This McDonald’s ad about a boy grieving his dead father sure will make you hungry

The fast food giant McDonald’s is trying, you guys. For the past half-decade, visits to the franchise have fallen, and so they are fighting back by offering up elaborate, avocado-smeared new sandwiches, so as to appeal to the Panera-eating dilettantes of America, and by introducing moody, dystopian uniforms, so as to better appeal to our 1984-reading populace.

Over in the U.K., similar efforts are afoot, as a newly released ad shows another side of the storied mega-corporation—the side that understands that despite the fact that your father died too young for you to know him, you are still his son, and he loves you very, very much, even though he can’t be with you. Yes, this 90-second spot features a young boy failing to measure up to his father in every way—sucks at soccer, chicks don’t dig him, keeps his shoes shitty, and so on—before finally realizing that he is exactly like his old man in one way: They both love McDonald’s fish sandwiches.

And they don’t eat right:

The ad, which is not so much tone-deaf as it is a bleak parody of an actual advertisement, successfully equating the franchise’s convenient, nutrition-free food with the unfathomable sorrow that comes from grieving a dead parent, received widespread condemnation, and has now been pulled. And yet, much like the father in the story, it lives on online, where we can return time and again to view the story and remember that even though the commercial is gone, it is not forgotten, and that it loves us very much, even if we have different colored eyes than him and maybe he wasn’t even our real dad after all if the only thing we have in common is a goddamn sandwich.

[via Munchies]