Once he learns all the steps and demonstrates his newfound aptitude, our protagonist returns to the real world, where Thomas touts the special skill required to make a great Wendy’s burger, segueing into a kitchen sequence where all the workers sing along to a quasi–glam rock melody about having “grill skills.” (I’ll give them this: They’re not as rhythmically sloppy as 2007’s “ the Fry Guy.”) The 2000s Bay Area–based Wave magazine once declared that the existence of “Grill Skills” proves “ we as a country should be judged fantastically insane.” As if that weren’t wild enough, three of the cooking patties gain eyes, lips, teeth, and big primary-shape earrings, singing in harmony about how “we start to shri-ink/ when we hit that grill/ you know we will.” Appropriately, the trainee rubs his eyes in disbelief. Inside the tube, the Duke begins dancing to a New Jack Swing beat before rapping all the steps to prepping beef patties on a grill. (In 2020, the official Wendy’s account tweeted that “our voice would be nothing without Black culture.” No kidding!) One particularly egregious tango: 1989’s “Grill Skills” meta music video, helmed by Wendy’s Music International subsidiary and credited to “the Crew.” After a lead-in from chain founder Dave Thomas and a brief tour of a Wendy’s kitchen, the video depicts a white trainee who puts a grill-instruction tape into a VCR, only for the TV to start shaking and steaming out of the rickety appliance, the sunglasses-wearing head of a Black Wendy’s worker named “the Duke of Grill” floats outward before sucking the trainee into the TV, Videodrome-style. In fact, Wendy’s may have it beat there, with its decades-spanning reliance on predominantly Black music genres like hip-hop, funk, and R&B to present how cool it is to work there. Mickey D’s didn’t have a monopoly on surreal employee indoctrination. By the end, however, the characters are all chanting the steps of the nugget-making process, Big Mac has come around, and we even see a McNugget who turns into a film noir–esque blond bombshell after being dipped in honey sauce. It’s a lot: Two of the sauces, sweet-and-sour and hot mustard, are showcased with cartoonishly racist Chinese and Japanese stereotypes, and there’s a whole plot arc about how disdainful the British-accented Big Mac is of these bite-size newcomers. To the awe of these McDonald’s staples, the McNuggets explain why they’re so delicious, what sauces they’re paired with, and how quickly and easily they can be prepared. This 40-year-old video steers away from celebrities and hackneyed songs instead, it uses puppets named for the iconic products they represent-Big Mac, Coke, Fries, etc.-and who, late at night, are visited by a mysterious Styrofoam box of outer-space visitors: Chicken McNuggets. The entry that interests me most, however, is this 1983 in-house introduction to the brand’s then-novel Chicken McNuggets, typically credited as a Rensi innovation. After placing his hand in the fryer, the young man doesn’t make a sound-instead, he turns silently to face the camera with a look of shock and agony. The deadliest danger of all is an “inattentive young Casanova” who “flirts with 375-degree terror,” burning his hand in a puddle of oil after bragging to a colleague about his motorbike exploits. What do these Deadly Dangers mean for the viewer, a Jack in the Box trainee in the early 1980s? Well, there’s the danger posed by a back door left ajar, where an ominous shadow looms by a dining-room floor left wet from mopping, on which a worker who boasts of being “sure-footed as John Travolta” slips and falls by an “insidious tomato slicer” lacking a safety top, causing an overconfident chef to cut his hand and by a cocksure employee who ignores a co-worker’s warning to not lift a heavy box with his back.

Over a dark background, a deep-voiced narrator warns that “deadly dangers” are “coming soon to a Jack in the Box near you,” with those two alliterative words growing in size to the blare of clashing trumpet sounds. “That was a long time ago, but what I learned from that film still means a lot to me in my job today. “When I was a new employee, I was shown the safety film that you are about to see,” he says. Inside a neat office with a large desk and imposing file cabinet, a man in a vest and tie turns to the camera with a flat expression. It’s Fast-Food Week ! Always cap the tomato slicer.

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