Why So Many People Have Decided a Purple McDonald’s Monster Is Killing Them With a Milkshake (2024)

I don’t remember celebrating Grimace’s first 51 birthdays. But ever since the furry purple McDonald’s spokesblob turned 52 earlier this month—and the fast-food chain came out with a limited-edition meal to mark the occasion—it feels as if Grimace-mania has descended across the nation. He’s proved surprisingly sticky as a trending topic: In recent weeks, social media users have gone from claiming the character as a queer icon to debating the controversial flavor of the milkshake named in his honor to, just in the past few days, transforming him into a horror villain via a viral TikTok trend. What’s going on here? And what does Grimace’s promotion from one of the lesser-known members of a mostly retired clown’s entourage to a full-fledged main character mean for society?

According to McDonald’s lore, Grimace was born in 1971, when he made his first appearance in a television ad. Back then, he was known as Evil Grimace, and he liked to steal milkshakes the way the Hamburglar burgled burgers. (Why Grimace and not Milkslinker or Shakebezzler? I guess we’ll never know.) He’s since reformed his ways, but it’s safe to say he retains some of that original chaotic allure. As for what he scientifically is, McDonald’s keeps that a little vague, though there was some inconclusive discussion a few years ago about whether he’s actually a taste bud. But despite appearing in many commercials in his first three decades, Grimace has hardly been in the public eye as of late. So if it feels as if his birthday is coming out of nowhere, that’s because it is.

McDonald’s announced that it was debuting Grimace’s birthday meal a few days before Grimace’s actual birthday, which was June 12 (to the extent that a fictional monster can have an actual birthday). The meal’s still available as of this writing, with no specific end date in sight—“while supplies last” seems to be the word. The centerpiece of it is a purple milkshake, but you have to buy the full meal—which also includes fries and either a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets—in order to get it. This feels important to note because, well, it’s a bit of a shakedown! And that makes the collective embrace of the Grimace birthday meal all the more stark—sure, maybe most of the people going to McDonald’s would be getting food anyway, but it feels weird to force people to order a certain thing in order to get another thing. What if you wanted that Grimace shake with a chicken sandwich, you know? Worse, his meal consists of a Big Mac and fries, without any special Grimace-y flair, but people are just happily accepting it. [Update, June 30, 2023: Grimace shake loyalists have informed us that you can get the shake without the meal at some, but not all, McDonald’s.]

Part, but only part, of the reason everyone’s going along with it is that they want to try the shake. I know why I wanted to try it, juvenile as these reasons may be: because purple is my favorite color and I was under the mistaken impression that it was birthday cake–flavored, which I am on the record as being obsessed with. I can’t say I’m totally clear on why others wanted to try it, though: Its taste has been a shockingly small part of this whole phenomenon. The shake is fine—it’s slightly berry-flavored, by the way—but no one really seems to be buying it because they anticipate that it tastes good. From what I can tell, they’re buying it for the novelty. They’re buying it because it’s Grimace’s birthday shake, and that’s funny.

It was a pretty strange gambit for McDonald’s to pretend that it’s this long-established fact that Grimace is a national treasure and his birthday is an annual jubilee that we celebrate by giving a very rich company our hard-earned dollars in exchange for a sugary purple beverage. But McDonald’s must have known something I didn’t, because it really worked—Grimace proved to be the perfect meme fodder. The internet’s response to this cash grab has effectively been to start ironically stanning Grimace—or to note his potentially sinister nature … while still handing over money for his birthday meal at the same time. One Twitter user called Grimace a “bourgeois parasite f*ck,” but the thing is, from McDonald’s perspective, joking that Grimace will be murdered when the revolution comes is still kind of a win for brand awareness. The more that people are talking about Grimace, the more they’re getting subconsciously drawn to those milkshakes. It’s all soaked in irony, but dollars spent ironically are worth just as much as regular dollars. The logic here might be something like McDonald’s is as evil as any corporation, but we do need to eat, so what’s the harm in giving it a few bucks to engage in some childish fun? And it certainly has been fun. A writer at America magazine went so far as to declare that the shake and the attendant craze restored his faith in humanity: “The Grimace Shake phenomenon has affirmed my hope that most humans fundamentally seek connection, not division,” he wrote.

If I had to take a stab at why Grimace and his birthday took off so spectacularly, one big thing I’d point to is the meteoric rise of Gritty, the Philadelphia sports mascot. Much like Gritty, Grimace is a furry monster of deliberately indeterminate species, mischievous but ultimately kindhearted, and their names even sound alike. Someone at McDonald’s saw the viral success of Gritty and realized they could use the same playbook for Grimace. Grimace’s blobby figure is also strangely on trend—the latest Pixar movie, Elemental, is very blob-forward too. I even think the queer-icon talking point isn’t a coincidence: June is Pride month, and many things about Grimace, from his color to his natural undefinability, are historically (and Teletubbically) associated with the queer community, all of which McDonald’s marketers would be keenly aware of.

Though McDonald’s has portrayed Grimace mostly as a goofball, or a goof-gumdrop, the latest development in the Grimace discourse is a TikTok trend wherein young people pretend that trying the milkshake kills them or turns them into monsters of some kind: A girl takes a sip and, a second later, purple liquid starts dripping from her nose; before you know it, she’s crawling across the ceiling. A boy takes a sip; cut to him levitating above a skyscraper. Some are calling it the “Grimace shake incident,” to make the trend sound more dramatic. As Mashable noted, it’s a “send-up of the corporate idiocy that is celebrating a fictional monster’s birthday with a purple milkshake,” but importantly, in order to participate in this sendup, most of these kids are presumably buying the shake (and the whole meal, sigh). It may seem a little dark and like something some brands might be wary about, but McDonald’s now has a bona fide Gen Z social media phenomenon on its hands. Something tells me Grimace’s 53^rd birthday is going to be even more lit.

Update, June 30, 2023: This article has been updated to clarify that the Grimace milkshake can be purchased on its own, without the accompanying meal, at some McDonald’s locations.