The Old-School Boogie-Woogie McDonald's Relic That Made Breakfast Twice As Fun

Back in the 1980s, McDonald's launched its "Taking Breakfast By the Hand" marketing campaign. The campaign made use of boogie-woogie and swing music to advertise McDonald's handheld breakfast options, and the company even went so far as to make an entire cassette of promotional songs titled "Takin' Breakfast By The Hand." The cassette was produced in 1986 to coincide with the ad campaign and featured 13 tracks with names like "Breakfast Scat," "Sizzlin' Mornin'," "Commutin' Couple,"and "Biscuit Boogie." It's unclear how widely available the cassette was, or even if customers were allowed to buy it. 

A copy that was converted to audio on YouTube was found in the attic of one franchisee. The songs on the cassette are all very short, with a total runtime of under 11 minutes — not quite on par with Waffle House and its famous record label. Most tracks focus on the overall idea of the campaign or a specific breakfast sandwich. Notably, the phrase "takin' breakfast by the hand" refers to eating on the go and the portability of the chain's biscuit sandwiches, as well as the Egg McMuffin and our top-ranked McDonald's breakfast item: the Sausage McMuffin with Egg. Spoken-word segments describing each sandwich were also woven into the songs, making them sound more like traditional commercials.

Since every track is essentially a remix of the same idea, the songs on "Takin' Breakfast By The Hand" get a little repetitive, and the spoken-word sections make them sound less like songs you'd want to bop along to on your drive to work. But the reason why they sound so much like commercials is that these were the actual audio tracks used in McDonald's ads for the campaign.

Some of the 1986 commercials you'll find on YouTube use basically the same video with slightly remixed versions of the jingles. There was a concerted effort among restaurants to focus on convenient, hand-held foods in the mid-1980s, and McDonald's was leaning into that heavily. Wendy's was selling on-the-go breakfast sandwiches, and KFC was offering Chicken Littles — essentially small chicken sliders that could be eaten on the run. During this campaign, McDonald's commercials specifically pushed biscuits and biscuit sandwiches, often emphasizing that they were made fresh in-store every morning.

It's unclear how many cassettes McDonald's made and distributed, but the YouTube video was uploaded in 2024. "I recently acquired this 1986 'McDonald's Breakfast Radio' audio cassette," said Consumer Time Capsule on X in 2023; he was the same user who posted it to YouTube after the audio was converted. There don't seem to be any earlier references to the cassette online, either, making this a rare piece of McDonald's history.