Life is all about surprises, and when you were a kid, the best surprises you could look forward to were the toys you’d get in a Happy Meal. As if eating delicious McNuggets weren’t a big enough treat on their own, the icing on the cake (or the sweet and sour sauce on the McNugget) was the toy that would come along with it.
In this day and age of kids preferring the rewards of Snapchat followers or a free app with their meal, the appeal of small trinkets have waned. If you need proof, just go to the cereal aisle of your local grocery store and see how many cereal brands offer any sort of reward.
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Just because kids these days don’t see small tchotchkes as something to desire doesn’t change how iconic some of the rewards in Happy Meals have been over the years! Take a look at some of the best rewards from over the years and the smell of the ball pit will come rushing back in no time.
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McNugget Buddies
We can only assume that at a board meeting for Happy Meals toys, someone said, “Hey guys, I’ve got an inside source on a guy who can get me countless lumps of amorphous brown plastic, so what is we put clothes on them and pretended they were anthropomorphic chicken McNuggets?” and history was made.
Chip ‘N Dale Racers
When all originality failed in the Happy Meal toy brainstorming departed, the powers that be always seemed to default to “Put recognizable character in a car.” It seemed like virtually every animated series released in the ’80s and ’90s got one of these cars at some point, but these ones that were based on Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers were some of the coolest.
Tiny Toons Flip Cars
Now, I know I just talked about how cool the Chip ‘n Dale cars were, but these cars featuring characters from Tiny Toons definitely broke the mold in that they were two cars in one! If you didn’t like the character on one side, you could flip the car over for a brand-new character and vehicle.
LEGO Sets
LEGO sets have always been expensive, no matter how many pieces came in a set or what the set was based on, so being able to get a small bag full of pieces was always awesome. Even if you just ended up adding the pieces to your massive collection, there was no limit to how useful those kits could be.
Super Marios Bros. 3
Even though they came out in 1990, these toys were peak ’90s. These toys celebrated the highly anticipated sequel in the Super Mario Bros. franchise and with NES finally becoming affordable, everybody could join in on the craze and McDonald’s tapped directly into that market. The spring-loaded Mario might be the coolest toy you could ever find in a Happy Meal.
Garfield Vehicles
Have we mentioned how many McDonald’s loved just putting wheels on things? Garfield was a massive property back in the ’80s, but what limited the merchandise was there wasn’t a massive cast of characters. Instead of every character getting a vehicle, McDonald’s went all-in on depicting the Mondays-hating cat in virtually every vehicle you could imagine.
Changables
In case you thought the McBuddies were limited in their qualities of just being orange pieces of plastic, along came the Changables, which were still based off of food products, but now they could transform into robots! However, these products were confusing as they started making kids everywhere think all robots were edible. Big mistake, McDonald’s.
Halloween Pails
Making the Happy Meal container itself be the reward was a stroke of genius, because now not only would kids look forward to getting the pail, but they could also use that pail to go trick or treating and continue to promote the McDonald’s brand. The concept was so successful that McDonald’s has recently brought back the pail for the Halloween season, but with different images on them.
[H/T YouTube/That90sGuy]
