Some more details have risen to the surface regarding the characters of McDonaldland. Dispositive sent me a good article detailing the case of HR Pufnstuf suing McDonald’s ad agency for copyright infringement.

When the case went to trial in 1973, their lawyers showed the jury several H.R. Pufnstuf episodes and McDonaldland commercials and pointed out the obvious similarities. McDonald’s and Needham responded that the show and the commercials weren’t exactly the same. For example, Mayor McCheese and Pufnstuf were each the mayor of a fanciful land, but McCheese was a cheeseburger in pink formal wear while Pufnstuf was a dragon. Big difference!

The jury, and later the appeals court, didn’t buy it. “We do not believe that the ordinary reasonable person, let alone a child, viewing these works will even notice that Pufnstuf is wearing a cummerbund while Mayor McCheese is wearing a diplomat’s sash,” the appeals court wrote.

And another mildly informative link from that site, McDonald’s commercials explained!

Also from Dispositive, A Tribute to Mayor McCheese, who was one of the characters involved in the lawsuit. Mike also uncovered that Grimace had a short-lived green Irish Uncle, named Uncle O’Grimacey.

Mike also was pointing out how weirdly similar the 4 armed grimace looks to certain multiple-armed Hindu gods & goddesses. That reminds me of an article I read by Alan Moore where he’s talking about tripping out on mushrooms, and seeing higher-dimensional entities, and that maybe the gods who are depicted with many arms actually exist in a different overlapping sort of space-time dimension, which causes their visual images to refract like a kaleidoscope to our 3-dimensional eyes.

More on this story as it unfolds… and now, here’s the weather.

UPDATE!