Ohio has a special place in the history of fast food.
The last two standalone Arthur Treacher’s restaurants in the world are in Northeast Ohio. White Castle is headquartered in Columbus. Giant chains such as Wendy’s, Arby’s and Donato’s were founded here.
Sunday, as Ideastream Public Media was cleaning up at the Associated Press Media Editors ceremony in Columbus, the Ironton Tribune also won several awards. That reminded me that Ironton is the current home of RAX Roast Beef. I was the emcee and I made a reference linking Ironton to RAX. I'm pretty sure people ate it up.
At one time, the chain had hundreds of locations around the world. Today, it’s down to six. What happened? The internet would lay the blame at the animated feet of Mr. Delicious.
Travel with me back to the early ‘90s, when “Vance” was diplomat Cyrus Vance (trying to negotiate an end to the war in Bosnia) and “Harris” usually meant Ed Harris, star of a movie I wasn’t allowed to see (“Glengarry Glen Ross”).
The retro craze was just taking flight thanks to Lenny Kravitz and “Reservoir Dogs” (which I am still not allowed to watch). A new management team was trying to turn around the faltering fortunes of RAX, then based in Columbus.
They hired an edgy marketing agency run by Donny Deutsch. He’s a frequent political commentator today, but in 1992 he was busy creating fictional mascots like Mr. Delicious. The character looks very similar to Max, the 1960s mascot for Forest City Auto Parts. That’s perhaps fitting, as Mr. Delicious conjures the quiet rage bubbling under post-war suburbs with his casual mentions of alcohol-fueled weekends, money troubles and a “rather delicate surgery.”
Bill Welter, then the executive VP of marketing for RAX, said in a 1992 promotional video that Mr. Delicious would “go down as one of the classic characters in advertising history.”
The man knew what he was talking about: he was previously the driving force behind the successful “Where’s the beef?” campaign for Wendy’s. View the comments on the video below, and most of them lament that Mr. D was ahead of his time.
Yet if you Google “Mr. Delicious,” you’ll find a plethora of videos labeling him a disaster. Bill Underhill, the chain’s president at the time, disagreed when I spoke with him in 2022.
“We turned it from where we were losing a million a month to making about $4 million a year,” he said. “Then, we made the mistake of taking over for Citicorp the third largest Hardee’s franchisee. And that’s really what sunk things. Some people try to link it to Mr. D, but it wasn’t him.”
After a long career in marketing, Underhill is now a Las Vegas restaurateur. He joyfully remembered creating a backstory for Mr. Delicious: A Corvair-driving former aluminum siding salesman who was recovering from, in Underhill's recollection, hemorrhoid surgery.
“We caught a fair amount of flak, including from a few of the franchisees in the more rural areas of West Virginia,” he said. “At a meeting they told me that Mr. D was too effeminate.”
Yet who was he, really? The animation is easy to describe, but the voice? Underhill couldn’t recall. Deutsch’s representatives said he was unavailable for an interview.
Googling produces the name Gregg Berger, who is familiar to fans of Garfield, Transformers, Spider-Man and numerous other cartoons and video games. I spoke with Berger ahead of this year’s Comic-Con International, and he said he was not Mr. Delicious. Instead, he thought perhaps it was Greg Berg, another prominent voice actor with credits dating back to “Muppet Babies.” Prior to that, he was on the radio in his home town of Akron.
When I spoke with Berg earlier this month, after reminiscing about Houlihan & Big Chuck and other staples of Northeast Ohio, he thought perhaps Mr. Delicious had been voiced by Gregg Burge. I immediately recognized the name from “The Electric Company.” Unfortunately, Mr. Burge passed way in 1998. His voice doesn’t quite sound like Mr. Delicious, at least to me, so the trail goes cold at this point.
If there was actually a different voice of Mr. Delicious, perhaps he’ll read this piece, send in his pledge of support for Ideastream’s APME Award-winning programming, and contact me with stories and coupons from RAX.
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