The best part about getting a fast food kids meal is taking home a toy, but these pack-ins are the opposite of collectible. Check out this assortment of outrageous kids meal toys that take the "happy" out of Happy Meals.
Transformers
Sure, Transformers were a big deal in the 80s, but the 1987 McDonalds Happy Meal toys designed to cash in on them were such sterling examples of outrageous kids meal toys that they had to lead this list. While the Autobots and Decepticons changed shape into a variety of awesome things like race cars and jet planes, the Happy Meal versions changed into... food. French fries, hamburgers, chicken nuggets and more. What exactly was the plan here - trick unsuspecting humans into eating them and then transforming in their bowels? That's gross.
Flaming Testicles
So what do these look like to you? If you said a pair of plastic human testicles, we agree. Unfortunately, for the marketing geniuses at McDonalds, they're actually supposed to be fireballs that fling from a Last Airbender promotional toy. A disgruntled Mickey D's employee posted a picture of the things and they were almost immediately recalled, making these faux testicles a bona fide collector's item.
A common toy concept for kids meals is making a cheap-ass version of something kids really want and trying to pass it off on them. Case in point, the "American Idol MP3 Player." It's obviously supposed to look like an iPod, but it's really just a flimsy piece of plastic with one of those greeting card sound chips inside that plays the show's theme song. Can you imagine how humiliated a poor kid who brought this to school would be? They might as well just fill it with cyanide.
Hummer
What better way to prepare the youth of today for a future of conspicuous consumption than by indoctrinating them early. McDonalds caught a ton of bad press in 2006 by using the gas-guzzling Hummer brand as a kids meal toy. The massive truck has become a symbol for the ugly American's desire to roll over the rest of the world at 3 miles per gallon, and what better food to eat when you do it other than fast food?
I don't envy kids meal toy designers - they have to wring the most exploitation out of a license using as little material as possible. Sometimes the stuff they come up with, however, is just weird. Take these Clone Wars bobbleheads - was there really a great need for giant Anakin Skywalker heads on Jedi starfighters? These things were just bizarre, even by the standards of Star Wars merchandise.
When it comes to licensing, the big boys tend to get the best deals. McDonalds and Burger King get the big movies and hot toys, leaving the scraps for the competition. Case in point: Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. This disturbing wind-up toy was produced for Subway before the nature show host's untimely death, and it reminds us of nothing more than a man trying to copulate with a giant lizard in defiance of God's law.
We're going to step back into the mists of time for this one, possibly the lamest Happy Meal toy of all time. "Glove Puppets" were basically plastic bags with pictures printed on them, usually of Ronald, Grimace, or one of his coterie of merchandising mascots. Aside from the utter lameness of getting a plastic bag as a toy (not to mention the choking hazard), they didn't even work like hand puppets should - attempting to use your hand to make Ronald "talk" would just make him do his best imitation of someone getting shot in the stomach.
We all know who Grigori Rasputin was, right? If not, he was the towering Russian mystic who cast his spell on the last days of the Russian tsars. He was brutally killed during the Bolshevik revolution and was also, for some reason, cast as the villain in the Don Bluth animated movie Anastasia, which got a set of Burger King kids meal tie-in toys. Rasputin's death is one of the most hideous in history - he was poisoned, shot, stabbed, beaten, and finally thrown into a river. After his body was recovered, his enormous penis was preserved in a jar. So this "Fall-Apart Rasputin," who can shed arms and head, is pretty bizarre. Even more so is the odd, vaguely dong-like decoration hanging from his neck. Hm....
This is stretching the definition of "toy" to the absolute limit. White Castle has always been the bargain basement of fast food restaurants, so it's no surprise that their kids meals come with some pretty ghetto stuff. Probably the weirdest thing they ever tried to use as a giveaway was grape-flavored Hammerman toothpaste. Based on the short-lived MC Hammer cartoon, this goop would rot your teeth like the show would rot your mind. Who wants to think about dental hygiene when they eat at White Castle?
Do you know why the music industry is dying? Because it's cheap enough to include CDs as giveaways in Wendy's kids meals, but they still try to sell them to us for fifteen bucks. This particular giveaway backfired pretty hard, as whoever was in charge of finding radio-friendly versions of the songs for the "Disco Fever" disc didn't realize that Donna Summer's "The Last Dance" contains the phrase "I'm so horny." Since this is a karaoke disc, your kids were supposed to sing along with that. Awkward!
We like to think of crappy fast food and the attendant toys as a very American thing, but people all over the world eat garbage and feed it to their kids. Sometimes, their toys are just as messed up as ours. Take the sheet of temporary tattoos given to young Swedish boy Eddie Hagglund with his kids meal from local chain Frasses. Pretty cool, right? Well, except for the freaking Swastika. Yes indeed, the Chinese company hired to make the giveaways didn't see anything wrong with affixing the symbol of the Nazi Party to the youth of Sweden, and nobody bothered to actually look at what they were giving away.
