Mac Tonight

Mac Tonight is a character used in marketing for McDonald's restaurants during the late 1980s. Known for his crescent moon head, sunglasses and piano-playing, the character played the song "Mack the Knife", which was made famous in the United States by Bobby Darin. Throughout the campaign, Mac was performed by actor Doug Jones and voiced by Brock Walsh.

Originally conceived as a promotion to increase dinner sales by Southern California licensees, Mac Tonight's popularity led McDonald's to take it nationwide on August 27, 1987. By 1988, the ad campaign had spread worldwide. In 1989, Bobby Darin's son, Dodd Mitchell Darin, sued McDonald's for allegedly infringing upon Darin's likeness. After the lawsuit, McDonald's stopped using the song. There were several attempts to reboot Mac Tonight in the US throughout the 1990s, but none of them took off.

Original marketing campaign (1986–1989)
The campaign, created by Jim Bennedict and Peter Coutroulis, was created for Southern California McDonald's franchisees by Los Angeles advertising firm Davis, Johnson, Mogul & Colombatto, for a budget of around $500,000. Looking to increase the dinner business, the agency was inspired by the song "Mack the Knife" by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, made famous in the United States by Bobby Darin in 1959. The agency listened to different versions of it before opting to create an original version with new lyrics. After deciding not to feature real people, the designers settled on an anthropomorphic crooner moon on a man's body with 1950s-style sunglasses; the song and style were designed to appeal to baby boomers and a revival of 1950s-style music in popular culture. The character, who played a grand piano atop either a floating cloud or a giant Big Mac (hence the name), was intended to garner a "cult-like" following.

From 1986 to 1987, the campaign expanded to other cities on the American West Coast. McDonald's said that the campaign had "great success", while trade magazine Nation's Restaurant News announced that it had contributed to increases of over 10% in dinnertime business at some Californian restaurants. A crowd of 1,500 attended the visit of a costumed character to a Los Angeles McDonald's. With concerns that he was too typical of the West Coast, in February 1987, it was decided that the character would feature on national advertisements, which aired that September. He attracted a crowd of 1,000 in Boca Raton, Florida. A September 1987 survey by Ad Watch found that the number of consumers who recalled McDonald's advertising before any other doubled from the previous month, and was higher than any company since the New Coke launch in 1985.

Doug Jones performed Mac Tonight for over 27 out of the 29 commercials from 1986 to 1997. Years later in 2013, he recalled "that's when my career took a turn that I was not expecting. I didn't know that was a career option." Mac Tonight's voice was provided by Brock Walsh.

In 1989, Bobby Darin's son Dodd Mitchell Darin alleged that the song infringed upon his father's trademark without prior permission and filed a lawsuit as well as an injunction for the song to be removed from both TV and radio ads. As a response to the lawsuit, McDonald's stopped airing the advertisements.

"They thought that I had co-opted his father’s singing style, and they filed suit for infringement of likeness. Specifically, my vocalization was apparently the issue. To me though, Bobby Darin wasn’t the imprint on that song. I was more influenced by guys like Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong — Louis Armstrong was known for this song, too.

That brought the gravy train to a grinding halt. I do think, though, that this lawsuit coincided with the downturn of Mac Tonight ads as effective marketing anyway. I think McDonald’s looked at it like, 'Do we really want to fuck with this? Isn’t it easier to just cut and run from the whole thing?' So that’s what they did. It’s cool, though. It’s a business. I get it.

I think they tried to change the song for a bit, but it just didn’t work. Mac was done soon after that."

Between 1997 and 1998, McDonald's sponsored NASCAR Hall of Famer Bill Elliott with Mac Tonight featured on his car. In 2016, the Mac Tonight theme was McDonald's driver Jamie McMurray's Chip Ganassi Racing No. 1 Chevrolet SS throwback scheme for Darlington Raceway's Southern 500.

Reintroduction in Southeast Asia (2006–2010)
In 2006, McDonald's brought back the character in territories throughout Southeast Asia such as in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and China. The Asian-exclusive campaign featured an animated Mac Tonight dancing atop a McDonald's restaurant while singing and playing a saxophone. These commercials were made by Liquid Animation.

"Mac Tonight Mad Dash" was a competition hosted on July 24, 2007, and broadcast in the Philippines, in which 24 pairs of contestants had to race to visit McDonald's locations to solve puzzles.

Mask
The mask the actor wore was made by a makeup and practical effects artist called Steve Neill. It weighed over 10 pounds and had the facial expressions motorized with animatronics. It needed three puppeteers to control the lip, jaw, and eyebrow movement.

New masks were made with more articulation and animatronics added. The Australian 1988 mask was made by Robert Bertie.

Animatronics
Several McDonald's restaurants in the early 1990s were fitted with Mac Tonight hydraulically powered animatronic figures built by Mannetron with the character playing a piano. One of the animatronics is in the World's Largest Entertainment McDonald's in Orlando, Florida.

Legacy
Mac Tonight is featured on an episode of Video Soul on January 26, 1988.

Ronald Mcdonald House Charities started the annual Mac Tonight Gala fundraiser, renamed Masquerade Ball in 2018.

Mac Tonight has a heavy association with vaporwave and appeared on the cover of the split album Late Night Delight by Saint Pepsi and Luxury Elite, where he became an icon of the genre.

Mac Tonight is featured in The Simpsons episodes "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore" as a cardboard cutout, "Fatzcarraldo", and "Burger Kings" via Homer's imagination.

Moon Man is an Internet meme and unofficial parody of Mac Tonight that originated in 2007 on the Internet meme community YTMND, in which the character is depicted as being a racist. A Salon article compared Moon Man to Pepe the Frog, another meme and hate symbol. In 2016, YouTube removed Moon Man videos for violating its community guidelines on hate speech, and AT&T, whose text-to-speech software was used to create the meme, had edited it to filter out the character's name and obscenities. In 2019, the Anti-Defamation League added Moon Man to their database of hate symbols.