In 1982, Steven Spielberg gave us E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a heartfelt, otherworldly story about a lonely boy, his fractured family, and the gentle, beer-drinking alien who showed them how to love again. It had emotional resonance, a John Williams score that could make a grown man weep into his Reese’s Pieces, and, most notably, no scenes set in a McDonald’s. It was, by every measure, a cultural phenomenon.
Hollywood, taking notes in the shadows like a particularly greedy raccoon, was intrigued. Six years later, in a bid to replicate E.T.’s magic, or at least its box office receipts, they birthed Mac and Me. It was not so much a film as it was a phenomenon of misplaced ambition, a time capsule of corporate overreach, and the answer to the question: “What if E.T.was produced by Ronald McDonald and directed by someone who once owned a RadioShack?”
That someone was Stewart Raffill (best known for…Mannequin 2: On the Move, and writing Passenger 57 which tells you everything), a man who, according to lore, was approached in a hallway by a producer with a vague pitch and a pile of money and the request of James Brolin. That producer, R.J. Louis, was known for producing McDonald’s commercials, and, how should I put this?, never quite stopped. His vision? A feature-length advertisement for fast food, soda, and assimilation. You know, for the kids.
If you were alive in the late ‘80s and had eyes, chances are Mac and Me passed through your retinas like a particularly aggressive screensaver. For those unfamiliar: it’s the story of Eric, a wheelchair-using boy with a bowl cut and heroic patience, who befriends a hairless alien whose face resembles a puckered sphincter and whose diet consists entirely of Coke and Skittles. (No notes.)
Unlike E.T., whose tender communication came through glowing fingers and the universal language of friendship, Mac’s talents include hiding inside plush bears, drinking an inhuman amount of Coca-Cola, and moving his oversized mouth like a dehydrated butthole trying to form vowels. He doesn’t talk, but he whistles in a haunting, off-brand bird call that is never explained and often unsettling.
The friendship between Eric and Mac is earnest, though frequently undercut by Mac’s resemblance to a scrotum in a wind tunnel. But here’s where things get truly transcendent, or demented, depending on your tolerance for capitalism in puppet form. The film stops dead, completely, joyously dead, for a full-scale musical number set in an actual McDonald’s. Not a McDonald’s-like location. Not a parody. A full, functioning McDonald’s. Customers dance. Employees break into spontaneous cheer routines. A man in a bear costume (spoiler: it’s Mac) does the Moonwalk. And Ronald McDonald himself, top-hatted, grinning, unblinking, stands at the center like a demon summoned in a suburban blood ritual.
To call the scene surreal is like calling the moon “somewhat round.” It’s a moment of cinematic insanity so bold, so utterly immune to irony, that it achieves something like transcendence. This, apparently, was the big selling point for the financiers: a film that doubled as a two-hour Happy Meal commercial, lightly dusted with the hallmarks of a Spielbergian family film and piped through a straw of corporate messaging.
PURCHASE MAC AND ME IN 4K
It gets stranger. There’s a scene in which Eric, our young protagonist, loses control of his wheelchair and plummets off a cliff into a lake. It’s framed with the gravitas of an action sequence but executed with the gravity of a local furniture ad. In the alternate ending, which only aired in international markets and is included on the new Vinegar Syndrome release, the U.S. government straight-up guns down the child in a wheelchair. Not the alien. The child. A wheelchair-using boy is riddled with bullets, as if this were a gritty Robocop remake. The tone? Casual. The aftermath? Mac resurrects everyone using unknown alien magic. And then, as if to apologize for the trauma, the film ends with the aliens becoming U.S. citizens. Balloons fly. Bubblegum is chewed. Confetti falls. Somewhere, an eagle cries. And the American Dream is achieved.
Needless to say, the film bombed. Critics eviscerated it. Audiences mostly ignored it, and McDonald’s quietly slinked into the shadows like a clown leaving the scene of a crime. But here’s the twist: Mac and Me didn’t die. It lingered.
It became a cult classic. A meme. A rite of passage for film masochists. Most notably, it became a decades-long joke courtesy of Paul Rudd, who famously hijacked every interview on Late Night with Conan O’Brien with a clip of Eric flying off the cliff. It became a ritual, an absurd, brilliant reminder that this film, despite its crimes against cinema, still had one job left: to make people laugh, even if unintentionally.
Which brings us to today, where this oddity has now been given the full red-carpet restoration by Vinegar Syndrome, the Criterion Collection for oddball dreams and forgotten VHS nightmares. This new 4K UHD edition is, frankly, astonishing. The transfer gleams. The colors pop. The Coca-Cola sparkles like vintage Dom Pérignon. Mac’s puckered face now has visible pores. You can count the seams in the alien costume, admire the grease on every McDonald’s table, and weep over how high-definition can turn farce into art.
The release is also stacked with extras: two new audio commentaries, interviews with cast and crew, and a lovingly curated booklet of essays treating this mess like it’s Citizen Kane. The packaging features nostalgic family-portrait-style artwork that’s both hilarious and haunting, like finding your childhood drawings of aliens hanging in the Louvre.
So what is Mac and Me? Is it a failed E.T. knockoff? A cautionary tale about unchecked corporate synergy? A secretly progressive film that centers a disabled protagonist in a heroic role? A Coca-Cola hallucination masquerading as a movie?
The answer is YES.
It’s all of these things. It’s a film that should not exist and yet somehow must. It’s the American Dream in celluloid form; loud, sugary, merchandised, unhinged, and somehow, weirdly, moving. It’s what happens when you mix Spielbergian sentimentality with Ronald McDonald and no adult supervision.
Mac and Me is not art. But it is and artifact. It is not cinema. But it is cultural proof that at one point in time, someone said, “Let’s make E.T. but swap the tears for burgers.” It is both wildly offensive and weirdly progressive. It’s a film where a disabled protagonist saves the day, an alien is naturalized as a U.S. citizen, and everyone learns that the true meaning of life is Coca-Cola.
So raise that can of Coke. Put on your roller skates. Roll into the nearest VHS-scented memory of the ‘80s. And say it with me as we drive off in a pink cadillac: “We’ll be back.” God help us, they meant it.
