How Big Boy Ended Up in Court Against Itself

How does a hamburger end up in federal court against itself? The story of Big Boy, the grin by the door of more than a thousand American restaurants. In 1936, Bob Wian sold his DeSoto roadster for $300 and bought a ten-stool lunch stand in Glendale, California. Within two years he had a double-deck hamburger, a name and a boy. Then he made an unusual choice: to protect that name, he lent it out, whole states at a time, to local owners who built their own restaurants. Dave Frisch of Cincinnati, by his company's own telling, paid one dollar a year for four states. By 1979, more than a thousand Big Boys stood across the United States and Canada, run by about twenty different owners. If you grew up with one, the sign may have said Frisch's, Elias Brothers, Shoney's, Elby's, Bob's or Eat'n Park. This film follows that map: the hotel company that bought the name for about $7 million and wanted a percentage, the biggest Big Boy owner in the country that reportedly paid $13 million to stop being Big Boy, the customers who voted about eight to one to keep the statue, and a 2001 deal that turned a borrowed name into ownership. Then it follows the strongest piece of the map, Frisch's, with its loans paid off and 80 buildings of its own, into the years after it sold the walls and began paying rent to stay inside them. Along the way you'll meet a cook in Wheeling who never once ate a Big Boy, a waitress in Middletown who stayed forty-three years, and a Frisch family descendant who just wanted one of the statues back. The story is drawn from SEC filings, federal court records, company histories, Time magazine's reporting from the 1950s and local news from Cincinnati, Wheeling and Detroit, and it tries to be fair to everyone in it: the founders and buyers, the franchise owners, and the people who worked the grills and waited the tables. The conclusions are yours to draw. Chapters: 0:00 Big Boys Behind a Fence 3:27 Ten Stools and a DeSoto 7:26 Whole States for a Dollar a Year 11:09 One Percent in Detroit 14:04 Twenty-Two Out of Six Hundred 16:59 The Hotel Company Wants a Percentage 20:21 Sunday Morning in Wheeling, 1982 23:11 The Waitress on Germantown Road 25:14 Thirteen Million Dollars to Leave 28:31 Keep the Boy or Let Him Go? 31:16 The Franchisee Who Bought the Boy 34:31 Florida for the Boy, Plus a Check 39:07 Selling the Walls 42:30 A Month Without Butter 45:44 The Big Boy Graveyard 50:36 Big Boy vs. Big Boy: Dolly's 55:13 What's Left of the Map 58:22 So What Happened to Big Boy? Selected sources: Frisch's Restaurants, Inc. — Form 8-K on the Big Boy trademark agreement, SEC EDGAR (2001) Frisch's Restaurants, Inc. — Form 10-K, fiscal year 2015, SEC EDGAR (2015) National Retail Properties, Inc. — Form 8-K, third quarter 2015, SEC EDGAR (2015) U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio — Frisch's Restaurants v. Elby's Big Boy of Steubenville (1981) U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio — FBB IP LLC v. Big Boy Restaurant Group, temporary restraining order (2025) Time — Modern Living: Burger Meister (1955) International Directory of Company Histories — Frisch's Restaurants, Inc. Company History The Christian Science Monitor — The Big Boy statue (1999) Entrepreneur — Big Boy Franchise Files For Chapter 11 (2000) Weelunk — The Elby's Empire (2016) WCPO I-Team — What went wrong at Frisch's? (2024) WCPO — Free the burger boys (2024) This is a documentary for history and general interest, not financial advice. Some scenes are illustrated with reconstructions. #BigBoy #Frischs #AmericanHistory About this film: some scenes are AI-generated reconstructions, used only where no original footage or photographs exist, and they are marked on screen as reconstructions. The narration is an AI voice. The script is researched and fact-checked against the sources listed above.