I finally got some answers on some questions that have been bothering me for some time…
@robbercat Same universe…McDonaldland is part of McWorld. ^LRO
— McDonald's (@McDonaldsCorp) August 22, 2011
Well, since the McDonald’s Twitter Crew are the authorities on matters pertaining to McDonald’s, and are therefore the arbitrators of McDonald’s canon, we must defer to their judgments. But frankly I think that’s a lot of McBingsoo. Are you telling me that these…
… take place on the same planet as these…?
I don’t think so! McDonaldland is a cartoony realm whereas McWorld is essentially our reality with some major changes (namely, kids being able to control their world Twilight Zone-style). It just doesn’t make any logistical sense for them to share the same universe.
I think it’s better to assume there’s a different universe for each McDonald’s “reality.” For the sake of preserving an orderly canon, McDonald’s should take a page from DC Comics’s playbook and start classifying these universes. Let’s start by declaring the original McDonaldland commercials from the 1970s (where Grimace is a villian) comprises McWorld-One. Then, the modern McDonaldland ads would be McWorld-Two, the McWorld ads from the 1990s are McWorld-Prime, the video game is McWorld-3, the cartoons are McWorld-4, Mac Tonight would be McWorld-5, and the current McWorld would be McWorld-6. In addition, all the “realistic” commercials targeted to adults would have its own universe; at this point, I’m not sure whether to assign a different universe to each campaign (i.e. the “You deserve a break today” campaign and the current “I’m lovin’ it” campaign), so I’m just lumping them together until further notice.
See, doesn’t that make things a whole lot easier?