 Good morning, John. You and I grew up going to Racks. It was for the days when we'd been good, when Wendy's wasn't good enough, when it was time to split a cookie so soft and gooey that you could push it back together and it would stay that way. Racks was a roast beef place, like Arby's, except that it was constantly undergoing identity crises and it had no idea what it wanted to be. Mostly, in their advertising, they just wanted to make the case that they somehow weren't like the other major fast food chains. Here's one of the most successful attempts to do that, implying people are oppressed because they can only get one kind of chicken sandwich. At Racks, you can get an Eenie, Meenie and a Miney. Eenie, Meenie and Miney, where's Moe? There ain't no Moe. Oh, it tried so hard to make that work. Many of their ads tried excluding demographics to make it more appealing to their core audience, except that they always didn't like push back against it. Here's a good example. Racks, it's good for adults and also kids, but only kids who act like they're adults. There are lots of bad Racks ads. There's one where a phone eats a sandwich which features yoga-jones from Orange is the New Black. This one with the giant chicken foot, and then there's one where a woman wants a pita pocket with a meatball in it and she explodes. Ads were bad in the 80s and 90s, and these are all your normal bad ad fare. But as Racks continued to lose focus and market share with an all-you-can-eat pasta bar upgraded interiors, getting into pizza for some reason, they went all in on the worst idea ever. Mr. Delicious. Hello, I'm Mr. Delicious, the new spokesman for Racks Restaurants. My job? To encourage you to enjoy tasty, affordable meals in a more mature dining environment. He's like a low-energy Rodney Dangerfield. He is a sad man. On that vacation, he took to Bora Bora with those two young friends. Well, that left Mr. Delicious feeling empty and unfulfilled. No, you need to explain. Mr. Delicious just had some rather delicate surgery. If there's no change, he doesn't have to squirm so much to put it back in his pocket. Did we just hear about Mr. Delicious's vasectomy? Because his analyst charges a lot to keep Mr. D's hostility all locked up. Wait, what? And Mr. Delicious always carries his briefcase. Mr. D, what's in the briefcase? And all of this is paired with the worst or possibly best tagline in all of fast food history. Racks, you can eat here. I think there's an element of parody here. Like, you can eat here is definitely a parody of a tagline. Mr. Delicious is a parody of what a spokesperson is. He's not fun. He's not happy. He's not engaging. But they're also trying to do a thing. They're trying to identify with a core audience, but who is that audience? It's fast food for grownups. Misogynist, unfunny, alcoholic, sad grownups who gamble too much and go to psychotherapy? Now the wonderful thing here is we have a lot of insight into Mr. Delicious because the ad agency and the management of Racks worked together to create a mini documentary about how successful Mr. Delicious was. Mr. Delicious speaks honestly to the kinds of problems and issues that we all face. I mean, does he? I don't feel like he does. Who is the target market for this 15 minute mini doc? One assumes it was the Racks franchisees who were, I'm sure, livid that the company was being mismanaged so dramatically. Yeah, I go to the candor in the commercials, but now that Mr. D's on, I'll just hold it. Mr. Delicious reminds me of my dad. It's somewhat telling that the 15 minute long pro Mr. Delicious propaganda documentary they put together included this line. Mr. Delicious is obnoxious. Oh my God, Racks filed for bankruptcy less than a year after the launch of Mr. Delicious, making the confidence of this statement. It's absolutely going to go down as one of the classic characters in advertising history. Seemed just a little off the mark. Now Racks had a ton of problems and Mr. Delicious didn't cause all of them. It was a cutthroat time in the fast food industry, but whatever gamble these people decided they had to make, it went even worse than Mr. D's trip to Reno. John, I'll see you tomorrow.