“What a total piece of shit.
Popeye’s, if you’re listening, I’ll do a for-hire romance novel based on…well, Popeye? Is that where your chicken restaurants get their name?
Okay, I just Googled, and it turns out Popeye’s is named after Popeye Doyle, as portrayed by Gene Hackman in The French Connection? Whaaa…?
So I guess technically there already IS a book based on Popeye’s, and it’s called The French Connection.
But dudes, I’ll write you a great romance. It’s perfect. It’ll be a detective story that goes all soft and mushy, unlike your delicious friend chicken.
In fact, let me just lay out a premise for several different fast food franchises, and I’ll add my fee for writing them:
Wendy’s: Wendy is the greatest burger chef in the world, known as much for her delicious burgers as she is her red hair. But when she decides to make her burger patties square, she rocks the burger world, and she finds a surprising ally in her old rival, Thomas Davies, and the two fuel each other competitively and, perhaps, in other ways.
Fee: I’ll do this one for free. I fuckin’ love Wendy’s.
McDonald’s: a McDonald’s marketer from the 90’s end up in a time machine and comes to the present, only to discover that McDonald’s has abandoned most of its McDonaldland characters because some jackoff made a stupid movie where eating McDonald’s one time made him barf. Anyway, this plucky marketer is teamed up with a more cynical fellow who is constantly talking about AI algorithms and blah blah blah, and she has to remind him of the magic of characters, narrative, and fries made in beef tallow.
Fee: I worked for McDonald’s for about a year when I was 15, and I made something like $4.50 an hour. I figure you could pay me a fairer wage, let’s call it $6.00 an hour, so a makeup of $1.50 an hour…Let’s call it $1500.
Burger King: The King of Burger is bored, lonely, and kind of creepy ever since a wizard put a curse on him that froze his face is to a plastic-y, terrifying rictus. The only way to break the curse is for him to eat the most delicious burger he’s ever laid face on. In rides a hero who might just be able to provide.
Fee: $500. This is a pretty random figure. I don’t really have much of a personal relationship with Burger King. But they do feel wildest in terms of what they’ll do marketing-wise, so game recognizes game.
Arby’s:
In the gold rush town of Arby, Colorado, prospectors arrive by the bucketful every day to make their fortune. A woman, Horseysauce (pronounced “or-see-saw-say,” she’s French) has set up shop feeding hungry golddiggers her delicious roast beef sandwiches. But when an evil land baron comes along and attempts to put her and most of the town out of business, it’s up to Madame Horseysauce and her companion, a miner with a heart of gold, even if his pickaxe can’t seem to find any, to right the wrongs and save the town.
Fee: $800. I’ve eaten Arby’s like twice in my life, and though I don’t personally like them, I respect their commitment to the curly fry. Is it me, or are curly fries never quite hot enough? That’ll also be a plot point. Horsesauce makes curly fries in honor of her miner friend’s curly hair.
KFC: Let me start by saying where Tender Wings of Desire goes wrong.
It’s boring.
The plot is boring: precocious young woman does not want to marry a duke and instead wants to run away and make a life for herself, work and go to school and stuff.
Which, Honey, sounds more fun than it is.
She meets a man named Harlan, and they fall instantly in love.
Now, the conflict, because there must always be a conflict in a romance, comes when our heroine, Madeline, confesses to Harlan that she used to be a lady of society, set to marry a duke, but she ran away because she…wanted to make her own way in the world. Which means working in a sleazy seaside bar, I guess.
She gets pissed off because she finds out that Harlan is not a simple sailor, he’s actually a Colonel who created a restaurant empire!
Upon learning this, Madeline rides her horse to a cliff. I think she’s going to just leave the seaside town, not throw herself off, but whatever. Harlan admits he’s wealthy and powerful and left that behind to see the world, but now he has to return to the States and be The Colonel again.
Madeline doesn’t want to go with him because the book requires some kind of plot. She has to be convinced that she likes her current life that she built for herself. It’s one of those things where it’s like, “It’s not much, it’s a bartending job and a place to sleep above the bar, but damn it, I earned it!”
I don’t know why fictional characters are so obsessed with that. I mean, I like doing things for myself, but if someone was like, “We’re totally infatuated with each other, and it turns out she super rich, and it’d be preferred by society that I not work in a bar” I think I’d somehow, some way, muddle through.
But I guess this is before Nintendo was invented, so whatever.
The plot is just so basic, the book is so boring, there’s NO description of the Colonel really knocking the back out, so it’s pretty chaste. NOBODY would give this a second glance if it weren’t a KFC marketing gimmick.
Which I’m not opposed to, but there are just so many missed opportunities.
For starters, Madeline could be betrothed to a boring duke who’s a hamburger magnate. She’s eaten many a burger and she finds them tasteless and boring. If only there was something herby-y-er, spicier.
Second, why does she run away to a seaside town and meet Harlan there? Isn’t the way to do this, you set it in The States, she lives in a seaside town where everyone is eating fish 24/7, and then she runs away to rural Kentucky where she gets a job working on a chicken farm?
Third, Madeline gets on the Colonel’s radar because she has an unusual quirk of bringing her lunch to work in a red and white striped bucket.
Fourth, there HAS to be a duel for Madline’s affection, but instead of pistols at dawn, it’s fried food at midday. Fish filet versus the Colonel’s secret recipe. Duh.
Finally, at the book’s end, a shadowy figure waits in the wings. He has his own ideas for what the future of chicken looks like. His name…Popeye.
Lotta missed opportunities in this book, and nothing that makes this remotely KFC-related. Normally I guess it’d be a good thing if a novel didn’t feel like it was written as KFC propaganda, in fact it’s one of the top criteria on the Pulitzer consideration process checklist, I think, but in this one case, I could’ve gone for it.
Fee: This one’s $2500. Because it’s damn good, and because I had to read your original recipe, and it sucks.”