KFC Created A Creepy Colonel Sanders Robot To Take Your Drive-Thru Order

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fast food commercial that could potentially give someone nightmares… until now.

As a lighthearted way to celebrate National Fried Chicken Day, KFC teamed up with the comedic geniuses over at Funny or Die to develop a brand new drive-thru robot. The machine, which looks like a Five Nights at Freddy’s version of KFC’s mascot from the torso up, works via speech recognition software that converts the voice of the KFC employee taking your order into that of Colonel Sanders.

This appears to be the latest in KFC’s high-tech marketing stunts, coming after the chain launched one of their Zinger sandwiches into space for a few days. The new robot, named H.A.R.L.A.N.D. (which stands for Human Assisted Robotic Linguistic Animatronic Networked Device), however, is more creepy than creative, to be honest. It pops out of a mechanized KFC bucket, randomly blinks at you like it’s half-broken, and has a straight face that looks like it’ll jump you at any given moment. I’d expect to find this in the haunted section of a fast food theme park, not at a drive-thru.

Fortunately, it doesn’t look like the spine-chilling robot will be a permanent fixture at KFC locations everywhere, so it’ll probably just be me and a few others that watch the video that feel this type of way.