Batman opened on this day 35 years ago. The movie was, of course, an absolute pop culture phenomenon, redefining the summer blockbuster not only for comic book films, but also for marketing them. Batman was fucking everywhere in 1989, and one of the many places you could find him was Taco Bell.

On the surface, the campaign seemed deceptively simple. Go to Taco Bell, buy a large drink, and you get a collectible plastic cup and an order of cinnamon twists (plus free refills, because that was something you advertised back then). But it proved to be massively successful. In fact it is arguably one of the biggest fast food movie tie-ins ever. It got so big that customers were reported to actually be breaking into restaurants to steal cardboard cut-outs of Batman, and if that’s not a hilarious and ironic piece of trivia for you, I don’t know what is.

I really do wish that Hollywood would get its shit together and do these major fast food extravaganzas again. I wanna go to Taco Bell and get Deadpool and Wolverine cups, complete with Ryan Reynolds breaking the fourth wall in the commercials for them! Make it happen! We used to be a country, a proper country. Now we just do the occasional X-Box game code promotion. We’ve become pathetic.

Have a bat night, y’all!