With a vibrant purple hue, a meme-able mascot and limited window of availability, McDonald’s had all the ingredients to turn its Grimace milkshake into a viral sensation. What the company likely did not intend was for the shake’s success to come from TikTok users playing dead. They often dump the shake over their convulsing bodies, apparently signaling that Grimace, that bumbling bestie of Ronald McDonald, killed them.
Grimace has a history of villainy Grimace wasn’t always a happy-go-lucky amorphous creature. When he was first introduced in the 1970s, commercials referred to him as the “evil Grimace,” a four-armed purple blob who used his many limbs to abscond with cups of milkshakes, according to Food & Wine. Even in those commercials, though, the bumbling thief never attempted to poison or murder anyone who got in his way.