Put a Smile On

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I wanted to make this after re-watching the entirety of The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald as well as finally seeing the legendary final video The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch.

When I was a kid, I watched Scared Silly, The Legend of Grimace Island, The Visitors from Outer Space, and Birthday World. I never got to see Have Time, Will Travel or the aforementioned The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch until more recently.

I still like these videos not only because of the nostalgia, but because a lot of my favorite voice actors were involved. For example, Hamburglar was voiced by Charlie Adler, who I know for being the original voice for Buster Bunny in Tiny Toon Adventures as well as voicing Mr. Bighead on Rocko's Modern Life and Cow, Chicken, and the Red Guy from Cow and Chicken. In addition, Birdie the Early Bird was played by the late Christine Cavanaugh (whose roles included Chuckie Finster from Rugrats and Gosalyn Mallard from Darkwing Duck), Franklin's dad Dr. Quizzical was voiced by Maurice LaMarche (best known for playing Brain of Pinky and the Brain), and Corey Burton (aka Ludwig von Drake, V.V. Argost, and DCAU Brainiac) voices a bug and an angry mob member in Have Time, Will Travel.

Before I explain why I made this picture, I feel like taking a trip down memory lane and describing everything about these videos. The entirety of The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald is now available on YouTube, and that includes The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch as of November 2015.

For those of you too young to remember, McDonald's used to have a series of VHS tapes where the McDonald's mascots went on animated adventures that were book-ended by live-action segments. Most of the videos were only available at McDonald's when ordered with a Kid's Meal or an ice cream (depending on the restaurant), while the last video The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch was only available by ordering from the website of Klasky-Csupo, the animation company that made the Wacky Adventures videos. In addition, McDonaldland Loch was only available in limited supply, so the video quickly became rare and until recent events was impossible to find online.

Scared Silly-

The first video had Ronald, his dog Sundae, Birdie, Hamburglar, Grimace, the McNuggets, the Fry Kids (who make no further appearances after this video), and an African-American girl named Tika, who is for some reason already friends with the group, go on a camping trip and end up inside a haunted house because of rain.

After solving several riddles given to them by a floating head (voiced by Patrick Pinney, who some of you may know as the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants' Painty the Pirate), it turns out that the house isn't really haunted, but was actually a bunch of illusions controlled by a kid named Franklin, who ends up in big trouble with his father Dr. Quizzical, but still makes friends with the McDonald gang.

The Legend of Grimace Island-

This adventure had Grimace be given a letter inviting him to Grimace Island, only to later find out that he was given the letter by a pirate named One-Eyed Sally to lead her to the treasure.

It really was Grimace's moment to shine, since his friends told him that they still liked him even if he was a coward and made no secret of their confidence that he can fend off One-Eyed Sally and her incompetent lackey Blather.

The Visitors from Outer Space-

Hamburglar gets in trouble for lying to his friends about aliens when some real ones come over and invite him to join them on their vacation. Unfortunately the time the vacation will last is far longer than any human can live.

Fortunately, Ronald is able to convince everyone to forgive Hamburglar for his prank and come to his rescue.

Birthday World-

This video in particular stands out for having a villain with a plan that actually sounds menacing. Professor Pinchworm's plan was to use a ray to turn everyone into infants, and with everyone but him turned into a helpless baby, that would have meant all humanity going extinct because nobody could take care of themselves. And don't get me started on the possibility that Pinchworm got eaten by his robot dog after he turned into a toddler.

My memory's fuzzy, but I may have actually watched this video on my birthday once.

Have Time, Will Travel-

As I said before, there was a time where I never saw this video before, but thanks to YouTube, I was able to catch up with what I missed out on.

This time, Ronald and the gang are helping Franklin clean up his house, when they suddenly end up in Dr. Quizzical's time machine and accidentally travel through time.

After traveling through the stone age, medieval times, the Wild West, and the 70's (featuring an appearance of Mayor McCheese voiced by Bob Joles), the gang return to present day and get back to cleaning, having learned that cutting corners is often not worth the trouble.

My favorite part was when the McDonald gang bonded with their prehistoric ancestors.

The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch-

Yesterday, I watched The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch. By now, some of you may be asking if the chance to finally see the video is worth it or if the ending is a disappointment. Well, technically both of those assumptions are correct. Seeing that this video is the last of the series, I feel obligated to warn you that there are spoilers in the rest of this video description.

The story of the series' last adventure is that Ronald and his friends visit  Scottie, a terrier and the Scottish cousin of Sundae, and are also intent on finding out if the legendary Monster of McDonaldland Loch is real.

Birdie finds out that the monster is indeed real, but is forced to keep his existence secret because Simon (that's the monster's name, in case you haven't figured it out) is worried that the people who fear him will harm him if they know he exists. Ronald also saw the whole thing, but he chose to keep it a secret himself until the time was right.

Like "The Legend of Grimace Island" and "Birthday World" before it, "McDonaldLand Loch" actually had an antagonist. This time, the villain was an inventor named Stiles. With his bumbling assistant Pip, Stiles planned to use a robotic monster he created to trick the people of McDonaldland Loch and use the reward money for the monster's capture to continue his villainy with style.

Fortunately, Stiles' evil plan is foiled by the McNuggets' meddling, and the robot monster is eventually destroyed by the real monster, who is happy to see that the people are not afraid of him and like him, just as Birdie promised him.

As I said earlier, the last video of The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald has its ups and downs. It's not a bad story, though it's kind of sad knowing this video was Christine Cavanaugh's final role, seeing that it was released two years after she retired from voice acting and it has been nearly a year since she passed away. I will miss her very much, though you'd probably know that already if you say my tribute picture where her grave was visited by several characters she played, one of them being Birdie, albeit drawn how she normally appears in the McDonald's commercials.

The main downside is that even though this is the last video, it still has the Announcer voiced by Jim Cummings telling us to keep a lookout for Ronald's next adventure. What's worse is that unlike the previous previews for the next video, the one found at the end of "The Monster O'McDonaldland Loch" doesn't give us a title or a premise for the next video and simply leaves the clown's next adventure to speculation and conjecture. Granted, it's probable that plans for further Wacky Adventures were canned at the time, which also might be why this video was only available in short supply from Klasky-Csupo's website, but that doesn't make the promise of another Wacky Adventures video any more disappointing.

I decided to celebrate my catching up by drawing the entire McDonaldland gang and their friends waving goodbye to the viewer. If I had more room, as well as a willingness to let logic and such be ignored for the moment, I probably would have thrown in the stone age versions of Ronald, Sundae, Grimace, Hamburglar, Birdie, and Franklin as well.

I am aware that McDonald's has gotten a lot of flack over the years, but I still love these animated adventures, and truth be told, I don't eat at McDonald's often anyway.

P.S.: It's the McDonald's characters that are saying goodbye, not me! I'm far from through with making pictures on this website. Heck, I might even draw more of the McDonald gang in the near future.

All McDonald's characters (c) McDonald's