You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

Some backstory before we begin. Most of us are probably familiar with the practice in TV and movies of needing to obscure trademarked names and logos. Sometimes this is as simple as putting a piece of tape over the offending trademark – other times, it means inventing your own legally distinct version for the purposes of the story, like having the characters use the search engine Goggle and drink a cool glass of Papsi.

Well, in Japan, someone hit on a rather clever way of evading McDonald’s trademarks: just flip those famous golden arches upside down, so the characters are now all eating at WcDonald’s. This trademark knockoff has popped up in a bunch of different anime series, and with anime’s increasing global popularity, it reached a point where, not only did someone at McDonald’s corporate office become aware of WcDonald’s, they decided to capitalize on it.

McDonald’s hired famed anime production company Studio Pierrot to produce a series of WcDonald’s commercials promoting their delicious WcNuggets, each done in the style of a different anime genre. And they are glorious to behold.

They even commissioned their own AMV (or Anime Music Video) to go along with them: