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mygif

Monopoly is awesome. You’re a terrible game!

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Jim Caldwell said on October 14th, 2009 at 9:44 am

And that’s before you knew the whole game was rigged from the inside.

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mygif

And, thanks to McDonald’s, we were never that young again.

:-p I mean, I almost don’t know if this is a bad thing. Would you rather get wise to these scams when you’re eight years old swapping paper tokens on the school yard, or when you’re eighteen and furiously scratching lottery tickets you think will pay for college?

And, to be fair, the Monopoly McDonald’s game does perfectly encapsulate the lesson that the original Monopoly game is supposed to teach. Once you have all the money, you really just get to push everyone else around until you eventually clean up and win.

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David Wright said on October 14th, 2009 at 9:58 am

Monopoly came to our McDonalds in 1987, when I was just out of high school and unimpressed by my college options. A friend and I went on one of those life-changing road trips, Rhode Island to Florida, in my ancient, creaky, and ultimately doomed Chevy Nova, and we survived on the “instant win” tickets.

All the way down I-95, we were able to shmooze and grin and flirt our way to bags full of the Monopoly pieces.

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mygif

It was Hostess Chips Bingo that did it for me.

I had 21 pieces, meaning any new piece would have given me a bingo. We bought enough chips that summer to desalinate the dead sea.

To make matters worse, a few months earlier, a friend of mine actually won a freaking LOTUS. His dad had to claim the prize, but man that was a sweet care. This of course re-enforced the belief that contests were winnable.

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mygif

The current version of Monopoly is far more insidious. Just about all large-scale contests now require you to sign on to the website with a code that identifies the location you visited, and fill in all your personal and demographic information.

McDonald’s is now training kids to play fast and loose with their privacy.

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mygif

McDonald’s is now training kids to play fast and loose with their privacy.

Judging from some of the social network sites and camwhores out there, the concept of “most if not all of the Internet is public” wasn’t sinking in before this contest.

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mygif

BAW BAW BAW

I’m lovin’ it.

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mygif

Ahhh, I remember this.

Once, I had two yellow properties and my friend Kyle had the third yellow property, and we were like, “Hey, we could go in on this together and split the prize!” But the prize was a car, a Pontiac Sunfire or something.

“How are we going to split the car, Kyle? Also, we are 11 and won’t be able to drive for years.”

“Well, we can’t split a car. But my mom should get it, because she really needs a car. Ours is almost dead but we can’t afford a new one.”

“No deal!”

And then Kyle cried, because I wouldn’t give him the chips and his mom so desperately needed a car. She really did, too: she was a single mom and they didn’t have a lot of money.

BUT THAT IS NOT HOW FREE MARKET ECONOMICS WORKS, KYLE’S MOM!!!!!!!!

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mygif

Well, you’re one up on me. I didn’t figure out how to play actual Monopoly until I was like 21, by which point casinos were a more enticing way to spend time and energy.

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mygif

Man, I feel like a complete simpleton. I STILL love McDonald’s Monopoly. You get game pieces! And they match! Then again, maybe it’s not that I have the functioning brain capacity of a nine-year-old, maybe I’m just an OCD with strong collecting tendencies.

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mygif

Yeah, it only ever causes me to get slightly more McDonald’s, except for the first time I lived on the same block as one.

RIP, 24.

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mygif

My main beef with the contest was how to get the pieces. The first Monopoly, it seemed like EVERYTHING gave pieces. Medium fries, medium drink, larges, if your sandwich came in a box, they all had it.

Then they pulled back. You want tokens, you get up early enough to grab a hashbrown, or you supersize your meal, or buy whatever sandwich they’re trying to save from obscurity.

I’ll probably go a time or two during the game period (about my normal frequency), and I’ll still think as I pull off the pieces, “Someone has to win the million. Why not me?”

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mygif

When ‘The Phantom Menace’ came out, I worked really hard to avoid spoilers and managed it very well until the day before the movie came out, when I thought reading a review of the soundtrack in the local paper would be safe. The article commented that the track “The Death of Qui Gon” was especially lovely.

And today, thanks to an article about McDonalds Monopoly, I learned that Proposition Joe gets killed. I mean, it originally aired a few years ago, so it is obviously fair play, but this was not the article I was expecting spoilers for ‘The Wire’ in.

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mygif

I’d just like to share with you a little bit of childish wonder: McDonalds in my area sells their small ice cream cones for 50 cents to this day. About twice a month, my wife and I head over there, get three cones (one for each of us and one for the dog), sit in the car and people watch as we enjoy a treat. It’s marvelous.

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mygif

Darren, add my name to the list of “people who got The Wire unceremoniously spoiled for them by an article about McDonald’s Monopoly.”

And I had made it this far, too…

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Sean D. Martin said on October 14th, 2009 at 7:58 pm

Dang. Was just about to start Netflixing The Wire. Even managed to mis-read that as Joe mearly got shot in the ass. So for me it got spoiled in the comments to an article about McDonalds.

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mygif

1.) All you complainers know now is that Proposition Joe gets shot, not that he gets killed. A lot of people in The Wire get shot and live. I am not even slightly kidding.

2.) If you let this stop you from watching The Wire I will have to hunt you down and slap you with a giant fish repeatedly in the name of Art.

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Evil Abraham Lincoln said on October 14th, 2009 at 9:10 pm

I never played McDonald’s Monopoly for the money. I played it for the free food. Yeah, I was pretty damned poor as a kid, but idiots who gave up free Extra Value Meals for multiple copies of Pennsylvania deserved to go hungry.

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mygif

My sister and I are trying to figure out the ratio of white people killed in The Wire to black people killed in The Wire. Not to spoil it for everyone else, but it’s kind of skewed in one direction.

(Here’s a hint: I can think of only two white people who die over the course of the entire series off the top of my head, but I can think of several EPISODES where more than two black people die.)

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mygif

Um, Darren? It is you who are “spoiling” The Wire for me, since I haven’t seen a single second of The Wire yet so the reference was meaningless and instantly forgotten. Until you cleared it up.

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Strawberry Smasher said on October 15th, 2009 at 1:41 am

The McDonaldland Mafia. So it’s like the Sopranos ‘for kids’?

Suppose I got off lucky, then; before McDonalds started their Monopoly game, they were the go-to place whenever our family went ANYWHERE. Anytime we went on vacation or even a long drive, we ate almost exclusively at McDonalds. Guess our folks figured the cheap toys would help shut us up, plus the Playlands left us exhausted.

But when they first ran their Monopoly minigame, Mom and Dad started picking it up all the time. Until, during one of our trips, I became suddenly and violently ill from the constant junk food. We literally didn’t visit a McDonalds for YEARS after that; suddenly our trips involved lots of OTHER resturants.

So, yeah: you win. Loss of innocence trumps loss of lunch anyday.

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HammerHeart said on October 15th, 2009 at 2:38 am

I think the lesson here is: don’t read articles about anything ever, if you’re afraid of having something spoiled. Because you never know where spoilers will come from.

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mygif

The equivalent that dominated *my* childhood days was scrounging Coke bottle tops from the school canteen. We were competing with the teachers, who were doing pretty much the same thing – but they lacked our smaller hands, faster reflexes and complete lack of a sense of shame. I ended up scoring 3 Simpsons-themed plastic cups and one TMNT one!

…Good times.

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mygif

Re: The Wire death ratios–most of the characters are also black, and it is not unfair to say that an urban street level drug gang in Baltimore might be primarily black, with the exception of the much less well-organized dealings in Season 2.

However, there are black characters from all walks of life, gangsters to addicts to mayors and commissioners of police. Not out of character for a majority (61%) black city.

Also my mother totally just spoiled the life lesson of Monopoly for me at around the same age. She didn’t even let me learn by getting burned, she just straight up explained it, probably because she hated Mickey D’s and only went there at the behest of her beloved younglings.

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mygif

Once, when we were on one of our long vacation road trips, my Mom had us stop at a McDonald’s.

In my youth, I had conceived a dislike of McDonald’s and refused to eat there.

My Mom proceeded to attempt to physically forcefeed me a McDonald’s hamburger, in a scene that horrified my family (and probably caused them to lose their appetites).

Needless to say, this did not endear McDonald’s to me… I still won’t eat that toxic garbage.

Also…

The ratio of black to white is much more favorable on the Sopranos, and I don’t think any black people have been killed on Breaking Bad yet… well, onscreen anyway. (Although Latinos don’t make out so well.)

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