Spooky burger.

Last night we had to do dinner on the fly, and so I pulled into a Burger King that was under reconstruction and completely shut down except for the drive-through. I was shocked and stunned and terrified and HORRIFIED to see THIS on the menu:

It's so new it isn't even on the Burger King Web site as of this morning.

Of course, I had to get one.

As the ad says, the Halloween Whopper is a normal Whopper but with A1 sauce, and "A1 baked into the bun." That's not what turned the bun black as coal. I suspect lots of food coloring did that.

According to CNBC, this was sold in Japanese Burger Kings last year as the Kuro Burger (in a somewhat different form, per the Independent, which reminds us that kuro means black). In that case, the burger also had black cheese, which I guess didn't test well with U.S. audiences. We will put up with baked goods and candy being weird colors---we've all had birthday cake and cotton candy and such---but we tend to draw the line there. Still, Heinz had some luck with the rainbow ketchup experiment of 2000, so it might have been worth a shot.

As for my Whopper, it was good. I've enjoyed the A1 variants they've been doing. When I took a little bit of the bun on its own, I could only just taste the A1 in that; naturally it was lost in the powerful onion-beef Whopper flavor sensation.

The best thing about the Halloween Whopper would be springing it on people who asked you to get them a Whopper and haven't heard about it.

"Got you your Whopper, Jake."

"Oh, thanks, Joe, I'm hungry and----AAAIIIEEEEEE! WHAT HAPPENED?"

The only scary thing about my dinner last night, though, is that they forgot my fries and I didn't realize it until I got home. AAAIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!!