In the summer of 1978, a child walked into a Burger Chef, ordered a Fun Meal, and received a cardboard box with Darth Vader on the front. For millions of American kids, that moment was a revelation. The box contained the same burger, fries, and cookie as always, but the cardboard itself was a piece of the movie that had rewired their brains a year earlier. They took those boxes home and kept them on dressers for years, using them as treasure chests for pennies and baseball cards.

No restaurant had ever done anything like it. Burger Chef had gotten the rights from George Lucas to put Star Wars on its kids meal packaging, seven different boxes showing seven scenes from the film, and in doing so invented the movie tie-in. McDonald’s would not do its first movie tie-in until December 1979, a year and a half later. The Star Wars promotion was merely the most spectacular achievement of a chain that had been quietly inventing the modern fast food experience for children since 1973.

That was the year the Thomas brothers, Frank and Donald, introduced the Fun Meal at their Indianapolis-based Burger Chef chain. Six years before McDonald’s ever conceived of the Happy Meal, Burger Chef was putting a child’s meal in a special box with puzzles, riddles, a comic strip, and a toy hidden inside. The toy was different every week. Sometimes it was a plastic figure of one of the chain’s cartoon characters, sometimes a rubber ball, sometimes a punch-out paper puppet, sometimes a flexi disc record so thin you could see through it.

Kids would take the record home, play it on their father’s turntable, and listen to a tiny voice tell a story about the chain’s mascots. The unpredictability was the point. The not knowing what you would get, the reaching into the box, the feeling of pulling out something that belonged only to you. The Thomas brothers did not start out as restaurant men.

They were equipment manufacturers who patented a flame broiler in 1954 capable of cooking 2,000 burgers an hour with a 20-second wait between order and sandwich. In 1957, they opened the first Burger Chef in Indianapolis as a showroom to demonstrate the broiler to other restaurant owners. The restaurant was meant to be a display, but customers came and kept coming. The brothers decided to keep it open.

One year later they had 40 locations. By 1972 they had 1,200, making them the second largest hamburger chain in America, larger than Burger King and Wendy’s. They invented things constantly. The Big Chef, a double-patty sandwich with cheese, lettuce, and sauce, appeared in 1964, three years before McDonald’s introduced the Big Mac.

In 1965, they introduced the Works Bar, a toppings bar where customers piled pickles, relish, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, tartar sauce, mayo, ketchup, and mustard onto their burgers. The salad bar that became standard in restaurants across the country in the 1980s, Burger Chef had one in 1973. They were ahead of everything, and almost nobody remembers them. By 1975, the cartoons on the Fun Meal box had expanded into an entire universe.

There was Burger Chef himself and his sidekick Jeff. There was Burgerini the magician, who performed magic tricks on the inside flap of the box. There was Count Fangburger the vampire, his wife, and his daughter, who appeared in October for Halloween Fun Meals. There was Burgerilla the talking ape, Cackleburger the witch, Werewolf, and Crankenburger, a Frankenstein parody.

An entire family of monsters and magicians lived on the sides of those boxes years before McDonaldland was ever drawn, years before Ronald McDonald had any friends. The voice of Burger Chef in commercials was Paul Winchell, the same man who voiced Tigger in Winnie the Pooh. In 1977, the chain did something else kids never forgot. During baseball season, the Triple Play Fun Meal came on a cardboard tray that doubled as a game board.

The tray came with nine punch-out discs, each featuring a real major league player. Tom Seaver, Mike Schmidt, Nolan Ryan, Dave Winfield, and George Brett were among the 216 different player discs spread across 24 team trays. On the back of every disc was a Burger Chef cartoon character. Kids ate their burger, punched out the discs, set up the tray, and played baseball at the table while their fathers drank coffee and watched.

For many families, Friday night was Burger Chef night. Mothers had cooked all week, fathers came home from work tired, loosened their ties, and said, “Get in the car. ” Kids ran. It was the highlight of the week, better than Saturday, better than Sunday, better in some weeks than a birthday, because their fathers were there.

Not at work, not reading the paper, not fixing something in the garage. Sitting across a small table, watching the box get opened, smiling. Christmas Fun Meals came in boxes with snowy scenes, with the characters wearing scarves and riddles about Santa, and the toy inside was nicer than usual. A small ornament or a figure of Burger Chef wearing a Santa hat.

A child sitting in a warm restaurant in December 1976, hands cold from carrying shopping bags, opening that box and looking up at a mother who smiled back. Then McDonald’s took it. In October 1977, McDonald’s tested something called the Happy Meal in Kansas City. By 1979, they were rolling it out across the entire country.

A burger, fries, a drink, a toy, a cardboard box with cartoon characters and puzzles on it. The exact same product Burger Chef had invented six years earlier, with different cartoons. That was the only difference. Burger Chef filed a federal lawsuit seeking five and a half million dollars, arguing that McDonald’s had stolen everything: the format, the packaging, the whole concept.

The court ruled that the idea of a kids meal in a box with a toy was too generic to be legally protected. The thing Burger Chef had invented from nothing, the thing that had no precedent in the history of restaurants, was ruled too generic. McDonald’s was free to copy it, and they did. With a marketing budget Burger Chef could not match, they made the entire country believe the Happy Meal was their invention.

In 1981, Hardee’s parent company bought what remained of Burger Chef for 44 million dollars. The locations were converted one by one. The Burger Chef sign came down, the Hardee’s sign went up. Sometimes the building stayed exactly the same and only the name changed.

By 1996, it was over. The last Burger Chef in America closed in Cookeville, Tennessee. All 1,200 locations were gone. The cartoon characters, Burgerini, Count Fangburger, Burgerilla, Cackleburger, Werewolf, and the whole Fangmily, were packed up, stored in a warehouse, and forgotten.

The Star Wars boxes ended up in a museum in Chicago. The Triple Play baseball trays ended up on eBay for two hundred dollars a set. What could not be taken was the memory. The box on the table on a Friday night in 1976 with a father across the table.

The toy in small hands. The Star Wars Fun Meal in the summer of 1978, seeing Darth Vader on the front and feeling like the luckiest kid in school. Punching out a Tom Seaver disc and playing baseball on a cardboard tray. The cookie saved for last, always last.

The first generation in America to experience what every kid in every restaurant has experienced for fifty years since. They were the original. They ate the original. They held the first one.

And they remembered.