Genuine question: Is Taylor Swift completely unfamiliar with Grimace, the purple McDonalds’ mascot who has been a staple of the restaurant chain’s marketing since 1971?
Swift appeared on The Tonight Show to promote her latest re-recorded album Red (Taylor’s Version), ahead of her fifth turn as musical guest on Saturday Night Live this weekend. But she was not content with merely ethering her ex in a blistering new ten-minute version of heartbreaking album highlight “All Too Well” — a fan and critical favorite long rumored to be about her short relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010/11, which now comes with a short film (out tomorrow) directed by Swift and starring Stranger Things‘ Sadie Sink.
She also pulled a Keke Palmer on one of the most recognizable corporate mascots of the 20th century.
A crumb of context, first. Swift and Fallon were playing possibly the dumbest and most abstract game in the Tonight Show‘s arsenal of weird celebrity segments: “Box of Lies”. Each player gets a box containing an incredibly specific and unique object, and must choose whether to invent a convoluted lie about what it is or describe it exactly, which will sound made-up anyway. (The first two boxes in this segment contained a pair of binoculars with corn stuffed into the lens holes, which Swift correctly pronounced “upsetting”, and a diorama of a park through which a tiny man is walking a giant stag beetle.)
Presented with a mockup of a tell-all Grimace autobiography titled I’m Not Loving It, Swift opted to describe it exactly, telling Fallon it appeared to have been written by… “A fuzzy monster with seal hands.”
“It says it’s written by… Grimace?” she told Fallon, knitting her brows and opening the book. “Is that a— is that a spokesperson for something?”
To be fair, nobody exactly knows what Grimace is. He is either a milkshake or a taste bud, as we learned earlier this year. But surely most millennials raised amongst the garish monuments of Western late capitalism would at least know the big purple blob by sight, if not the complex lore of his origins.
Swift has been working essentially since before she hit puberty and may have missed a few “normal” kid things the rest of us take for granted. But has she never been to a McDonalds’? Has she never asked her mother for a pen to do the maze on the side of a Happy Meal box, or painstakingly colored the canonically purple Grimace in rainbow stripes on a free activity sheet in the back of the car out of some childish whim to pervert the natural order of things? Would she recognize Ronald McDonald, or the Hamburglar? Would it have rung a bell if the photo hadn’t been in grayscale? Was she actually playing five-dimensional chess with Fallon by giving him all the details but one?
Anyway, sorry to this man embodiment of a tastebud/milkshake. But hey, Grimace, my dude, it could be worse — she could have written a song about you skipping her 21st birthday party.
You can watch the rest of her interview on Fallon below.
Source : Taylor Swift does not know who Grimace is, apparently
