The Worst Fast Food Commercials Ever

$5 billion. According to one recent survey, that’s how much the fast food industry spends on advertising in a single year. No wonder these chains feel so ubiquitous. Their marketing is everywhere; on billboards, on websites, and especially on broadcast and cable (and even some streaming) television. If you interact in the world in any way, it is inescapable.

Because these companies spend so much, they can afford to get the best of the best advertisers money can buy; the creme de la Creamsicle, if you will. Even still, Madison Avenue’s best and brightest are not perfect, and throughout the fast food world’s history, they have produced some genuinely bizarre commercials, including some that really push the boundaries of good taste, both in and out of their restaurants. Below, you’ll find 15 of the absolute worst. They’re fun to watch — but maybe not on a full stomach.

McDonald’s – The Original Ronald McDonald

At this point, Ronald McDonald is instantly recognizable to generations of fast food patrons around the world. When he was first introduced in the early 1960s, Ronald McDonald was a weird-looking dude with a tray of food on his head. As if the O.G. Ronald wasn’t quirky enough, how’s this for some mind-boggling trivia: The original Ronald McDonald from these early ads was portrayed by Willard Scott, who went on to national fame as the weatherman on NBC’s Today for decades. And you thought he was clowning around with those Smucker’s segments.

Kentucky Fried Chicken – Lie Detector Test

Colonel Sanders himself appears in this ad, strapped to a lie detector, while a group of women try to uncover the secret to his proprietary spice blend. Even under interrogation, the Colonel refuses to yield his chicken information, and the whole thing ends with an unseen narrator unleashing an evil laugh. Is this an ad for fried chicken or a deleted scene from The Prisoner?

McDonald’s – Waste Baskets

Eventually, Ronald McDonald became the figurehead of a whole “McDonaldland” filled with oddball creatures like Birdie, the Hamburglar, and of course Grimace. Not every McDonaldland resident became a famous character, though. In this genuinely nightmarish spot, Ronald McDonald introduces a couple of children to a pair of sentient garbage pails, encouraging them to “feed the waste baskets … cause they’re hungry too!” Uh, okay Ronald. Watch the kid closest to the baskets as they dance closer and closer. He looks worried that he’s gonna be fed to the waste baskets.

Burger King – Where’s Herb?

Oddball pitchmen became all the rage in the early 1980s, thanks to ads like Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” and Dunkin’ Donuts’ Fred the Baker, with his perpetual refrain of “Time to make the donuts!” Burger King tried to carve out their own niche in that space with … uh … Herb. Who was … a guy … named Herb. In early ads, he was unseen but described as the one man alive who had never eaten a Burger King burger. That was followed by commercials like the absurd one above, that had a whole musical ode to this rando named Herb.

Then Burger King doubled down with further ads that offered discounts to anyone who told a BK cashier “I’m not Herb.” (If by some sad chance you were actually named Herb, you were instructed to say “I’m not the Herb you’re looking for.”) Later ads introduced a dweeby goofball with thinning hair and huge glasses, along with a contest where if you spotted Herb in your local Burger King you could win a cash prize. None of this boosted Burger King sales among non-Herbs; in fact, profits dropped while the Herb campaign was running and the chain wound up jumping ship to a new advertising company.

Rax – Mr. Delicious

Once upon a time, hundreds of Rax restaurants dotted the United States. The chain sold a variety of foods — roast beef primarily, but at various points it also offered things like pizza, tacos, and even a “dinner bar,” which is like a pasta buffet but way way classier. Today, only a handful of Rax remain, a state of affairs that was exacerbated by their infamous “Mr. D” ads, in which a milquetoast animated pitchman “promoted” the restaurant in the most boring way imaginable.

In one ad Mr. D complained he was a “little overextended” so it was a bonus that Rax’s food was so cheap. In another, Mr. D talks explains that he loves the drive-thru window because he “just had some rather delicate surgery” and it allows him “to pick up his combo and drive ever so slowly over the speed bump.” For some inexplicable reason, this did not boost sales.

McDonald’s – The Tooth Fairy

In another truly odd McDonald’s spot of yesteryear, Ronald McDonald reminisces about losing his first tooth — when he (in full clown costume) was visited by the Tooth Fairy, and received his first pair of big red shoes. Then Ronald’s closet full of big red shoes springs to life and starts singing. Then the Tooth Fairy appears and asks adult Ronald if needs any “socks and undies.”

Far be it from me to question the ad wizards who came up with this thing but … like … what does any of this have to do with food? There’s no mention of hamburgers or Happy Meals. Imagine presenting this commercial to a person who just stepped out of a fallout shelter for 50 years. If you asked them what was this ad promoting, do you think they could guess it? They’d probably think this was for big red shoes! Or maybe better tooth care.

Quizno’s – Toasty Torpedo

Quizno’s is hardly the only fast food chain to lard its ads with shameless sexual innuendo. In this case, though, it just makes sense, Because, really, when you think about it, what’s sexier than shoving a phallic sandwich into a hot oven? Am I right, my dudes? High five!

That’s not a rhetorical question — that is the actual content of this commercial, with a sentient toasting oven speaking to a Quizno’s employee and instructing him “Put it in me, Scott” (It’s talking about a sandwich here, at least I think it is?) If there was any question what was going on, the oven then instructs poor Scott to repeat its instructions back, but to make it “sexy.” I just want to say everyone here at ScreenCrush wishes Scott a speedy recovery for all those second-degree burns on his dong.

Burger King – Eat Like a Snake

Call me crazy, but I’ve always thought a food commercial should make the viewer want to eat the food, not send them run screaming away from their television in horror. Yet that is the vibe of this Burger King ad, in which a man eats a Whopper “like a snake,” slithering on the floor and then distending his jaw to swallow the large sandwich whole. Whatever you do, do not attempt to make any of this make sense. That way lies madness.

Quizno’s – Spongmonkeys

When Quizno’s first burst onto the sandwich market, the fact that they toasted their subs helped garner them an enormous number of sales, and their early ads all focused on that one facet of their business. Then Quizno’s competitors copied their gimmick, and the novelty of toasted subs began to wear off. So their commercials needed another hook.

The quest to find one led, as it inevitably does, to the Spongmonkeys, who were an online creation of animator Joel Veitch, who had previously made a popular YouTube video with the strange, singing critters. He then created one just for Quizno’s, with special lyrics about the glory of the shop’s warm sandwiches and pepper bar. Although the campaign did not last long, in recent years the sheer insanity of the spot has gone viral; a single 2019 tweet about the ad (with the text “millennials don’t own homes because this quiznos commercial put a hex on us as children”) has been liked over 100,000 times. And it doesn’t even have a pepper bar!

McDonald’s – The Dead Dad

READ MORE: America’s #1 Fast Food Chain Is Closing Stores

McDonald’s has had plenty of good and memorable commercials through the years; sometimes the jingles from those old ads will earworm their way back into my head out of nowhere because they were so darn catchy. (If reciting old McDonald’s slogans is something you’re interested in, what you want is what you get at ScreenCrush today.) This example from the U.K., though, is memorable for all the wrong reasons. In it, a wayward teen asks his mother to tell him about his late father, a trip down memory lane that culminates in a trip to Mickey D’s for a Filet-O-Fish sandwich. And wouldn’t you know it? That was his dead dad’s favorite too.

I sort of get what they were going for here; they want you to associate with family and traditions and bringing people closer together. Those are all reasonable ambitions for a fast-food commercial. But doing it in a way so heavily focused on death and absent fathers … it doesn’t exactly make me want to eat a Filet-O-Fish, that’s all I’m saying.

KFC – Colonel RoboCop

During the late 2010s, KFC cast one celebrity after another as the “new” version of the chain’s venerable mascot, Colonel Sanders. And they kept getting stranger and stranger; Darrell Hammond begat Norm Macdonald begat Billy Zane begat Rob Lowe begat Reba McEntire begat … RoboCop? And not just any RoboCop; KFC actually brought back original RoboCop star Peter Weller to play the character in the ad. The results were truly baffling. While I recognize that stoned people make up one of fast food’s core demographics, ads like this one makes me feel like their commercials are made by stoned people too.

Burger King – Poké Ball Recall

Oof. In 1999, Burger King launched a major tie-in campaign for Pokémon: The First Movie that includes miniature toys that came packaged inside plastic containers that looked like Poké Ball. That’s nothing new for Pokémon toy, but for some reason, the shape and size of these specific Poké Balls was such that if a small child placed it over their nose and mouth they could suffocate and die. Burger King issued a voluntary recall, which they supported with ads like this one. Obviously this is not the sort of commercial you want associated with your fast food restaurant. Talk about a nightmare.

Arby’s – Italian Beef

Everyone loves an anthropomorphic food mascot. They’re cute, they’re funny, sometimes they giggle when you poke them in the belly. A good food mascot can mean a huge boost in sales. In 2003, Arby’s tried their, uh, hand at creating their own mascot when they introduced a sentient oven mitt to their commercials. This one armed, no handed mitt was designed to hype the oven-roasted nature of Arby’s beef (you gotta cook it in an oven, and you need a mitt for that, you see). Perhaps the whole oven mitt / oven roasted thing went over people’s heads; perhaps people couldn’t stop thinking about what would happen if you put the living oven mitt on your hand and scorched him with a hot roasting pan. Either way, he vanished from Arby’s advertising within a couple of years.

KFC – Chicken Corsage

Somehow this is not an April Fool’s joke, even though it debuted in April of 2014: A KFC “chicken corsage” you can wear just in time for prom. Apparently this campaign was a “massive hit,” and the florist that partnered with KFC to create this decorative item “sold out” of corsages, so that shows what I know about good advertising. All I know is I’ve been trying to attach this chicken drumstick to my watch for the last 20 minutes and the hot grease keeps burning my arm.

Jack in the Box – Try My Bowls

Look, I’m not going to shame anyone who wants to try Jack in the Box’s bowls. You want to put Jack’s bowls in your mouth? Go for it. You want to eat Jack’s bowls? Don’t let me stop you. Do you like the intense aroma wafting from Jack’s bowls? I’m genuinely happy for you. For me, these sorts of shameless double entendres always come across as kind of sad. So a whole ad built around how the word “bowls” sounds a little like the word “balls” is a miss for me. That’s right, it does not bowl me over.

Burger King – Moldy Whopper

This is another one where the concept makes sense on paper. You want to get across the idea that the Whopper doesn’t contain preservatives, so you show it literally falling apart and growing mold through the use of time-lapse photography. In practice, you’re just staring at a moldy cheeseburger, a sight that’s more likely to make you nauseous than hungry. Again, this is promoting an important element of a fast food item, and on some level, it is well-executed. It’s just so well-executed that it makes me want to go clean out the expired food in the back of my fridge, not jump in my car and head to BK.