This Mac Needs a Knife Too

Louis Armstrong first performed “Mack the Knife” in 1956, a year later McDonald’s introduced the Big Mac, and then, Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife” became a chart-topper in 1959.

So, these events were all before my time, but I’m left wondering if there was any connection between them, back in the day, or whether they were an unrelated coincidence of events.

Either way, who could have known and who would have guessed that more than fifty years later, the Super Sized sandwich brand would be truncated to “mac” — no less in all lower case style?

Still looks big enough to require a knife though. One of the other things that intrigued me about this billboard is the federal registration symbol on the “mac” reference, because I hadn’t previously seen or noticed any use by McDonald’s of MAC or mac standing alone.

Turns out, despite my best investigative efforts in scrolling through some 123 USPTO records for McDonald’s and a multitude of third-party registrations for a wide variety of goods and services ranging all the way from hair pieces and wigs to boat seats to lip gloss, and then all the way to apparent evidence of some peaceful coexistence with Mac’s fried pork skins, all I could find for McDonald’s was a pair of abandoned MAC applications from 1994, and a few federally-registered slogan marks incorporating the “mac” term: (a) Get Your Mac On; and (b) Are You Mac Enough?

Do you suppose that the creatives behind this work of art thought the sheer size of the sandwich might double as a visual representation of the missing — or perhaps, supposed redundant word “big” — if so, the trademark types should know better, as it’s definitely not an equivalence the USPTO or the courts would recognize for purposes of Big Mac trademark use. Leaving me to wonder whether McDonald’s has gotten the memo on proper use and misuse of the federal registration symbol?

In the end, it would appear that this mac needs a knife too: It might double as one for dining and one for legal surgery to remove the errant federal registration symbol, at least for this mac.