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00:00If you ate fast food in America in the 1970s, there's a very good chance your favorite item on the
00:05menu does not exist anymore.
00:07Not a different recipe. Not renamed.
00:10Gone completely, pulled off the board decades ago, and never coming back.
00:15I bet you can't remember all 30 of these discontinued fast food items from the 1970s.
00:21And number 30 is the one that changed the entire industry, and nobody ever noticed it happening.
00:27Number 1. McDonald's Hula Burger
00:30In 1963, testing what to offer Catholic customers on meat-free Fridays, McDonald's ran a real head-to-head trial
00:39in Cincinnati between two options.
00:41The Filet-O-Fish, and a grilled pineapple slice with a slice of cheese on a bun, called the Hula
00:48Burger.
00:48The Filet-O-Fish won, and the Hula Burger vanished into history, remembered today mostly as the answer to a
00:56trivia question about the burger that almost was.
00:59It never made it out of that one test market, and it stayed gone for good.
01:04The idea itself wasn't crazy for the era.
01:06Plenty of chains experimented with meatless options for Friday customers throughout the decade.
01:11But the pineapple and cheese combination never found an audience beyond that single Cincinnati trial.
01:17And Ray Kroc himself later said the Hula Burger was one of the strangest ideas the company ever seriously tested.
01:25Number 2. Burger Chef's Fun Meal
01:28Before Happy Meals existed, Burger Chef had already invented the kids' meal-with-a-toy concept with the Fun Meal
01:35years ahead of McDonald's.
01:37Burger Chef itself grew to nearly a thousand locations by the late 1970s before General Foods sold the struggling chain
01:44to Hardee's in 1982.
01:46And virtually every Burger Chef closed or converted within a couple of years.
01:50The Fun Meal and the toys inside it, and the entire chain that invented the format McDonald's would later perfect,
01:58are gone.
01:59Kids who grew up going to Burger Chef in the 1970s remember the specific character mascots printed on the boxes,
02:06distinct from anything McDonald's offered at the time,
02:08and the sense of visiting a genuine rival with its own personality,
02:13rather than simply a smaller copy of the Golden Arches.
02:17Number 3. A&W's Burger Family
02:20The Papa, Mama Teen, and Baby Burger
02:23A&W Root Beers Restaurant Chain sold a whole family of burgers named like sitcom characters.
02:30The Giant Papa Burger, the Mama Burger, the Teen Burger, and the Small Baby Burger.
02:35A genuinely clever menu built around the idea of a burger for everyone at the table.
02:40A family of four could walk up to an A&W counter and order by roll, rather than by size
02:46or ingredient.
02:47Everyone simply asked for their designated burger.
02:50And the naming alone made the menu feel warm and familiar, in a way few competitors ever managed.
02:56Most of these names and portions were phased out over the decades, as A&W restructured its menu repeatedly.
03:03And the specific Papa, Mama, Teen, Baby lineup that made ordering a small family joke has disappeared from current menus.
03:11Ordering at the counter meant a genuine bit of family theater every time.
03:15The dad calling out for a Papa Burger, the littlest kid proudly asking for the baby burger by name.
03:21A small piece of menu design that turned every visit.
03:24Number 4. Burger King's Yumbo
03:28Long before anyone talked about chicken sandwiches taking over fast food, Burger King sold the Yumbo.
03:34A hot ham and cheese sandwich on a bun.
03:37One of the chain's original menu items going back to the early 1960s.
03:41It quietly disappeared from menus decades ago.
03:44A genuine hot ham sandwich from a burger chain.
03:48And today, almost nobody under 60 has ever heard the name.
03:52It sat quietly on the menu for years, ordered by regulars who preferred a hot ham sandwich to a burger.
03:58Until it was eventually phased out entirely as Burger King's menu narrowed around its core beef offerings in the decades
04:05that followed.
04:07Number 5. KFC's Kentucky Fried Chicken Sandwich
04:11The original 1970s formation, not today's.
04:14The KFC chicken sandwich you can buy right now bears the same name as one sold in the 1970s.
04:21But the item itself, the specific patty, the bun, the sauce, the whole construction from that era, is not what's
04:29on the menu today.
04:30It's been reformulated and relaunched so many times that the exact sandwich a 1975 customer ordered no longer exists in
04:38any form.
04:39Fast food historians who've tracked the recipe changes count at least three distinct reformulations of the sandwich between the 1970s
04:46and today.
04:47Each one different enough that a 1970s customer eating today's version would likely say it wasn't the same food at
04:53all.
04:53If you remember driving to a Kentucky Fried Chicken that had actual dine-in seating and a bucket of chicken
04:59meant the whole family ate for the week.
05:01Hit subscribe because this channel exists for people who remember exactly what fast food used to be before it became
05:08what it is now.
05:10Number 6. Arthur Treacher's The Entire Experience
05:14Arthur Treacher's fish and chips grew to over 800 locations by the late 1970s.
05:21An entire fast food chain built around British-style fried fish and chips wrapped in paper,
05:26complete with a mascot dressed as a proper English butler.
05:30The chain collapsed dramatically through the 1980s and 90s down to a small handful of locations.
05:36And the specific fish and chips as fast food experience, at that scale, in that many towns, is gone.
05:43Number 7. Sambo's Pancakes
05:46Before the chain's name became the reason it vanished.
05:49Sambo's grew to over a thousand restaurants across the country in the 1970s.
05:54A pancake and coffee shop chain enormously popular with families and truckers alike.
05:58Controversy over the restaurant's name and imagery escalated through the late 1970s and early 1980s.
06:05And the chain collapsed from over a thousand locations to a single restaurant within just a few years.
06:12An entire nationwide pancake house experience disappeared almost overnight.
06:18Number 8. Long John Silver's Fish and Fries
06:21The original scale of it
06:23Long John Silver's grew to more than 1,500 locations by the late 1970s and early 1980s,
06:29making fried fish and chips a mainstream fast food category, the way burgers dominated everywhere else.
06:36The brand still exists today, but at a small fraction of that footprint,
06:40and the specific experience of a Long John Silver's being as common on a strip as a McDonald's has disappeared
06:46from most of the country.
06:48Number 9. Jack in the Box's Original Clown Head Architecture and Drive-Thru Speaker Box
06:54Jack in the Box's actual mascot in the 1970s was a giant clown head mounted on a pole at the
07:00drive-thru,
07:01which you spoke directly into to place your order.
07:04A genuinely strange and memorable piece of fast food architecture.
07:08The company retired the giant clown head speaker boxes industry-wide by the early 1980s after a wave of vandalism
07:15and killed the character entirely for over a decade after that.
07:19The specific experience of ordering into a giant clown head is completely gone.
07:26Number 10. McDonald's Onion Nuggets
07:29In some markets, McDonald's sold deep-fried onion nuggets,
07:34essentially a McDonald's-branded onion ring alternative,
07:38breaded rings and pieces of onion fried up alongside the fries,
07:41as a limited or regional item during parts of the 1970s.
07:45It never became a permanent national menu fixture and disappeared,
07:49one of dozens of items McDonald's tested regionally and quietly dropped as the national menu standardized.
07:56Number 11. Burger King's Whaler
07:59The Original Tartar Sauce Fish Sandwich Rollout
08:02Burger King's own fish sandwich, the Whaler,
08:05launched to compete directly with McDonald's Filet-O-Fish in the 1970s,
08:10complete with its own jingle and mascot imagery playing on the name.
08:14Commercials for the Whaler leaned hard into the pun,
08:17with cartoon whale imagery and a jingle built entirely around the name,
08:22a level of dedicated marketing for a single sandwich
08:25that fast food chains rarely commit to for any one item today.
08:28It was eventually renamed and reformulated multiple times over the following decades,
08:34and the specific Whaler branding and recipe from that original 1970s launch is gone,
08:40replaced today by an entirely differently branded fish sandwich.
08:44Number 12. Howard Johnson's 28 Flavors of Ice Cream
08:48served at a genuine sight-down orange-roofed restaurant on nearly every highway.
08:53At its peak, Howard Johnson's operated over a thousand restaurants recognizable by their orange roof
08:59and turquoise spire,
09:01serving fried clams and their famous 28 ice cream flavors to families on every major American highway.
09:07And here is where I want to hear from you.
09:10In the comments, tell me two specific things.
09:12The discontinued fast food item you would pay real money to taste one more time,
09:17and the name of the restaurant or chain it came from,
09:20especially if it's a small local or regional place.
09:23Not just the big names.
09:24Both!
09:25I am reading every single one,
09:27and half this comment section grew up on a chain the other half has never even heard of.
09:32So read theirs too.
09:35Number 13. Dairy Queen's Hoolaville and the Whole World of Regionally Exclusive Blizzard Predecessors
09:41Before the Blizzard existed,
09:44Dairy Queen sold a rotating cast of regional and limited soft-serve creations
09:48under names most people today have completely forgotten.
09:51Tested market by market throughout the 1970s,
09:55almost none of these predate the Blizzard treats survived into the current menu,
09:59replaced entirely once the Blizzard launched nationally in 1985,
10:03and became the singular signature item.
10:06Number 14. Del Taco's Original Big Del Burger Taco Hybrid Concept
10:12Del Taco experimented through the 1970s with hybrid items straddling the line between burger stand and taco stand,
10:20since the chain began literally as a combination of both concepts.
10:24Most of these hybrid items were phased out as the chain's identity consolidated firmly around Mexican-style fast food,
10:31and the specific burger-adjacent items from Del Taco's earliest years are gone from the menu entirely.
10:38Number 15. Roy Rogers' RR Bar, the Actual Fixings Bar
10:42Roy Rogers' Restaurants, the Western-themed chain,
10:46featured a genuine fixings bar right at the counter
10:49where customers built their own roast beef sandwiches with a wide array of toppings.
10:53A rare, hands-on customization concept for the era's fast food.
10:58As the chain shrank dramatically from its 1970s peak of hundreds of locations to a small remaining footprint today,
11:05the specific build-your-own RR bar,
11:08experience became something only a shrinking number of remaining locations still offer.
11:13Number 16. White Castle's Fish Nibblers
11:16White Castle, already known for its tiny square burgers,
11:20sold fish nibblers, small bite-sized breaded fish pieces,
11:25as a menu item through parts of the 1970s and beyond.
11:29The item was eventually dropped from the standard menu,
11:32one of many smaller items that came and went off White Castle's board over the decades
11:36as the chain refined its offerings around the core slider.
11:41Number 17. Burger King's Entire Burger King Kids Club Structure Predecessor Concepts of the Era
11:46Before organized kids' club branding existed industry-wide,
11:51Burger King's earlier kids-focused promotions and characters throughout the 1970s were far more ad hoc,
11:57tied to specific regional promotions and premiums that came and went without ever being centralized.
12:03Most of these specific 1970s-era promotional characters and giveaways have been completely forgotten,
12:09predating the more famous kids' club branding that came later.
12:13Number 18. Wiener Schnitzel's Original German-Themed Presentation
12:18Der Wiener Schnitzel, the hot dog chain founded in the 1960s,
12:23leaned heavily into a German restaurant aesthetic in its early decades,
12:27including menu presentation and branding tied to that theme far more heavily
12:31than the streamlined hot dog stand identity the chain shows today.
12:36Much of that original German-themed presentation was phased out over time
12:40as the brand simplified toward its current identity.
12:43Early locations leaned into the theme with staff uniforms,
12:46menu board lettering, and building details that referenced Bavarian architecture,
12:51a level of thematic commitment for a hot dog stand that would look almost eccentric
12:55by today's fast food branding standards.
12:58Number 19. Chock-Full-O-Nuts Lunch Counter Sandwiches
13:01Before it became purely a coffee brand.
13:04Chock-Full-O-Nuts operated an actual chain of lunch counters through the 1970s
13:09in addition to its coffee business,
13:11known particularly for a distinctive cream cheese and nut bread sandwich
13:15that was a genuine New York institution.
13:17The restaurant side of the business was sold off and shuttered over the following decades,
13:22leaving only the coffee brand behind.
13:24And the lunch counters and their specific sandwiches are gone.
13:28Office workers in Manhattan lined up daily for that specific cream cheese and nut bread combination.
13:34A sandwich distinctive enough that people who moved away from New York
13:38spent years afterward trying to describe it to confused friends who had never heard of such a thing.
13:43Number 20. Geno's Hamburgers and the Baltimore-based chain's entire Kentucky Fried Chicken co-branding experiment.
13:51Geno's, a regional East Coast burger chain founded by Baltimore Colts players,
13:56grew to hundreds of locations through the 1970s,
14:00and at one point operated a co-branded format selling Kentucky Fried Chicken alongside its own burgers in the same
14:06restaurants.
14:07Marriott bought and dissolved the chain in the mid-1980s,
14:11converting the locations to Roy Rogers,
14:13and the specific Geno's KFC co-branded restaurants that many East Coast families grew up eating at vanished entirely.
14:21The unusual pairing meant a single drive-thru window could hand you a bucket of fried chicken
14:26and a Geno's giant burger in the same order.
14:28A combination that felt perfectly normal to kids who grew up with it
14:32and baffles people encountering the concept for the first time today.
14:37Number 21. Burger King's Yumbo returns to mind alongside its lesser-known specialty sandwiches line of the era.
14:44Beyond the Whaler and the Yumbo, Burger King ran an entire rotating cast of specialty sandwiches through the 1970s
14:52that tested different formats and proteins against McDonald's more standardized menu,
14:57most of which were quietly dropped as Burger King's menu consolidated in the 1980s around the core Whopper lineup.
15:04Almost none of that original specialty sandwich variety survives on today's menu.
15:09Number 22. Carol's restaurants, the entire chain, before it became Burger King.
15:16Carol's was its own independent burger chain through the 1960s and 1970s in the Northeast,
15:22with its own menu, its own mascot, and its own loyal following.
15:26Before, the company began converting locations to Burger King franchises
15:30and eventually became one of the largest Burger King franchisees in the country.
15:35For families who grew up going to Carol's specifically,
15:38the original chain and its own distinct menu disappeared entirely into a different brand.
15:44Long-time Carol's regulars in upstate New York and New England
15:47still argue online about specific menu items the chain sold that never made it into Burger King's national lineup,
15:54insisting that something genuine was lost in the conversion beyond just a sign-out front changing.
15:59Number 23. Zip's drive-in and the broader world of regional drive-in chains with full carhop service.
16:07Beyond the famous names, hundreds of smaller regional drive-in chains across the country in the 1970s
16:14offered full carhop service.
16:16A server bringing the tray to your car window on roller skates or on foot,
16:20hooking it right onto your door.
16:22A specific format of fast food that required no walking inside at all.
16:27Teenagers specifically sought out carhop jobs for the tips and the social scene of the parking lot itself,
16:33which functioned as a genuine weekend gathering spot in countless small towns.
16:38Cars parked in rows with trays hooked on the windows and radios playing across the lot.
16:44Almost all of these regional carhop drive-ins closed by the 1980s and 90s
16:48as the walk-up and drive-through format took over the entire industry.
16:52Number 24. Knoll's distinctive Mexican fast food menu before its merger and eventual disappearance into Del Taco.
17:01Noggle's built a devoted following through the 1970s and 80s with a menu genuinely different from Del Taco's,
17:08including specific items like the Macho Burrito that fans still talk about with real intensity decades later.
17:14After a merger and years of decline, the original Noggle's brand and its specific menu effectively disappeared,
17:22absorbed into competitors, and the particular items fans loved most are gone.
17:28Decades after the brand effectively disappeared,
17:31dedicated fans have run online petitions and even attempted small-scale revivals,
17:36trying to recreate the exact Macho Burrito recipe from memory,
17:39a level of devotion rarely seen for a fast food item that stopped being sold before many of today's customers
17:46were even born.
17:47Number 25. McDonald's Deluxe Line Predecessors and the entire pre-supersizing portion culture.
17:54Before the concept of supersizing existed at all,
17:57portion sizes across the entire fast food industry in the 1970s were smaller by default,
18:03with no oversized option offered at any price.
18:05And the specific small-by-default portion culture of that decade,
18:10the standard fries cup, the standard soda, the standard burger,
18:14is a version of fast food that simply does not exist as the baseline anymore,
18:18on any chain's menu, at any price point.
18:21A regular fries order in the 1970s was smaller than what most chains now call their small size,
18:27and a regular soda was smaller still,
18:30meaning the entire baseline scale of an ordinary fast food meal has shifted upward across the whole industry,
18:36without any single chain ever announcing the change out loud.
18:40Number 26. Bob's Big Boys regionally named Double Decker
18:45before the Big Boy name and mascot fragmented into competing regional owners.
18:50The original Big Boy Double Decker hamburger, topped with a special sauce,
18:54was sold under the Big Boy name across a network of regional operators,
18:59Bob's, Frisch's, Elias Brothers, and others,
19:03each running its own version of the menu and mascot through the 1970s.
19:07As the parent brand fragmented and many regional operators sold off or closed over the following decades,
19:14the specific version of Big Boy that any given American grew up with,
19:18tied to their exact region,
19:21has largely disappeared even where the name survives elsewhere.
19:24A kid in Michigan grew up utterly convinced that Elias Brothers' Big Boy
19:28was simply how Big Boy looked and tasted everywhere in the country,
19:32while a kid in Ohio held the exact same conviction about Frisch's version,
19:36and neither one discovered until adulthood, often on a road trip,
19:41that the mascot statue and the menu itself changed entirely
19:44depending on which regional operator held the territory.
19:48Number 27. Lums, the entire chain, and its beer-steamed hot dogs.
19:54Lums built its identity in the 1960s and 70s specifically around hot dogs steamed in beer,
19:59a genuinely distinctive fast food concept.
20:02Growing to hundreds of locations before financial troubles and ownership changes,
20:07dissolved the chain by the 1980s.
20:10The specific beer-steamed hot dog format that gave Lums its whole identity
20:14disappeared along with the chain itself.
20:17Number 28. Red Barn's Barn Buster and the chain's distinctive barn-shaped restaurant architecture.
20:24Red Barn, instantly recognizable by its actual barn-shaped buildings,
20:29sold a large stacked burger called the Barn Buster
20:32and grew to hundreds of locations through the 1970s
20:36before being acquired and largely converted or closed by the early 1980s.
20:41The barn architecture wasn't just a gimmick.
20:44The restaurants were genuinely built to resemble real barns,
20:48red paint and all,
20:49standing out dramatically against the standardized rectangular boxes
20:53most competing chains used,
20:55which made spotting one from the highway effortless for a hungry family driving at dusk.
21:00Both the specific burger and the genuinely unusual barn-shaped restaurants that housed it
21:05are almost entirely gone from the American landscape now,
21:09driving past an actual red barn sitting in a strip of highway commercial development
21:14was disorienting even at the time.
21:17And the handful of red barn buildings that survive today
21:19have almost all been repurposed into other businesses entirely.
21:23The barn shape now advertising something with no connection at all
21:27to the burger chain that built it.
21:29Number 29. The self-service condiment culture that didn't exist yet.
21:34A worker built your order exactly every time, by hand.
21:38Beyond any single item,
21:40the entire fast food experience of the 1970s assumed a counterworker assembling your order by hand
21:46to order, item by item,
21:48rather than the pre-made, sitting-under-a-heat-lamp, grab-and-go model
21:53that dominates much of the industry today.
21:55That specific by hand, made-to-order counter experience,
21:59once the default at nearly every chain on this list,
22:02has become the exception rather than the rule.
22:04You could watch your food being built in front of you at nearly any counter in the country.
22:09The exact ingredients going on in the exact order you asked for,
22:13and sending something back because it was wrong,
22:15meant they remade it by hand again,
22:17not because a machine had misfired.
22:19Number 30. And here is the one that changed the entire industry,
22:23and nobody ever noticed it happening.
22:25Every single item and chain on this list disappeared for the same underlying reason.
22:30The fast food industry spent the second half of the 20th century consolidating
22:34from hundreds of small and mid-sized regional chains,
22:38each with its own menu, its own personality,
22:41its own version of a burger or a fish sandwich or a hot dog,
22:45into a small handful of national mega-brands
22:47offering an increasingly standardized menu everywhere in the country.
22:51Sambos, Genos, Noggles, Red Barn, Lums, Carols,
22:57the regional big-boy operators.
22:59These were not failed imitations.
23:01They were genuine competing visions of what fast food could be,
23:05each one specific to the region and the era that produced it,
23:09and one by one, through buyouts,
23:11franchise conversions, and slow financial collapse.
23:15Almost all of them disappeared into the handful of brands
23:19you can now find in identical form in every single town in America.
23:23We traded a country where the fast food you ate
23:26depended on where you lived,
23:28where a kid in Baltimore grew up on Genos
23:31and a kid in California grew up on Noggles,
23:34and neither one had ever heard of the other.
23:36For a country where every fast food menu,
23:39from coast to coast,
23:40is now functionally the same eight or nine logos,
23:43we gained perfect consistency.
23:45We lost the specific,
23:47we lost the specific, regional,
23:48slightly strange, fiercely loved local version of fast food
23:52that an entire generation grew up with
23:54and can now barely prove ever existed,
23:57except in the stubborn memory of the people who ate there.
24:00Think about what that consolidation actually required.
24:03Hundreds of independent regional chains,
24:06each one somebody's genuine business,
24:08each one employing local teenagers and feeding local families,
24:12had to be bought out,
24:13franchised over, or driven under,
24:15one at a time,
24:17across five decades,
24:18until the landscape that used to be a patchwork
24:21of hundreds of distinct local flavors
24:23became a handful of identical logos,
24:26repeating themselves every few miles
24:28down every highway in the country.
24:30Nobody planned this outcome as a single decision.
24:33It happened the same way
24:34everything else on this channel happened,
24:36through thousands of individual business failures
24:38and buyouts that each made sense on their own,
24:41until one day the specific, regional version of fast food
24:45that had defined an entire childhood was simply gone,
24:48replaced by something that looked the same
24:51in every town from Maine to California.
24:53There are about 70 million Americans alive right now
24:56who remember at least one name on this list
24:59from personal experience,
25:00who ordered a Yumbo,
25:02who ate at a Sambo's,
25:04who grew up on their specific region's version of Big Boy
25:07and assumed, as a child,
25:09that it was the same everywhere.
25:11It wasn't.
25:12And now most of it is gone,
25:14replaced by the same eight logos everywhere you go.
25:17Somewhere in a box of old photographs,
25:19someone's family still has a picture taken
25:21in front of a barn-shaped red barn,
25:23or under a Sambo's sign.
25:25Evidence of a place that a Google search today
25:28can barely confirm ever existed,
25:31and within another generation or two.
25:33Even that photographic evidence
25:35will have nothing left standing behind it
25:36to compare against.
25:38No building,
25:39no franchise,
25:40no menu,
25:41just the photograph itself
25:42as the only remaining proof.
25:44So tell me,
25:45in the comments,
25:46the discontinued fast food item
25:48you'd pay real money to taste again,
25:50and the name of the restaurant,
25:52especially the small regional ones
25:54nobody else has heard of,
25:55because you may be one of the last people
25:57who can prove that place ever existed at all.
26:00Subscribe if you remember eating
26:02at a fast food chain that doesn't exist anymore.
26:04Share this with someone from your hometown
26:06who ate there with you.
26:09And I will see you on the next one.
26:11I will see you on the next one.
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