Losing Porky's is bad enough, but we've lost another piece of restaurant history: A family-friendly fast-food joint with a statue based on a cabaret song about an assassin recently shut its doors. You're thinking, that doesn't really narrow it down. It was a McDonald's in Edina's Centennial Lakes development, one of the nation's few remaining "Mac Tonight" outlets.
If you've completely repressed the memory, Mac was a hideous grinning creature with a crescent moon for a head. He wore sunglasses. At night. Why? Because it was the '80s. The "Mac Tonight" ad campaign was intended to boost late-night meat-patty consumption, and used the song "Mac the Knife" from "The Threepenny Opera" as the musical inspiration. If you've ever read the lyrics, you know it's about a guy who kills people for a living. "Scarlet billows" is not a reference to ketchup on your shirt.
Even better -- some "Mac Tonight" outlets had a life-size Mac at a player piano. Over the years the Centennial Lakes Mac fell into disrepair, plinking away with an odd tentative style that made him sound melancholic and indifferent, drunken, out of tune. It was a strange but potent relic of the '80s, just as Porky's was a survivor of the postwar era. I walked past it the other day; closed. Mac was gone. Wow, two venerable burger traditions closing, one celebrated, the other ignored. Juxtapositions like this are a columnist's dream! Surely some sweeping statement about our times can be deduced from this! Perhaps. But I'd rather reprint a story I got off our in-house FutureWire, which shows us what we'll be printing in years to come. From the 2139 A.D. Stribune googlenet site:
END OF AN ERA
METRO FANS SAY GOODBYE TO McDONALZ
For the last 60 years it was a familiar sight along the road old-timers called "494" -- an enormous holographic red-haired clown face 20 stories tall, its head turning as you passed, one eye winking on and off. McDonalz Circular Protein-Delivery Wafers had stood on this spot, with a few name changes, for more than 150 years, and folks thought it would always be there.
"I thought my kids would come here," said Amanda Haggenkis, "but of course that was before we found out the Shamrock Shakes made you sterile. Still, if I'd had some kids grown for me, I would have taken them here for one of those 'Positive Emotional-State Meals' I got as a kid. Yummers! A bovine grub-divot on a seeded bun, a container of liquefied sugar, elongated starch sticks, and a game chip you'd put in your personal entertainment slot. Of course back then kids didn't have the slots in their head, so you'd have to beg your parents to use their slot and tell you which immersive reality you'd got. I still remember when my Dad turned into a Disney Princess right there in the restaurant and ran around getting the place ready for the Ball."
In an age where advertisements are constantly projected against low-level, artificially generated clouds, a holographic clown that did little but wink seems a relic of a simpler era. Indeed, the restaurant traces its origins back to the middle 20th century, when the restaurant was a national chain selling "ham-burgers" for 21 cents, or $10,396 in New Dollars. As venerable as the brand was, however, it could not compete with matter-rearrangement technology that could replicate any food, an innovation that has destroyed the restaurant industry over the last 10 years, sparing only the chains that have admitted that their products are not, technically speaking, food at all.
