Fast food chains aren’t known for their distinctive interiors; rather, a certain bland predictability means one outpost looks and feels pretty much the same as every other.

And then there’s the unexpected experience of walking into the Burger King on Connecticut Avenue in Van Ness, which happens to be the District’s last public purveyor of Whoppers and cardboard crowns for kids. (There is another location at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, but it’s not open to the public.) The 40-year-old restaurant is part burger joint, part museum to movie and music memorabilia from the 1980s and 90s.

But not for long.

Earlier this week, franchise owner Mark James told an Advisory Neighborhood Committee in Ward 3 he’s planning a facelift both for the exterior and the interior of the aging split-level building. “It’s dilapidated, it’s old, it’s not in a good condition. And so we’re proposing a total renovation of the restaurant,” he said.

And that means the collection inside will disappear. The BMX boys from “E.T.,” which hang above the line leading to the food counter — soon to fly away. The giant “Jaws” shark head and the “Jurassic Park” T-rex head that menacingly emerge from opposite walls? Chased off. The two acoustic guitars, posed glamorously in glass cases as you walk into the restaurant’s ground floor, which itself it lined with bright neon lights? They’ll never be strummed again. And all those 80s- and 90s-vintage movie posters, including “The Blues Brothers” and “Terminator 2”? Hasta la vista, baby.

“That’s all gone,” said James after the meeting.

The Burger King opened in 1980, and at the time it was the first fast food restaurant on Connecticut Avenue within city limits. And, maybe not unexpectedly, it prompted pushback in this affluent area of Northwest D.C. Residents worried the drive-thru would threaten pedestrians on the sidewalk; it would mean more trash and rodents; and that it would attract an unsavory element to the neighborhood.

“You know who goes to fast food restaurants,” asked one resident quoted in a Washington Post story. “Drunks and kids and low-class people. People who can’t afford to cook or eat in a nicer place.”

“Let’s face it,” said another. “Fast food restaurants tend to breed the kind of loitering ground that produces not necessarily the most wholesome kind of people. This is a great neighborhood, with decent people. We don’t want that here.”

The opposition — which included a lawsuit that made it all the way to the D.C. Court of Appeals — ultimately failed to stop the Burger King.

As for the collectibles all over the store, James guesses they went up some 25 years ago.

“My boss decorated it. He had a store that sold memorabilia, anything kinda famous. And he just pulled junk out of that building,” he said.

That junk, though, has been something of a local curiosity. People have taken to calling the restaurant the Rock ‘N Roll Burger King, the Hollywood Burger King, and the Magnificent Burger King. Every now and again, someone wanders in, unaware of what they’re about to experience, and posts on social media about it.

“I’m now obsessed with this D.C. Burger King that has not been redesigned since 1997,” tweeted New Republic reporter Kate Aronoff last fall, prompting more than 2,700 likes. “Is this real,” came one incredulous response. “What you have found is a national treasure that we must protect at all costs,” said another.

“Consider this tweet my official nomination of the Van Ness Burger King in D.C. for landmark status,” tweeted Fox 5 reporter Jim Lokay last summer.

On Yelp, one diner who visited last February gave it five stars. “It is absolutely the most unique BK ever in terms of its decor and is worth a trip for the atmosphere alone,” they wrote.

As this WAMU reporter was standing in the restaurant earlier this week, one new customer walked in with her daughter, who pointed at the BMX-riding “E.T.” kids hanging above their heads. “Weird,” marveled the mother.

But is the Van Ness Burger King a national outlier? Was this ever a corporate-sponsored trend among local franchises? There’s a hint that maybe it was — there’s a similar Hollywood-themed Burger King in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, our questions to Burger King parent company Restaurant Brands International about their interior decorating standards have so far gone unanswered.

James clearly has a less romantic view of those aging decorations. He’s the vice-president of operations for the Potomac Foods Group, which operates more than a dozen Burger King restaurants across the region. In a 2017 zoning hearing in Montgomery County, James told officials that one of the group’s Burger Kings—in Gaithersburg—was one of the chain’s best performers in the country.

The Burger King in Van Ness is at the other end of the performance scale. In recent years there were rumors about the location closing, and a proposal to replace it with a Chick-fil-A fell apart when residents objected to a proposed double drive-thru. For now, James says they’re set on keeping the Burger King running. (Potomac Foods doesn’t own the building.) The renovations will include new outdoor seating, accessible entrances, a refreshed interior look and a new outside awning. The building’s awkward split-level design will remain, though the branding of the two main floors — the top level is known as the Capital Theater, and the bottom level is the Rock Cafe — will be history.

“We’re just making the building more pretty,” James told the ANC of the plans on Tuesday evening, where most attendees seemed less concerned about the fate of the quirky decorations and memorabilia than they did about whether the existing drive-thru lanes will remain.

But one resident did speak up on the restaurant’s behalf, saying it served as one option for the thousands of students at the University of the District of Columbia just two blocks away.

“It’s been serving the community for a long time. It just needs to be remodeled,” she said. “The posters are collectible.”

“You want them, girl?” offered James. “You can have them. I don’t want them.”

In fact, the items will go to a warehouse, according to the store manager.

But what he insists he does want to stay the same is the drive-thru. And from what James told the residents at the meeting, it seems that most of the restaurant’s customers weren’t even going in to enjoy the memorabilia his boss had put up so long ago. Sixty percent of the restaurant’s business, said James, comes from drivers.

“If we’re not able to keep our drive-thru, we can’t afford to stay there,” he said.

And some reviewers on Yelp seem to agree that maybe the dated music and movie memorabilia needs to go and that the Burger King’s fate will only improve once it’s been removed.

“I wanted to leave sooner because nothing seem(ed) clean around,” wrote one diner. “New renovations will save this business, as I think people will visit more.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU and has been updated to reflect that this is the only Burger King open to the public in D.C., but technically not the only BK in the city.