Whether you love him or he just creeps you out, Burger King’s masked mascot, The King, is in the news again.
The recent ad campaign featuring The King is one most of us have seen: He runs through an office building pursued by men in white coats before bringing a burger to a woman as the men tackle him.
“This king’s insane,” one man tells her, and they seem to know this because he is giving out “so much beef for $3.99.”
The ad is cute. Maybe we smiled or laughed. But The King has apparently gone too far, and Michael Fitzpatrick, the executive director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is outraged.
He called the ad “blatantly offensive” and said he was “stunned and appalled” when he saw it.
C’mon, now, Mr. Fitzpatrick. Should there really be a scandal over this?
While The King’s “illness” is up for debate, we don’t see any reason to get into one.
The whole thing is merely a joke, and one that everyone, except Fitzpatrick, is in on. Ask anyone to view the ad, and it’s obvious that The King’s not meant to truly have any kind of real mental ailment.
It’s hard to view the commercial and look at it from a serious standpoint. While Fitzpatrick seems to have succeeded somehow, we really wouldn’t recommend it.
If anyone is the butt of this joke, it’s not people with mental illness but the silly doctors who would try to keep us away from cheap burgers.
