RONALD MACDONALD MADE OVER AS A WOMAN

In an attempt by the restaurant monolith to improve its image, the clown used in McD ads for years and years has been replaced in Japan with a girl in a bikini with the trademark yellow and red leggings and high heels.

I always thought the Ronald McDonald character a bit creepy and grotesque, the babyish grown-up that hangs around the playground, bit paedophile in our paranoid day and age, so a girl in a bikini can only improve matters, except that nobody’s going to buy the notion of McD’s as healthy. It’s just a blatant attempt to sell a combination of ephemeral sponge masquerading as food, using a sexy, healthy young woman who probably wouldn’t touch the stuff.

They’re off to a bad start, this is what Den Fujita, the first McDonald’s Japan president said: “The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for 2,000 years. If we eat McDonald’s hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years we will become taller, our skin become white and our hair blond.”

This is a little bit sad, Japanese men are doing their metrosexual hair-cut grooming thing in establishments that employ pretty women hairdressers wearing French maid outfits.