Before the Big Mac, before the Quarter Pounder, there was the original iconic fast food burger:
the Whopper.
And fans of the Whopper don't clown around.
"I want my Whopper."
No matter how much you love it, though, there are some things you may not know about the
Whopper, like the cruel social media experiment that was actually banned by Facebook.
What got Mark Zuckerberg so flame broiled under the collar?
Here's the untold truth of the Whopper.
The birth of the Whopper
In 1957, Burger King co-founder Jim McLamore came up with a brilliant idea: take their
flame broiled burgers and make them real, real big.
He explained in his autobiography,
"I suggested that we call our product a Whopper, knowing that this would convey imagery of
something big."
The Whopper went unchallenged in the fast food market for years.
The Big Mac wouldn't be introduced until 1968, and the real competitor with the Whopper,
the Quarter Pounder, didn't appear until 1972.
The Whopper spread like beefy wildfire across America, and a legend was born.
The Whopper Jr.
The Whopper Jr. is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: the same as a Whopper, just
smaller.
It seems obvious, but, like so many Juniors in this world, it actually only exists because
of an accident.
"You get back here!
Get back here!"
"I wish I'd never been broiled!"
In 1963, a Burger King employee in Puerto Rico named Luis Pérez opened up his store
for the first time only to find that the molds needed to make the bread for the restaurant's
Whoppers hadn't been delivered.
Thinking fast, Pérez decided to use traditional hamburger buns as a substitute.
He gave it the name Whopper Jr.
The restaurant chain adopted the idea soon after, and Pérez was eventually admitted
into Burger King's own Hall of Fame for his ingenuity.
The Whopper family
Over the decades, Burger King has offered up more variations on the Whopper theme than
any one person could possibly eat.
The many versions include the Angry Whopper, the California Fresh Whopper, the Piñata
Whopper, the Halloween Whopper, and even the Windows 7 Whopper.
And they've also used the Whopper to make progressive social statements, like in 2014,
when they introduced the LGBTQ friendly Proud Whopper, which was a regular Whopper in a
rainbow wrapper that had the words "We Are All the Same Inside" written in it.
Then there's the infamous left-handed Whopper, and the Chocolate Whopper, which were both
April Fool's jokes.
"Chocolate Whopper!"
Not so funny, though, was their least popular Whopper variant, a 2013 edition that accidentally
included horse meat.
Luckily, this edible equine issue was confined to the United Kingdom and Ireland, and was
quickly resolved.
We don't think the world is quite ready for the Horse Whopper.
Crunching the numbers
So just how many types of Whopper are there?
One of the original slogans for the sandwich is the claim that "There are 1024 ways to
have a Whopper."
While that may have once been true, thanks to all the new optional ingredients the chain
has introduced over the years, the current number of possible Whopper permutations is
now actually 221,184.
Are you ready for the new Math Whopper?!
Breakfast burger
In 2014, Burger King experimented with adding the Whopper to its breakfast menu.
Around 5,000 of the chain's restaurants participated in the program, which was dubbed Burgers at
Breakfast.
Burger King's rival, McDonald's, struck back by introducing an all-day breakfast menu in
2015, a move which seemed to make a lot more sense, as pancakes for lunch is likely to
be a lot more popular than trying to get people to eat burgers for breakfast.
"I don't want lunch.
I want breakfast."
"Yeah, well, hey, I'm really sorry."
"Yeah, well, hey, I'm really sorry, too."
Ellen tells a Whopper
How significant is the Whopper's impact on society?
Not only is it delicious, it also gave us the legendary talents of Ellen DeGeneres.
Yes, it's true.
DeGeneres explained on Oprah's Master Class that her first impromptu stand-up routine
was based around eating a Whopper.
"And they said, 'Will you get on stage and do something funny?'
So I brought a Whopper and fries and a shake."
She then began to talk, only to interrupt herself with a bite of food over and over
until she ran out of time, finishing the meal but not the sentence.
Someone in the crowd liked the routine enough to offer her a stand-up gig, and the rest
is Whopper history.
Whopper whoopsies
Burger King has a long history of putting together some of the most memorable and viral
ad campaigns ever, from their educational Net Neutrality Burger ads, to the Whopper
Freakout clip, where they told angry customers the Whopper had been discontinued forever.
"It sucks."
"It's nuts, and it's ludicrous, and it's stupid.
If Burger King doesn't have the Whopper, they might as well change their name to Burger
Queen."
"Yeah!"
In 2008, for example, the company ruffled feathers with a Whopper ad showing how people
around the world who had never eaten fast food before reacted when fed a Whopper.
Called Whopper Virgins, the short film drew fire from critics who felt it was an "insulting,"
"embarrassing," and "offensive" example of cultural colonialism.
Nearly a decade later, Burger King made headlines again for their ill-advised 2017 "Okay Google"
viral campaign.
In the ad, a Burger King worker says
"I got an idea.
Okay Google, what is the Whopper burger?"
The ad was designed to trigger the viewer's Google Home device to read aloud from the
Whopper's Wikipedia page.
Clever, right?
Well, maybe a bit too clever.
Almost instantly, online pranksters began messing with the Wikipedia entry.
As a result, Google began cheerfully fully reporting wildly inaccurate nonsense, such
as that the Whopper contained rat meat and toenails, included cyanide, was made from
children, and caused cancer.
Google was not amused, and barely three hours after it started, the campaign was shut down.
Amazingly, that wasn't even Burger King's most infamous viral prank.
Back in 2009, Burger King trolled Facebook users with one of the most vicious ad campaigns
of all time.
Called the Whopper Sacrifice, the campaign promised people a coupon for a free Whopper
if they unfriended 10 people on Facebook through a special app.
The app would then send a notification to everyone who was defriended to let them know
their friendship was worth only one tenth the price of a Whopper.
Burger King then doubled down, offering victims the chance to send the person who unfriended
them an "Angry-Gram," which consisted of a Whopper and a personalized note telling them
off.
After Facebook complained, Burger King shut down the app, but not before nearly 234,000
people were unfriended in exchange for Whoppers.
So if you ever thought the Burger King looks like a mean-spirited sociopath, turns out
you were right all along...