Jack in the Box Colossus Burger

The Colossus arrived in 1993, within months of the E. coli outbreak that had nearly destroyed Jack in the Box that winter. Investigators had traced the contamination to the chain's Monster Burger, which had been on a discounted promotion so successful that demand overwhelmed the restaurants' cooking procedures. By September 1993 parent company Foodmaker was reporting comparable sales down 22 percent in one quarter and 9 percent in the next, a $45.5 million quarterly loss and a $40.4 million charge for franchisee settlements. A UPI story on those results noted that the summer's Teriyaki Bowls had sold well on the West Coast but not in Texas, so "to boost sales in that market, the chain introduced a new hamburger, The Colossus," and was optimistic about its prospects.

The burger itself was pure volume: two quarter-pound beef patties, three kinds of cheese and eight slices of bacon, which the retrospective blog The Impulsive Buy, citing Calorie Count, put at about 1,100 calories, 84 grams of fat and 1,510 milligrams of sodium. The television spot sold it like a movie, opening on a towering title card for "The Incredibly Hungry Man." It ran in the same stretch when the chain was rebuilding its image, a campaign that culminated in the fall of 1994 with the return of Jack, the clown-headed chairman in a business suit who strode back into the office "through the miracle of plastic surgery."

How long the Colossus stayed on the menu under that name is not well recorded, but it never fully went away. By the late 1990s a near-identical stack lived on as the Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger, which then carried two quarter-pound patties, three slices of cheese and the full eight strips of bacon. The Bacon Ultimate is still sold, by 2015 with three strips, which is the quiet way a 1,100-calorie monument gets trimmed down to something a chain can keep selling.