah.

Konek: Then there are the nuggets that are people and Mayor McCheese, who just disappeared. We basically stole his likeness for our logo.

How do you think McDonald’s feels?

Konek: As weird and almost fucked up this whole trend is, I say fucked up with the most sincerity and appreciation, it’s great marketing for McDonald’s. I kind of feel like they’re gonna be willing to do another thing kind of like this. This wasn’t even their original plan. They basically took all of these characters that people remember and have always felt weird about, and the fact that we don’t really know a whole lot about them as an entity really lends to the idea that like, what does happen if you drink his shake?

Brandt: I’m sure that at first, the money people behind McDonald’s were like, what do you mean, everybody’s making jokes about us on Tik Tok? This is gonna be bad for us. But, I wouldn’t have bought the shake if there wasn’t a Midsommer parody that went with it. You wouldn’t have even gotten that engagement a couple of years ago that we’re now getting from celebrities. Now it’s just like, oh yeah, Courtney Cox is doing a TikTok about Grimace or whatever. Its mere existence is intensely surreal and the fact that this trend is happening seems like a weird story prompt or something. I’m so here for it. I was a little bit annoyed with how much of it I was seeing but then I realized what circles I’m running and I was like, oh, yeah, this is why.

Those marketing meetings must have been incredible. Because, like, how tame is the concept of just, let’s have a new shake for Grimace’s birthday. All right, cool. We’ll make new cups and bags and whatever, and we’ll formulate a new kind of vanilla berry shake. That’s totally easy. We’ll do that. We’ll run it for a month and be done.

Konek: It’s not out of the ordinary for them either, because they’ve been doing a lot of like BTS meals and then the adult Happy Meal for a limited time. Like, here’s a weird thing we’re doing. They’ve been leaning into that a lot more lately. But I don’t think they expected to be watching really just horrifying videos and showing executives videos of people pretending to die.

I hear Grimace is on his way out. What’s up with that?

Brandt: Basically, he’s relinquishing control of McDonald’s account because his birthday month is over. Yes, he is a Gemini. He’s just doing the thing that all corporations do where they change their profile picture after Pride Month.

Do you think Grimace will make a comeback eventually?

Konek: I don’t know if we see it again next year. If it didn’t blow out of proportion in the way that it did, I think we probably would have. If you think about it, lore-wise, you’ve got his uncle who is the Shamrock Shake guy, and that’s also yearly, so you just keep it in the family. It feels almost desperate to bring it back again next year. Like, let it cool off, an extra year or so and then kind of bring it back. Also, I don’t know, I don’t work there. I think for a lot of people it probably won’t be like, oh, was the thing that killed people? It’d be neat to see it again. If they leaned into it a little bit more than I did at least want to know what that looks like.

Brandt: Yeah, I think leaning into it is the only way that this gets continued in any way, shape, or form. I want Grimace with a knife and an eyepatch. I think that I would love to see what they do next. Goodbye Grimace is trending right now. Like, is McDonald’s just gonna go back to being like, anyway, Happy Meals for $6 or whatever? They acknowledged the trend, they also posted a Last of Us meme, Grimace has a game you can play on grimacesbirthday.com, and he’s got a Spotify playlist for his birthday. It’s really weird the kind of stuff that you can do with marketing now.

Konek: I think that if we don’t necessarily see the Grimace stuff again next year, this definitely empowered them to revisit some of their older mascots a little bit more. Unless they do like something next year, like, here’s a picture of Grimace with a gun. You absolutely have me. I will buy whatever you’re selling.

https://twitter.com/AustinTing2/status/1676835939367395328

How do you feel about Grimace?

Brandt: It’s so cool to just see everybody try some weird shit. I really just appreciate the I don’t expect anything from this other than to make a funny attitude. Especially right now when everything is hashtag, ad, influencer, all that kind of stuff where it’s super fakey fake and that’s what this event started out as. It’s that disparity between the reality of Grimace being a nothing character and Grimace is an Elder God and he killed my entire family. That disparity between the truth and the fiction there is what gives it meaning for me.

It is a very Gen Z thing to have these hyper-layered, weird references all together and then come out with a new thing that has all of the elements of the thing that they put together, but also none of them at the same time. This weird absurdist self-referential thing. It’s so weird but I am so happy that sense of humor is kind of in right now. We’re building this lore as it’s going. It’s so surreal and it’s a thing that we’re never ever going to understand exactly how or why any of it happened.

Konek: There’s no kind of easy onboarding point for literally any of the concepts in this. That’s what’s so weird about how everybody seems to be into it. It kind of feels almost generational. I do think that largely this is a lot of Gen Z people doing this stuff. I mean, I objectively think they’re way funnier than any of us. If this were in the creative hands of millennials, I would have been so fucking tired of it after like a day or two.

There are also a lot of people who were kind of taking it the exact opposite way. I don’t know if it’s intentional to try and balance it out, but there are people who were more like, Happy Birthday Grimace, our sweet sweet Grimace. He’s so nice and so good and we love our sweet, sweet boy. It’s so very genuine and it’s kind of rad that both of those things just can and do exist at the same time. It kind of hurts. It feels like we ruined his birthday. Like I don’t want to ruin anybody’s birthday.

How do we protect the youth of KC?

Brandt: Look to god and pray. I just watched Independence Day last night, so I’ve just got one-liners ready to go. God help us all. I would say that it’s too late. Why won’t McDonald’s stop selling this? Do they know what’s in this?

Konek: Fast food is literally killing our children.

Brandt: You can read into it however much you want, but nobody knows what’s in their food, ever. Half of the people who try this thing are just like, give you different fucking spectrums of what it tastes like and I’m like, I don’t know about that.