Known for his crescent moon head, sunglasses and piano-playing, the character played the song "Mack the Knife", which was made famous in the United States by Bobby Darin.

Originally conceived as a promotion to increase dinner sales by Southern California licensees, Mac Tonight's popularity led McDonald's to take it nationwide on August 27, 1987.

Looking to increase the dinner business, the agency was inspired by the song "Mack the Knife" by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, made famous in the United States by Bobby Darin in 1959.

[3] The character, who played a grand piano atop either a floating cloud or a giant Big Mac (hence the name), was intended to garner a "cult-like" following.

[3] With concerns that he was too typical of the West Coast, in February 1987, it was decided that the character would feature on national advertisements, which aired that September.

[3] A September 1987 survey by Ad Watch found that the number of consumers who recalled McDonald's advertising before any other doubled from the previous month, and was higher than any company since the New Coke launch in 1985.

[9] In 2006, McDonald's brought back the character in territories throughout Southeast Asia such as in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and China.

The Asian-exclusive campaign featured an animated Mac Tonight dancing atop a McDonald's restaurant while singing and playing a saxophone.

[13] Several McDonald's restaurants in the early 1990s were fitted with Mac Tonight hydraulically powered animatronic figures built by Mannetron[14] with the character playing a piano.

[16] Ronald McDonald House Charities started the annual Mac Tonight Gala fundraiser, which was renamed Masquerade Ball in 2018.

[17] Mac Tonight has a heavy association with vaporwave and appeared on the cover of the split album Late Night Delight by Saint Pepsi and Luxury Elite,[18][19] where he became an icon of the genre.

By 2016, YouTube was removing Moon Man videos for violating its community guidelines on hate speech, and AT&T, whose text-to-speech software was used to create the meme, had edited it to filter out the character's name and obscenities.

[28] A mod for the video game Doom featuring Moon Man as the playable character and racist stereotypes as enemies was also created.