Grimace the Lucky Charm – The Weird Side of the Internet

Grimace the Lucky Charm – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I’m a Mets fan. Maybe a lapsed Mets fan. It brings me a fazzy to know they’re doing well, but I don’t really have the interest to sit and watch the three-hour games needed to be a true fan. Admittedly, I don’t even check the box scores. I’m at best a “Christmas and Easter” Mets fan.

This may change, all thanks to the new Mets icon and viral mascot, Grimace.

You heard me right. Grimace, the amorphous purple blob, the brain-eating amoeba turned flesh in the Frankenstein’s lab that is McDonald’s Marketing division. Grimace has become not only the Mets’s new unofficial mascot, but also their lucky charm, and progenitor of a purple-painted seat in the second deck of right field.

Grimace, in true Grimace fashion, which is to say mid-century clown-like, threw out the opening pitch iin the June 12^th game, and the Mets crushed it, going on to earn a ten-game winning streak. Since then, they’ve been 53-31, which, for non-baseball fans, is a pretty mean hot streak.

And so Grimace became celebrated. And so Grimace became viral. And of course capitalizing on this attention, the Mets painted a seat in the outfield purple and called it the “grimace seat,” which you can reserve, for market rate, of course.

What in the hell is Grimace though? According to McDonald’s, Grimace is supposed to be, get this, “the embodiment of a milkshake.” This would make Grimace a ghost, since every shake machine in the continental Unites States is broken, and the ones in Alaska and Hawaii break down every lunch-time, only to magically come online when nobody’s in the store or drive-through.

This is the biggest launch of McDonald’s into American culture since Wesley Willis’s “Rock and Roll McDonald’s.” McDonald’s has yet to reward his monumental song with a pitchline or a special sandwich.

Rest in Power, Mr. Willis.

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