Hungry Jack's is the Australian branch of the US Burger King chain. It was unanimously decided that consumers down under were unlikely to know the meaning of the word burger, as that particular food item is known here only as a meatsandwich. The alternative title originates from the name of the Prime Minister at the time, Hungry Kevin, as Australian law states clearly that all new food related enterprises must be named after an unpopular politician. The name was changed to Hungry Jack's because Australians can't spell Kevin.

Hungry Jack's has the added virtue of being the only fast food outlet whose products remotely resemble the images that you see on the menu. As with its American counterpart, Hungry Jack's specialises in the production of a wide variety of delicious meatsandwiches, depending on your mood.

WHOPPER		BACON DELUXE
This is the greatest burger ever conceived by mankind. This is a quantifiable and indisputable fact, beyond the power of science to debunk, much like global warming. A delicious, meaty, solid mass of sheer awesome, the whopper is also the only fast-food burger that takes more than two and a half bites to consume. Despite the whopper's fairly humble construct - low grade meat, lettuce, tomato, pickle, ketchup and bread - my attempts at recreating it at home have been consistantly futile. I can only deduce this is because genuine whoppers contain some variety of crack. The whopper can also be ordered in the form of a double-whopper, or the mighty double-whopper with cheese. However, the latter contains greater than seven times the recommended daily dose of awesome, and some deaths have been attributed.		The name says it all. If it were possible to distill the undiluted deliciousness of bacon, pour it into a shot glass and dump it into a depth-charge of melted cheese, it would taste a lot like the bacon deluxe burger. It's like a bacon-fuelled punch to the bridge of the nose, and each bite is likely to shatter your entire face. If you enjoy picking pieces of bone out of your brain and eye sockets, then the bacon deluxe is your burger of choice. The best way to replicate the taste is to fry bacon every day for a month without cleaning the pan, then pour the excess fat into a mold and eat it. It's like eating three thousand bacons at once. Hungry Jack's is in collaboration with top Geneva physicists to create the perfect bacon, and they are within sight of their goal, although some fear that such a discovery will ultimately destroy us all.
GRILLED CHICKEN BURGER		SPICY CHICKEN BAGUETTE
You should be aware that Hungry Jack's only ever uses the word 'grilled' in the loosest sense possible. Sure, the chicken in this burger was probably 'grilled' at some stage in its existence, but it wasn't lately. And by 'grilled', it's entirely likely that they mean it sat on a grill-shaped surface in the microwave. Or it may simply mean that the chicken was harshly interrogated.		Hungry Jack's, your powers of spice are weak, my son. If you're the kind of person who asks for the mild butter chicken at Indian restaurants, then this is the choice for you. In fact, you're likely to be disappointed even if you are that person. Baguette seems like an inappropriate name for this item. If you want to create an image of something hardcore and spicy, the last thing you're going to do is call it something French.
BREAKFAST WRAP		ONION RINGS
The Hungry Jack's breakfast wrap accounts for about 60% of the world's heart disease. If you eat this, not only will you gain weight, but so will three other people in your viscinity. You can't get better a better hangover cure than a breakfast wrap in combination with a strong cup of coffee.		When Hungry Jack's realised that its french fries were exactly the same down to the molecule as the McDonald's product of the same name, they decided to make up for it with these unique ring-shaped onion chunks. Though they originally tried to pass them off as calamari, they quickly recognised that they weren't fooling anyone.

HEALTH KILL FACTOR: 60%

When you see lettuce, tomato and pickles you might delude yourself into believing that what you're eating falls into the category of health food. You couldn't be further from the truth if you put the truth on one side of the universe and then flew to the other side. You see, what Hungry Jack's purports to be lettuce is actually the flesh of the wily lettuce hog, a creature whose body is composed of greater than 70% fat. And that's the bad fat, not the good fat.

Terrifying

MASCOT RATING: 1/10

The American franchise hit a home run with the recognisable, mildly threatening Burger King character. Hungry Jack's, unfortunately, by virtue of needing to be different, came up instead with three chronically retarded cartoon shapes named Roly, Dicey and Sparkle. I'll leave it up to you to figure out which is which.

It's probably giving them too much credit to suggest it may have taken an entire afternoon for the Hungry Jack's creative department to formulate this concept. I don't know how many people were charged with the task of putting this together but I think we can assume they're either paid too much, or not enough. Off the top of my head I can think of seven more characters that would fit the same theme, and that's without even going into three dimensional shapes like Coney and Prismy.

The Hungry Jack's website also lists a pantheon of lesser characters with names like Pirate and Fairy. I like to imagine that the folks who brainstormed all of this were really, really proud of themselves, and likely stoned. "Oh man check this out, okay? We can make this project like a love letter to Euclidean geometry. We can make Hungry Jack's synonymous with the idea of happy, anthropomorphic shapes. And think of this - their eyes match their physical appearance. So like the square guy actually sees the world through square eyes. It's a metaphor for the way that our human contexts shape the world around us. Hey, man, there's that word again! Shape! Write that down, okay? And pass the joint."

THE VERDICT:

Hungry Jack's is the best drinking food, presuming that a kebab is unavailable. This is because, in the midst of a sense-deadening alcoholic stupor, a Hungry Jack's meatsandwich is the only fast food option that has enough taste for you to be able to register that you're actually eating something. You could duck into a 7-11 and pick up a sausage roll, but you know that you might as well eat the foam out of the inside of the bus seat. For this reason alone, Hungry Jack's is invaluable. Beyond that, however, it's little more than a vaguely superior McDonald's ripoff. And due to the long established and rigorously scientific Law of Diminishing Fast Food Quality, we can be assured that in about a decade Hungry Jack's will taste as bland as McDonald's does today, though by that time McDonald's itself will only be used as packing material for international package delivery.