McDonald's Playland: The Golden Age Of The Golden Arches: Or, How To Not Give A Fuck About Your Kids

They say the times, they are a-changing.

I think.

It’s pretty much impossible to decipher anything Bob Dylan says without the skilled linguists behind the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or technology that hasn’t been invented yet. Seriously. Making sense of the Rosetta Stone from its original Egyptian hieroglyphs takes less laborious effort than trying to parse the lyrics of Dylan’s greatest hits. I think he does that shit on purpose, and I think he really speaks with the glorious, clear cadence of Morgan Freeman when no one’s listening.

That said, I recently realized the claim is true. Times have indeed changed—at least in one small instance.

I recently found myself inside a McDonald’s, staring past the ridiculous broccoli haircuts that seemed to exclusively populate the staff—various male perms that looked like they’d been administered at a PetSmart after picking up a corresponding bag of kibble—before looking toward the soulless grey modern décor while I awaited my order of fruit explosion muffins. Something was missing. Something had changed. Then it hit me: the Playland (or PlayPlace, as it was eventually called) no longer existed.

Sometime in the last two decades, McDonald’s seemingly decided to eradicate any trace of their existence, pretending they were never there—like Craig T. Nelson building a house on a ghost-field graveyard in Poltergeist and passing it off as a regular family home. “YOU MOVED THE TOMBSTONES, BUT YOU DIDN’T MOVE THE BODIES!”

I always wondered what happened after that. What’s the resale value on a house that was literally swallowed by a ghost portal? Is there any financial compensation? Imagine going to your insurance company as Craig T. Nelson’s character and explaining the predicament: “What kind of coverage do I have on a tree trying to eat my son, a television transporting my young daughter into a closet-accessed nether-realm, and some sort of hell vortex sucking my entire house into a dervish of forever nothingness?” Imagine how much that poor motherfucker’s premium went up afterward. Even the lack of a future cable bill wouldn’t offset that bullshit.

I digress.

The Playlands were gone. McDonald’s was acting like they had never been here at all. The sudden departure hit me hard—not just because I longed for my youth (though there was that), but because my heart truly went out to the parents. Those forced to now actually consume full meals with their children, fully present the entire time, without a single second of respite. Something unheard of during my youth.

What a fucking nightmare.

If I were raised today and my parents couldn’t temporarily dispose of me occasionally for the sake of their own psyches, they would have no doubt, not-so-subtly, wrapped my school lunch in a road map and encouraged me to “find myself,” preferably somewhere far, far away.

Even the ball pit was gone. THE BALL PIT. By the time I was a grown man, that was all that remained of what I remembered—at least in the town I live in. You remember the ball pit, right? A toxic, cube-shaped, basketball-net-lined prison filled with hollow, possibly diseased plastic spheres of varying colors. Children of varying fatness would haplessly and chaotically plunge their rotund frames into it repeatedly until the whole thing looked like a bowl of Trix filled with flailing future diabetics.

I distinctly remember, in the late ’90s, allowing my younger sister to play in this exact chasm of human suffering—if only for a mental-wellness break for myself. One day, as she hopelessly swam among the balls with other children, there was a sudden mass panic when one of them supposedly shit in the pit. All the other children came flying out simultaneously in absolute terror, clinging to the net walls, desperate to escape this lone, obscured turd—like the people fleeing the water in Jaws after the first shark attack, or those lower-deck working-class schmoes who failed to get onto Billy Zane’s lifeboat in Titanic after he kidnapped an Irish orphan. You would have thought there was a house fire. I’ve never seen so many portly children move that quickly in my life.

"But, as you can see, it's a beautiful day, the Playland is open, and people are having a wonderful time!"

It got me thinking that this might have been a great way to instill some involuntary physical education upon a massive, ever-growing generation of pudgy hell-spawn. A silver lining among the sudden brown one. Every day, a pimply-faced fry cook could be encouraged, before the restaurant opened, to sneak into the ball pit, pinch a loaf into the balls, and then watch later as the children ultimately discovered the discarded bounty, panicked, and desperately scrambled and climbed to escape what was, for all intents and purposes, a human grenade that no one would dare throw themselves upon to spare the others.

In my estimation, this sudden forced exertion alone would create a massive calorie-burning inferno that would ultimately erase the burger gains. It was genius. Weight loss through sheer unadulterated terror. What was the worst that could happen? Some incurable bacteria-caused disease? A few unfortunate trampled children? It seemed a pretty fair ratio of gain over loss to me—and a pretty good lesson in the cruelty of nature and the realities of natural selection.

I was alone on that one, though. And I was told (frequently) that it was probably a “good thing” I’m not a parent. (At least not to any that I will admit to. ;) )

In any event, there was still a time when even this shit-filled ball pit seemed like the safest place on earth by comparison. A time before. A time when the men were separated from the boys (and not literally, like in the Catholic Church). A time when colors were much brighter and terrifyingly intense. A time when parents cared far less—or not at all, it would seem—and children were encouraged to disappear entirely. There was a reason a newscaster every night at 11 p.m. would ask if you “knew where your children were.” 1980s parents needed to be reminded that their offspring even existed, and that it might be a good idea to keep tabs on their locations occasionally, instead of simply hoping they eventually returned under their own power, limbs mostly intact, like some deflated and defeated knight returning from the Crusades years later.

But back to my main point…

Allow me to paint a picture, if you will:

In the sacred, smoke-hazed temple of a 1980s McDonald’s, while your parents sat utterly unbothered beneath a Sistine Chapel ceiling mural of Ronald McDonald delicately touching fingertips with a sentient Mayor McCheese, we—the tiny, under-helmeted, and fully disposable—were cheerfully hurled into an outdoor Hunger Games forged from scalding steel and pure parental indifference.

And that was if you were lucky.

I was from Canada, so ours wasn’t even outside sometimes. It was often contained entirely indoors, like some separate partition where we tried not to die, like the fledgling unitard-wearing contestants from The Running Man. There was no alternative in those days. Lest we all die outside in the harshest of winter terrain, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, meeting his deranged end in the sentient hedge maze. (Unlike Scatman Crothers, my own mother had no interest in manning a snow-cat to plow us to safety, regardless of the evil ghost magic contained within the walls of a supernatural hotel—or, in this case, a terrible fast-food restaurant.)

I’m not going to say my generation was tougher. But today’s children are seemingly raised inside climate-controlled bubbles of foam, netting, and anxiety. Every surface is soft. Every edge is rounded. Every adult hovers like a nervous helicopter pilot ready to abort the mission at the first scraped knee. A slightly uneven rubber tile can trigger a full parental crisis and corresponding tidal wave, as a gaggle of women in cropped capri pants stampede toward the first manager they can sink their claws into, desperately trying not to get blood on their Kate Plus 8 hairdos as they did so.

We, the feral survivors of the 1980s and our latchkey upbringings in most cases, received no such luxury. We were simply turned loose into the Playland—an asphalt-ringed killing field of galvanized pipes, jail-bar climbers, and metal slides that seemed less like a playground and more like some lethal escape room as the puppet from Saw likely rode its tricycle in menacing circles while you kept the same pace on a spring-mounted hamburger that possessed sullen, frozen, human-like features, like some ungodly victim from House of Wax. It was a scene, man.

Did I mention that it was less “playground” and more Lord of the Flies (Fries?), or a post-nuclear Mad Max Thunderdome world where, instead of gasoline becoming the only desired currency in a desert-laden hellscape, it was the shitty, easily breakable toys found inside your half-consumed Happy Meal? It’s hard to truly describe, and even harder to do justice to. But I will try anyway.

Inside, the dining room itself pulsed with a full-blown Alice-in-Wonderland acid trip. It was like something Pennywise would create to lure children into the sewer before devouring them in its true Deadlights form and then taking a 27-year power nap.

More sentient hamburgers grinned from every surface—the stools you were expected to sit on while consuming your meals were made of their disturbing faces. Furry fry Goblins and a purple Grimace monument hovered above you like smiling demons. The air was thick with the unholy smoke of Camel Lights and Virginia Slims. Ashtrays overflowed (impending lung cancer was readily approved by McDonald’s in those days). Nobody flinched. Nobody checked on the children. Parents just sat there, vacant, stoic as stone at the Formica tables, exhaling long, defeated, contemplative plumes while their heirs performed lethal high-wire acts on equipment that now exists only to train members of the elite Navy SEALs and weed out the weak.

The equipment was cumbersome, steel, and often the temperature of a sun about to supernova.

The Officer Big Mac Climber wasn’t a toy. It was a vertical steel jail. You had to first enter its tubular, ladder-lined neck before reaching its claustrophobic oral cavity, suspended just high enough to guarantee a dramatic plunge onto unforgiving concrete if you somehow managed to snake your way through the steel bars of his teeth.

One time, I recall vividly, a child got stuck inside the vaunted sheriff’s nightmarish burger-shaped head, necessitating the local fire department cutting the bars to free him—smashing out the metal chompers of the Cheshire-grinning officer to liberate this trapped, wailing globule from the results of his own poor decisions. 

It just wasn’t the same after that. The sheriff, bars missing, now looked like he’d gotten into a stash of crystal meth found in the drug locker at McDonald’s police headquarters and become so addicted that his teeth had simply rotted out of his meat-laden head. What an unceremonious end to what was likely a celebrated police career after years of serving the McDonald’s community as a trusted officer of the peace. I can almost imagine him from there, falling into a life of crime, being pulled into the varying heists of the Hamburglar, before becoming the feared but mysterious distributor of Methamphetamine in McDonaldland, under the pseudonym “Heisenburger”, eventually hooking Birdie on the same life shortening crank, before ultimately, turning her out for tricks as a soulless prostitute. How the mighty had fallen. Godspeed, Sheriff Big Mac. We hardly knew you.

Luckily, the other death traps remained fully intact—even if the children contained within them were not, by the time their parents begrudgingly retrieved them.

The metal slide—I remember it well. It had some sort of pirate motif. But, it wasn’t a ride. It was a solar-powered branding iron that could deliver second-degree burns before you even reached the bottom, searing the supple skin of my sensitive seven year-old ass cheeks with the intensity of liquid hot magma—or like John Dutton himself was personally branding me with a Yellowstone logo, or, in this case, the Golden Arches, forever tethering me to his ranch of secrets.

The aforementioned shin-crushing, hamburger-shaped spring-riders bounced with the enthusiasm of mechanical bulls, hurling children off at breakneck speed.

If you looked up into the sky, you could almost see vultures circling, licking their nonexistent lips at the prospect of dive-bombing and snatching away a frail child as they attempted to climb out from—or were propelled from—the disturbing Grimace endoskeleton.

What fucking nightmare fuel that thing was: a ten-foot-tall, hollowed-out visage of the popular milkshake-loving endomorph. Only with his entire insides removed, his organs disposed of, and his metal ribs exposed so children could climb inside his cavernous innards and shake the giant death cage until they either shattered their teeth on the reverberating bars or went flying through the doorway-sized opening once the velocity reached fever pitch.

And through it all, Mom or Dad remained perfectly serene inside the hallucinogenic burger cathedral, tapping ash into tray, wondering what life would be like if only they had actually used contraception. Luckily for them, in some cases, the Playland balanced that checkbook and answered their yearning—and they went home that day with one less child than they entered with. The lunch may have cost them some, but the reward of one less mouth to feed in perpetuity saved them far more money in return.

God, I miss it.

I’m Sean