I'll be honest with you, Ronald McDonald is a great mascot. He's not creepy at all (I mean, save for maybe his early days).
Though honestly, not as creepy as this brief design...
Ronald definitely reached his peak in the early 70's when the McDonaldland commercial campaign began. He's just too campy of a protagonist in the 80's/90's media, those commercials are just too sweet. C'mon, you're freaking McDonald's, not Disney. I felt his interaction with the kids in the mid-late 2000's commercials came off as pretty natural. Obviously, there's not an ounce of realism in McDonald's commercials (Especially those 80's/90's ones, yikes), but I felt he worked pretty well as a mascot when interacting with the kids in those commercials. Then came the brief era of that weird farm around 2011, which I felt was pretty decent. Okay, it wasn't perfect (Especially that goat commercial), but it was miles above the current campaign. Then Ronald returned in 2013 with that one commercial they looped until he was ditched in 2016. You know the one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku6KDFqq35w
Then they announced he was getting a redesign.
Then they ditched him. He never appeared again, and was replaced by the worst mascot out there. Yeah, even the Minions (Illumination's mascot) are miles above these abominations.
I hate Happy, he's an incredibly ugly and overall unappealing character, that's actually somehow creepier than Ronald is. Ronald McDonald might not have been perfect, but he was a great mascot, and it's a major shame he was ditched due to the brief era of clown sightings. Will he ever return? Probably not, unless there's some nostalgic push to have him make a comeback, which I wouldn't mind honestly. Anything,
anything is better than this.
