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Chicken shaped like french fries, sold in a fry box with a hole for sauce — a dumb idea so perfect it built a cult. When Burger King killed them in 2012, the internet staged a years-long resurrection campaign. The internet won.
Bite-sized cinnamon rolls served hot with a little tub of icing for dipping, sold at Burger King for 99 cents from the spring of 1998. They disappeared from the national menu in 2012, and the petitions, a Grubhub promotion, a Florida test and a 2025 nationwide comeback all say how many people never stopped asking.
The 1996 commercial that turned a two-year-old salsa soundtrack single into a Top 40 hit. For a season of TV breaks, the Blackout All-Stars' "I Like It" was simply the Burger King song — an ad doing what radio hadn't.
Joe Dante's 1998 movie about toys that come alive and go to war: a defense contractor puts a munitions-guidance chip in a line of action figures, and the Commando Elite decide the gentle Gorgonites must be destroyed, along with anyone who gets in the way. Empire's verdict: "It's Gremlins with toy soldiers, except not quite as dark or funny."
A man in a chicken suit stood in a living room on what looked like a live webcam and did whatever you typed: moonwalk, lay egg, do the YMCA. Burger King's Subservient Chicken site, built to sell the TenderCrisp sandwich in April 2004, became the textbook case for viral marketing, and nobody could quite explain it to their parents.
Galoob's inch-high robots, sold three to a pack and split into two warring camps: Z-Bots, Designed to Defend, against Voids, Made to Menace. A Micro Machines spin-off scaled down to the size of a thumbnail.