Major spoilers ahead for One Piece manga chapter 1086.
If you hadn’t noticed, One Piece is starting to go for a solar system theming in its final saga. Nika—the legendary warrior Luffy essentially turns into while in Gear 5—is called the “sun god.” The Five Elders are all planets. We finally learned all of their names during 1086, but we’ve known about “Jaygarcia Saturn” for a couple months.
So a moon guy was inevitable, and who would’ve thought the moon guy would be related to Shanks?! The unveiling of St. Figarland Garling, Supreme Commander of the God’s Knights and distinguished hero (monarch?) of God Valley, was an epic reveal decades in the making. Unfortunately for me, my first thought after “Figarland?! But that’s Shanks’ last name in Red!” was “This dude looks like Mac Tonight.”
Mac Tonight is one of those strong branding choices where even if you weren’t around to remember the ad, someone, somewhere has probably shared his existence to you—possibly because they found him terrifying. But for the uninitiated, Mac Tonight was a character introduced by McDonald’s in the late 1980s to boost sales for their nighttime menu. He’s a cool guy who wears sunglasses at night, and the ads all have him playing the piano while singing a version of the jazz standard “Mack the Knife” with altered lyrics about—you guessed it—getting dinner at McDonald’s.
But importantly for our purposes, Mac Tonight is most famous for his crescent moon-shaped head.
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McDonald’s had to retire this ad in the late ’80s—Mac’s iteration of “Mack the Knife” was dangerously close to popular singer Bobby Darin’s, and Darin’s estate threatened to sue McDonald’s. But Mac Tonight is not so easily forgotten. For one, a few McDonald’s were outfitted with animatronic Mac Tonights in the 1990s. A few are even still floating around. But also, Mac Tonight was unfortunately re-outfitted by the internet as Moon Man, a meme that was categorized as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.
I am fervently of the opinion that Mac Tonight and Moon Man are different people, because I refuse to let assholes steal such a ridiculous mascot away from us, which brings me back to St. Figarland Garling. Just look at them back-to-back. I dare you to tell me you do not see this. One Piece mangaka Eiichiro Oda just had to add sunglasses, too.
I’d say it’s the triumphant return of Mac Tonight, except St. Figarland Garling establishes himself in a single panel as a gigantic asswipe. Honestly, the hate speech of the Moon Man meme might not be too far off in tone from St. Figarland Garling’s own beliefs. We’re talking about a guy who thinks Fishmen are “sub-human scum” and that helping them is literally worth a death sentence. So.
I would be surprised if Oda knew about Mac Tonight—even considering that the mascot got a resurgence in southeast Asia (outside Japan)—but the ways my brain work cut the dramatic tension of this reveal just a tiny bit.
(featured image: McDonald’s)
