This week’s Drunk Cartoon from Bob Eckstein brings us the Oddburgercouple.:
(#1) The Burger King and Ronald McDonald share a moment of post-coital bliss
Two creepy mascots for competing burger behemoths seize a moment of forbidden love — Romeo coupling with Julio, Tony with Mario — and share an after-cliché.
“Why does something so wrong feel so right” finds its true home in sweaty romance lit, as here:
(#2) The dad: “Why does something so wrong feel so right? And would this mean, I lose my daughter forever?” (Goodreads site)
The mascots:
(#3) Who is that masked man?
The Burger King was retired in 2011, but was, alas, revived for appearances in 2015 and 2017.
(#4) The big astonished eyes, the manic smile, the hair in flames
Clearly they deserve each other. May they be locked in an embrace forever, in endless love. Then they’d be out of our way.
(It’s probably a sign of the times that a coupling between Burger King and McDonald’s is way more shocking than two male celebrities doing it. Some taboos should never be violated, the walls of commerce should ever be unscaled.)
Companies locked in competitions all have logos, but only a few have animate mascots that you could imagine screwing each other. That moment of fantasy is one of the pleasures of Bob’s cartoon.
But even logos can be indissolubly united, as in this Micrapple logo:
(#5) Applesoft would also work, but it’s been taken for another purpose, and anyway, the crap in Micrapple is hard to beat
The amount of business competition that resolves itself into just two big rivals facing off against one another (with other, smaller, competitors serving local or specialized audiences) is astounding. From an assortment of sites on great business rivalries, this list of reasonably recent pairings:
Coke vs. Pepsi, Marvel Comics vs. DC Comics, McDonald’s vs. Burger King, Ford vs. GM, Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Starbucks, UPS vs. Fedex, Nike vs. Reebok, Airbus vs. Boeing, Hasbro vs. Mattel, AT&T vs. MCI, Microsoft vs. Apple, Sony vs. Nintendo, Ferrari vs. Lamborghini, Energizer vs. Duracell, Nickelodeon vs. Disney Channel, Budweiser vs. Miller, MasterCard vs. Visa, Fender vs. Gibson, BMW vs. Mecedes-Benz, R.J. Reynolds vs. Philip Morris, Hertz vs. Avis, CVS vs. Walgreens, Wal-Mart vs. Target, Canon vs. Nikon, Sotheby’s vs. Christie’s, Estée Lauder vs. L’Oréal, Disney Studios vs. Warner Brothers
In some types of businesses, big rivals tend to avoid direct competition by filling somewhat different niches: big supermarkets and clothing stores, in particular, tend to seek out different sorts of customers. When this doesn’t happen, the products or services that companies offer are often hard to distinguish on objective grounds, and the competition can become primarily a matter of marketing strategies — still a competition, but of another sort, in which slogans, music, logos, and mascots play significant roles.
In this world, we can be amused by the coupling of the Burger King with Ronald McDonald, or of Mickey Mouse (representing the Disney Studios) with Bugs Bunny (representing Warner Brothers) — or maybe a three-way of Spider-Man (representing Marvel) with Superman and Batman (representng DC).