Mac and Me, Paul Rudd’s favourite movie, was released on home video today in 1989, after an August 12, 1988 theatrical release – and helped bring about the jaded and cynical individual I am today.
Funded in part with corporate sponsorships by McDonald’s and Coke, Mac and Me is a glorious exercise in cramming thinly veiled commercials into the headspace of unsuspecting children. The problem that was this was 1988, and we suspected, we suspected a lot. You don’t get raised by after-school TV and Sunbow productions without learning a thing or two. And the not-so-subtle commercial aspirations of the film were felt like and anvil dropping through the ceiling. The target demographic wasn’t having it.
The titular alien, MAC (Mysterious Alien Creature, I mean seriously, c’mon!), looks like a sun-melted Madball with a heart of gold and a whisteling sphincter for a mouth. The plot is xeroxed from stuff found pilfered from Spielberg’s trash can – a boy in a wheelchair befriends a fugitive alien and helps reunite him with his family while dodging NASA and guzzling Big Gulps. Roll credits.
And yet, despite all that – or maybe because of it? – Mac and Me lingers in the public consciousness (and in no small way thanks to Paul Rudd’s rolling Talk Show gag). Its not a beloved classic, but a petrified relic of a time when marketing wizards took wild undisciplined swings at getting their Moichandise into the heads of kids, and wrapped them in sincerity to help it go down. It didn’t fool anyone, in fact it made a whole generation even more suspicious. And for that, MAC, we salute you. Kind of.