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Hardees.com: Mankind's light through the darkness

written by  ╚☻♣☼☼╒, staff curator (╚☻♣☼☼╒@smithsonian.com)

Sometimes humanity gains inspiration from a source it would least expect.

The year was 2005.  Mankind was still reeling at every level from the aftereffects of The Event.  Billions were dead.  Paper currency was used to fuel flames huddled over by freezing, hungry survivors; coinage was melted down into musket-balls for ammunition to protect against pillaging marauders.  Wholesome food was a priceless commodity --sometimes Man feasted upon weeds, sometimes cockroaches, sometimes each other.  Children were not named until their eighth birthdays.  Hope was nowhere to be found.

Until Hardees.com was discovered.

Hardee's, a pre-Event fast-food chain, was lucky enough to possess one of the very few Internet servers left unscathed.  In fact, only three other websites were known to have survived: a fan-fiction site dedicated to the characters from "Field of Dreams" building a rocket ship and 'saying hi to aleins [sic]', a rather tragic LiveJournal, and, of course, Google.com.  Below you see what Google looked like shortly after the Event, and far before it assumed governance of all of humanity.

SUPPLEMENTAL EXHIBIT #1

Hardees.com was quite different from these websites.  In fact, it was different from any other fast-food corporation's website.  Rather than a site featuring large pictures of their food, a few valuable coupons, and a menu, Hardees.com was, in fact, a step into another world. 

EXHIBIT A

Nearly every aspect of this website baffles historical analysts.  Why are you in a living room instead of a restaurant?  Is this supposed to be your house?  Are those your legs?  They don't look like your legs!  Questions like these have been pondered for the last few decades, and no satisfactory theory has been devised as to why a fast-food place's website transports you to some guy's den, but it obviously made sense to humanity at some point in history.

And really, it didn't matter to humanity at that time how much sense it made anyway.  The majority of humankind lived underneath highway overpasses, behind dumpsters in back alleys, or if lucky, a tool shed (which, obviously, the Event left untouched).  Food was disgusting if it was on the plate at all.  Survival through the day was never a certainty.  The "smile", once used to convey happiness or joy, was reassigned to mean, "Oh dread, a rat gnawed off my fingers while I slept."  Life was bleaker than ever, and Man's primal instinct of survival was all that kept him alive.  Hardees.com provided a glorious, if artificial, respite from the hellish abuse they knew as life.  Of course, Internet access was inaccessible to most at the time, so the few lucky souls who did have Internet consigned their homes and computers for public use.  People stood in ten-hour lines just to log on to Hardees.com and have a chance to kick their figurative feet up on the coffee table that did not really exist, watch the TV that wasn't there, and look out the window at a sky that was blue instead of a constant terrifying hue of reddish-gray. 

The room was interactive -- the visitor could click any item on the coffee table to use it. 

EXHIBIT B - THE COFFEE TABLE

From left to right: a cell phone, a picture of some nameless chick eating a burger, some Hardee's food, a remote control, a video game system, your (?) wallet, and your (?) legs.  The legs are probably just ornamental, as in those days most people still had legs of their own.

EXHIBIT C - THE CELL PHONE

The cell phone served two purposes when clicked: to bring up a store locator, and to look at allegedly sexy pictures of Paris Hilton.  Unfortunately, the store locator was rendered pointless as the Event managed to collapse every Hardee's restaurant into rubble or sink it into the sea.

The pictures were equally useless.

Unless Pinocchio in a wig is your thing.

EXHIBIT D - THE PICTURE

Clicking on the picture on the coffee table inexplicably makes an answering machine from the 1980s fall on the table.  This entire component of the room baffles researchers for several reasons.  Is this some sort of wireless answering machine that you just set anywhere and play?  The outgoing message makes it obvious that this is "Cindy's" answering machine; so are we sitting in her house?  Does she know we're here?  Is it okay with her that we kick our feet up on the coffee table?  Why does she keep pictures of herself around?  And why did she write a reminder on her picture for her to call herself?  Fortunately, stimulation-starved Event survivors did not hold such rigorous standards to the "how"s and "why"s of this site; otherwise they would likely have held a mass burning of all monitors that had ever displayed it.

The answering machine itself is interactive, as well.  Curiously, it allows the user to download and save the four messages on the machine, if for some reason anyone would ever want to:

A complete knockoff of Borat from Da Ali G Show.  The filename says the guy's name is Achmed, but on the message he said he was Riyadh.  I guess they were in such a desperate rush to quench their thirst for racism that in their frenzy they couldn't manage to make the names the same.

A bimbo screeching about how she met Mr. T.  In the years following up to the event, jokes had given way to simply namedropping B-level celebrities.  Stand-up comedians would take the stage, grab the microphone, and mumble things like "The Olsen Twins LOL" and "Mr. T I PITY THE FOOL" to thunderous applause.  This doubtlessly brought joy to Event survivors everywhere.

A guy named Arnold Weiss rambling on about how he's stalking her or something.  This one actually makes us feel bad.  Whoever was in charge of recording this message for the site really put his all into it.  He even created a name for his character, Arnold Weiss.  They were possible hoping this site would get huge and he would become some sort of cult figure.  God, that's such a bummer.

Someone named Maureen from OnStar notifying her that her airbag has been deployed and making sure she's all right.  Because, you know, the first thing you do when you think someone has been in a car wreck is to call their home phone and say HELLO ARE YOU THERRRE into the answering machine.  This actually casts a lot of light on this entire website.  Apparently Cindy died in a horrific car accident, and you're squatting in her house and assuming her identity.  But you still can't bring yourself to put away that picture, can you?  You fucking sicko.

EXHIBIT E - THE FOOD

Now this was just cruel.

These people were eating fried dirt, and here they're made to look at more carbs than an entire family ate in a given year.  They opted to take the good with the bad, however, and brave this website anyway.  Many who lived in that day remembered the pre-event film "Hook", and opted to prepare "Neverfood" meals by setting bowls and plates full of gravel, rocks and boulders on the table and pretending they were elaborate meals.  The ensuing whimsical Neverfood fights left hundreds of thousands dead.

EXHIBIT F - THE TELEVISION

This was truly the showcase of Hardees.com.  The few Event survivors that did possess a working television were forced to sit through NORAD emergency programming, which generally consisted of garbled transmissions of Grand President Wolfowitz saying, "WE WILL STAND AS ONE WITH OUR PARAGUAYAN BRETHREN TO QUASH THE YELLOW MENACE" intersparsed with the one television episode that survived The Event, which happened to be the episode of Home Improvement in which Tim Taylor debuts the Man's Bathroom.  After dozens of repeat viewings, Tim Allen began to lose his gruff masculine-posturing charm, and many viewers simply gave up on television altogether.  Admittedly, the programming offered on Hardees.com wasn't much better, but viewers ate it up.  Ate it up in a figurative sense, obviously, because the mass starvation of humanity ushered in a generation-long microevolution of human anatomy in which the stomach withered away and food just came down the esophagus straight out the butthole, requiring humans to eat 46 thumb-sized meals per day.  Perhaps this is why the Man's Bathroom was as coveted as it was.

Hardee's programming consisted entirely of commercials for things they could not have.  The main feature was Paris Hilton eating a Thickburger while washing a car.  Again, it's entirely staggering to think that human society once regarded Paris Hilton as attractive or more sexually desirable than a plank of wood wearing mascara.

One highlight features an automobile racing game.  According to all our knowledge of pre-Event racing video games, they didn't involve actually racing a car, but instead viewing a CGI segment of cars taking tight turns and cuts of a camera panning around a car as it morphs from a blueprint to finished product as the text "7 TRILLION COMBINATIONS" vibrates out of control above it in XTREME font.  Under most circumstances it features serenade by rock music phenomenon Drowning Pool.  This particular game features a rap-techno song in which the vocalist says, "we're rolling with big names/we haven't got time for playground games."  Aw man, I was gonna ask this anonymous guy from a commercial for a video game that is shown on a television in a living room which does not actually exist if he wanted to play hopscotch.  Phooey.

EXHIBIT G - THE VIDEO GAME SYSTEM

Completing the entertainment experience was a video game system.  Back in those times, video game companies strove to build the best, most powerful, most fun systems possible, quite different from today.  Shortly after Sony began making systems again some five hundred years after The Event, the PS8 was released to the public.  It featured photo-realistic graphics, light-speed processing, and unprecedented control.  It was clear that no system would top it, so the industry began to move in a different, more avant-garde direction.  Sony claimed that the PS9 was a "statement piece", in fact, it was an eight-foot-tall iron box which cost $14,000, featured a ten-pound brass box with sharp corners and one button that said "PUSH" for the controller, and played Asteroids and Pele's Soccer at five frames per second.  Since that point, gaming has abandoned technical excellence for artistic expression and absurdist experimentation. 

Before discovering this website, modern historians knew only fragments of information about this mysterious "x-box", as it was code-named by researchers.  We now know from what we see here that it was the original creation of the Hardee's corporation and was likely named the "Hardee's Box." 

Surprisingly, this system only plays one game, a ripoff of "Space Invaders". 

This game enthralled some, but its confusing plot alienated others.  The star guy is the Hardee's mascot, right?  And those things above him are Hardee's burgers, fries and drinks, right?  So why are they trying to kill him?  Why is he trying to kill them?  How could a sesame-seed bun possibly absorb a laser blast?  Why is this battle taking place in outer space?  There were some, however, who lived and died for this game, if only to have a chance to make the all-time high-score list.  Their eyes shone bright with the hope that though they dressed in rags and looked ahead to a future of scavenging for insects and desperately seeking clean water sources, they could get on the high scores list and their names would be preserved for eternity.  Unfortunately, the scores were reset every week.  Heh.  Heheh.

Study Questions
 

1. Did you know that the Terms and Conditions page on the Hardee's website strictly forbids reproduction of any of its imagines and that we could get sued for this crap?

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2. Sued!  Can you believe that shit?
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3. Hardee's Thickburger is delicious!  That's not a question, I'm just saying.

4. True or False: Paris Hilton accused Giles Cory of witchcraft and had him pressed to death.

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4. Hardee's!  Why or why not?

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Students: Learn more!  E-mail jonbois@gmail.com if you have questions!