Yesterday as I sat in my grandchildren's favorite restaurant (a place which barely qualifies as one, except that it copiously spews an almost edible product), my sweet 5-year-old granddaughter Carrie looked up at me with her earnest brown eyes and asked,

"Grandma, who's your favorite McDonaldland character?"

I had to strain to remember who the suckers were, remembering only that they were loud, ugly and stupid. Programmed to induce a bottomless Morgan Spurlock-like hunger in half a minute, they delivered the goods, implanting deep in the human brain the indelible message that McDonald's is good.  . . McDonald's is good. . . McDonald's is good.

Some ancient neuron fired: "Mayor McCheese," I said.

"What? Who?"

"You heard me. Mayor McCheese. He's the big cheese in McDonaldland. The mayor. The guy who makes all the rules."

Carrie rolled those expressive brown eyes. "G - r - a - n - d - m - a," she intoned in her best Alzheimer-humoring voice. "There's no - such - thing  - as - Mayor - McCheese."

A vague but disturbing anxiety crept over me. How long had it been since I'd watched a McDonald's ad? Mute buttons, glazed eyes, and years of conscious oblivion had wiped them from memory. But this! There had to be a Mayor McCheese! He was the main guy! The important guy! He called the shots!

I asked my daughter about it (she who was also raised under the golden arches, in spite of my fierce protests - but hell, the place is cheap and has clean washrooms). She had the same unsettled, anxious look. "No Mayor McCheese?"

"He's history."

"What happened?"

"We'll have to find out."

My daughter is a television news reporter and could probably get to the bottom of this in a second, but has other fish to fry, such as gangland murders and the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics. So I took it upon myself to run the culprit to ground. Someone had killed my beloved McCheese, and I was going to find out who.

The internet was my only available source, but it was tainted by the longing and loathing of its contributors: most people associated McD's with their childhood, and some frog-croaking mass of jelly in the core of our brain says, "Grokkk. Grokkk. Childhood good, mmmmm." This is a survival mechanism designed to keep us from blowing our brains out, accompanied by a slowly rotating holographic image of a Big Mac with an endless loop of music in the background: "McDonald's is our kind of place, because it's Ronald's place. . . Ronald's place. . . Ronald's place. . . "(a particularly evil refrain during the Reagan administration).

I went on YouTube, and to my great relief, I actually found some ads with Mayor McCheese in them and showed them to Carrie, who was goggle-eyed. Yes, he was just as I remembered him: a simpering idiot with a head that looked like a massive cheeseburger. The fact that his head was edible did not seem to concern his creators.

And just who did create this guy, along with Grimace, the Hamburgler, FryGuy, Gloppy, and Witless? Where did that strange birdlike thing come from, and could french fries really sing?  AND WHERE WAS THE MAIN GUY, THE GUY WHO RAN THE WHOLE SHOW??

My granddaughter told me that McDonald's ads had changed. They now promoted healthful things like apple slices dunked in caramel sauce, and salads made of hard white chunks of iceberg lettuce topped with fried chicken. These were lifestyle alternatives, most of them representing several thousand calories. Ronald was still around, presumably to run the show, but people felt uneasy about clowns now, and perhaps with good reason.

I had to dig deeper to get to the sordid story of the Mayor's demise. When I turned up the name of a '60s children's show called H. R. Pufnstuf, areas of my brain suddenly lit up, like in those studies they do (you know what I mean, about whether you're a retard or not). Pufnstuf! Those staggering, toppling, life-sized human puppets, surreal as a fever dream, resembling nothing more than those hapless mascots who get pushed over at football games. The main character, no doubt named in tribute to Puff the Magic Dragon, ruled as a benevolent despot, and his smoky-breathed word was law.  This hallucinogenic children's counterculture-land was cooked up by Sid and Marty Krofft, and for all I know they also invented Mr. Green Jeans, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent.

Sometime around 1970, McDonald's spotted a good thing, and informally discussed "adapting" the Pufnstuf characters for their ad campaign via the Kroffts' lawyer. Well, who'd want to fight that? McDonald's! 3-1/2 billion served (with some poor sod in charge of counting each and every one). Dream balloons appeared above the Kroffts' heads with blueprints for luxury condos in Jamaica.

But then something happened.

Yes, they "adapted" those characters all right. And where was the cheque? Somehow it got lost in the shuffle.

Let me quote that final authority on human history, Wikipedia: "In 1973, the Kroffts successfully sued McDonald's, arguing that the entire McDonaldland premise was essentially a ripoff of their television show. Specifically, the Kroffts claimed that the character Mayor McCheese was a direct ripoff of their character, H. R. Pufnstuf (being a mayor himself). McDonald's initially was ordered to pay $50,000. The case was later remanded as to damages, and McDonald's was ordered to pay the Kroffts more than $1,000,000  when the case was finally settled in 1977. As a result of the lawsuit, the concept of the 'magical place' was all but phased out of the commercials, as were many of the original characters."

$50,000. FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS??? That's like tossing them a quarter! Even a million bucks is a contemptuous sum, a "we spit on your lawsuit - they're ours" gesture. What the fuck was wrong with these guys? Were they brain-dead? Their beloved huffing and puffing dragon, their MAYOR dragon with the large wobbly head, had been co-opted, ripped off, yanked out from under them, and they were willing to endure an endless court battle which likely used up many millions of dollars in legal fees, just to be bought off with a sum that could only be described as pathetic.

Can you guess why? When sociologists pointed out that H. R. Pufnstuf was loaded with drug terminology (kinda like Puff the Magic Dragon), the Kroffts lost some cachet, and perhaps decided it wasn't worth it to fight on. But there was more: the vague threats, the figures crouched in underground parking lots. The special engagement of the Cosa Nostra's finest,  just to get those goddamn Kroffts to shut up. Mickey D's is powerful, my friends.  You don't mess with them. Your dragon is our mayor. End of discussion. OK, now we'll rip the duct tape off your face.

And still, that wasn't the end of it. Somebody has to take the fall in a case like this. Ask Humphrey Bogart, who wouldn't play the "shap" for anybody. Mayor McCheese was the shap. The patsy. The white-bread-red-meat-and-processed-cheese innocent, toppling over from the weight of his own head.

I'm not really sure what they did to him, but one thing was certain: we wouldn't be seeing him in McDonaldland again any time soon.  In an act of bare-faced ruthlessness typical of the heart attack centre of the world,  the character McDonald's  had fought so hard to steal was ruthlessly axed.

When Carrie looked at some of those YouTube videos of early McDonald's ads, she was unusually quiet. After three or four ads with Mayor McCheese in them, she looked at me, almost pityingly, and said, "Ewwwwwwww."

As for the Mayor, it's anybody's guess what happened to him. Maybe Morgan Spurlock ate him.