A few years ago [April 29, 1994] you wrote about the murky origins of the characters in McDonald’s advertising–Mayor McCheese, Hamburglar, Grimace, and so on. Mostly you regurgitated a lot of puffery from the McDonald’s PR department and missed the real story. Check out the uncanny resemblance of the McDonaldland denizens to the characters in the old H.R. Pufnstuf children’s TV show. Can you say “copyright infringement”?
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The Krofft brothers are legendary (well, pretty well-known) TV producers. They had their biggest successes in kidvid in the late 60s and early 70s, with shows like The Bugaloos, Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and most prominently H.R. Pufnstuf, which aired between 1969 and 1974. H.R. Pufnstuf featured brightly colored sets with hyperkinetic actors (many of them dwarfs) in wild costumes playing such characters as Wilhelmina Witchiepoo, Cling and Clang, and of course H.R. Pufnstuf, a friendly dragon who was mayor of Living Island, where plants, animals, and objects could talk and wacky adventures took place.
By 1970 H.R. Pufnstuf was the top-rated Saturday morning TV show, and the Kroffts began getting calls from ad agencies hoping to get in on the action. One series of calls came from Needham Harper & Steers, which was wooing McDonald’s. Needham figured a campaign featuring the popular H.R. Pufnstuf characters might be just the thing to land the business. In a letter dated August 31, 1970, Needham told the Kroffts that it was going ahead with a McDonaldland campaign based on the Kroffts’ work and that they could expect a fee for creative services. But a short time later Needham told the Kroffts the campaign had been canceled.
