T wenty years ago, no one was a bigger beneficiary of the Michael Moore documentary boom than gonzo doc comic Morgan Spurlock who royally punk’d the McDonald’s corporate giant with his uproarious 2004 film Super Size Me. It was a piece of cheek that took advantage of the anti-corporate, anti-fast-food feeling that had been growing, especially in this country since the McLibel trial. He embarrassed the McDonald’s organisation and single-handedly pressured them into withdrawing their mega-portion policies and even into offering unconvincing “healthy” options.
He forced it to eat a triple Mac of shame with a side order of contrition. And it was happening in a pre-social-media age when this kind of proto-viral populist uprising was very difficult to create. Spurlock had come to film-making from his earlier careers as dramatist and MTV prank comic (with his show I Bet You Will, daring members of the public to do wacky stunts).
View image in fullscreen ‘Gross-out mission’: Morgan Spurlock with a poster of Super Size Me at the 2004 Sundance film festival. Photograph: Randall Michelson Archive/WireImage He tuned in brilliantly to the new wackily confrontational, approachable and broadly issue-led mood in documentary that Moore made fashionable. Spurlock was also the ancestor of Sacha Baron Cohen’s legendary stunt-com masterpiece Borat.
His gross-out mission was to eat nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days, taking advantage wherever possible of the irresponsibly of.
