Mac Tonight

Mac Tonight is a character used in a marketing campaign for McDonald's restaurants from the late 1980s to the 2000s. The character was known for his giant crescent moon head, sunglasses, piano playing, and crooner parody of "Mack the Knife", which was made famous in the United States by Bobby Darin. The original campaign's Mac was performed by actor Doug Jones and voiced by Brock Walsh. The campaign was conceived in 1986 as a local promotion to increase dinner sales for Southern California licensees, and its popularity prompted a nationwide campaign in 1987. In 1989, Bobby Darin's son, Dodd Mitchell Darin, filed a lawsuit against McDonald's for allegedly infringing upon his father's trademark, causing McDonald's to stop using the song and mostly retiring the campaign. None of the several 1990s reboot attempts were successful, including a NASCAR sponsorship in the late 1990s. A separate animated campaign featuring the character was launched in Southeast Asia in 2007. In the late 2000s, the character was appropriated as "Moon Man", an Internet meme that became associated with white supremacy and the alt-right and was designated a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. In the 2010s, the character's image became an icon in the vaporwave music genre.