Planet Holly­wood

We have a list of pictures that will make a word chain to create names of chain restaurants. There are five letters in the answer, and the pictures will create five different chains of restaurants. The pictures often depict two words, each of them being half of a restaurant name, with the endpoints of a chain only displaying one word, or one half of a restaurant name.

The flavor text mentions, "where did these come from," indicating that we need to find the city that each restaurant chain was founded in. Given the lengths of the chains (different, but not unique lengths, shortest is length two), we should try graphing chains on the map. Once the cities are plotted and connected dot-to-dot style, the chains will spell out the answer, from west to east.

In order, the pictures represent:

These pictures make the following chains:

• Jack in the Box, Starbucks, Quiznos, Black Bear Diner
• Pizza Hut, Wingstop, Pizza Hut
• Dairy Queen, Popeyes, Rainforest Cafe, Salt Grass
• Long John Silver's, Texas Roadhouse, Cracker Barrel, Ruby Tuesday, Little Caesars
• Arby's, Krispy Kreme, Hardee's, Five Guys, Arby's

We then need the original location of each restaurant chain:

If we draw out connecting lines between these cities on the United States map, we get the following picture. Reading west to east across the map, the letters spell out our answer: PINDO.