Outrageous Kids Meal Toys

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.

American Idol MP3 Player

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?

Clone Wars

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.

Crocodile Hunter

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.

Glove Puppets

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.

Fall-Apart Rasputin

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....

Hammerman Toothpaste

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?

Disco Fever CD

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!

Swastika Tattoo

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.

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Ten Films to Avoid in 2011

We have a bad feeling about this.We advise you to stay away from these 2011 turkeys.

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher" in No Strings Attached" (Paramount Pictures)

As professional movie watchers, part of our job is figuring out what movies are actually worth watching. You know, separating the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff, the "National Treasures" from the "National Treasure: Book of Secretses." And as the 2011 release schedule shapes up before us, we're seeing a few risky propositions being put forward -- movies that might turn out to be considerably less than the sums of their parts.

Let's take a look at the list... as a strictly hypothetical exercise, of course. You never know; that "Transformers" threequel could be the movie that finally makes people hail Michael Bay as the modern-day equivalent of Michelangelo Antonioni. Autobots have their existentialist moments, right?

 No Strings Attached (January 21)

Ivan Reitman's comedy -- in which Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher play "sex friends" trying to keep their relationship strictly physical -- doesn't seem to aspire to be anything more than a frivolous rom-com. But it arrives at the worst possible time -- just as "Black Swan" has people taking Portman seriously as a powerhouse actress. Are people who've staggered out of Darren Aronofsky's demented psychodrama going to turn around and head into another theatre to see Portman coasting through something that looks like a second-rate Katherine Heigl vehicle? It seems like this might have been better served by a few more months on the shelf, just to put a safe distance between it and the Oscar movie.
Just Go with It (February 11)

The premise of Adam Sandler's latest comedy gives us hives: Fearing commitment to girlfriend Brooklyn Decker, Sandler tells her he's married -- and then ropes single mother Jennifer Aniston and her kids into pretending they're his family so he can continue the lie. (Unexpected attraction, presumably, ensues.) Now, Sandler hasn't made a proper romantic comedy since the underrated "50 First Dates," so maybe he's spent the intervening years taking his time, waiting for the perfect project to land in his lap. That'd be great, right? That would mean he actually cares about the movies he chooses to make, rather than churning out pap like "Grown Ups." Yes, let's just go with that -- and hope this movie turns out to be something recognizably human, rather than a comedy about the most selfish and manipulative man on the planet.
Big Momma’s: Like Father, Like Son (February 18)

It's been 11 years since "Big Momma's House" became a huge hit for Martin Lawrence, casting him as an FBI agent forced to go undercover as a morbidly obese woman -- and paying off in crowd-pleasing laughs aplenty. Now that Tyler Perry has cornered the market on such projects, you'd think Lawrence would be able to move on... but things have been a little slow for him recently, so here he goes again -- and he's dragging Brandon T. Jackson ("Tropic Thunder") along for the ride as his character's son, who must go into hiding at a girl's school after he witnesses a murder. It's just like "Sister Act," if Whoopi Goldberg had climbed into a culturally insensitive fat suit instead of a nun's habit. And taken a blow to the head. We are dubious as to the comedic value, is what we're saying.
Red Riding Hood (March 11)

Casting Amanda Seyfried in a new version of the Little Red Riding Hood story? Kind of brilliant, since Seyfried already looks like a fairy-tale version of an innocent maiden. Retelling the story from the perspective of said maiden, who's caught between a wealthy landowner (Max Irons) and a penniless woodsman (Shilo Fernandez) while the local clergy (Gary Oldman and Lukas Haas) hunt a werewolf that's been terrorizing the village? Sure, why not? But then someone went and hired Catherine Hardwicke -- director of the first, worst "Twilight" movie -- which means the result is likely to be slow as molasses, inconsistently acted and cheesy as all hell. It might still be a massive hit, but doesn't anyone want it to be good?
The Beaver (Spring 2011, date to be determined)

On the one hand, Jodie Foster has demonstrated considerable grace and wit as a filmmaker, so her latest directorial effort is something we can all look forward to. On the other hand, "The Beaver" is a movie about an emotionally damaged man who communicates with his friends and family through a hand puppet, which would sound completely insane even if that man wasn't Mel Gibson. The announcement that the film will make its bow at the edgy South By Southwest festival suggests the movie's worth defending... but given that Gibson's spent most of the last few years turning himself into a freak show of global proportions, it's going to be a very hard sell.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (May 20)

Sure, the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series played itself out, story-wise, somewhere in the first hour of the third movie. But that movie made a lot of money, so here comes Part Four, with squabbling seafarers Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) racing none other than Blackbeard (Ian McShane) to find the Fountain of Youth. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley have moved on, so producer Jerry Bruckheimer has recruited Depp's "Blow" co-star Penelope Cruz to play his fiery romantic interest -- and tapped "Chicago" Oscar-winner Rob Marshall to take over for director Gore Verbinski, which seems like a bit of a leap. They're also releasing this one in 3D, which really doesn't seem like the best idea for a movie set on water. Perhaps you understand our lack of enthusiasm now.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (July 1)

On some level we can't fully understand, we feel kind of bad for Michael Bay. Yes, his movies are phenomenally successful and he's paid very, very well. But we all know his movies kind of suck -- and when it comes to the "Transformers" movies, they suck on an almost spectacular level. "Dark of the Moon" finds the Autobots and Decepticons trying to beat each other to the lunar surface where a lost spaceship holds a crucial secret -- so we can brace ourselves for another two and a half hours of visually and aurally incoherent giant-robot smackdownery -- and this time, in eye-popping 3D! Still, we're willing to go if there's a scene where Shia LaBeouf undergoes explosive decompression after being teleported into the Sea of Tranquility.
Zookeeper (July 8)

 

We don't mean to beat up on Adam Sandler, really we don't. But you know that thing he does where he uses his box-office clout to greenlight silly movies for his friends? Well, the good intentions that let Rob Schneider make two "Deuce Bigalow" movies are back in force with this Kevin James comedy, which finds a bunch of captive animals acting as Cupids to help their beloved keeper get lucky. The trailer makes it look like "Paul Blart, Mall Cop" meets "Madagascar" -- with Sandler, Sylvester Stallone and Cher supplying the voices of the digitally enhanced animals, and James looking awfully freaked out. Can't blame him, really.

One for the Money (July 8)

Katherine Heigl's latest quirky romantic comedy casts her as a newbie bail bondswoman whose first case is ex-boyfriend Jason O'Mara. And let's not mince words: It sounds straight-up horrible, as though Heigl saw "Ugly Truth" co-star Gerard Butler in "The Bounty Hunter" and decided she wanted to make a movie just like it -- though we can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie just like "The Bounty Hunter." Which is why this movie isn't at the top of our must-see list. Really, is it at the top of anyone's?
Alvin and the Chipmunks 3D (December 16)

Do you think Justin Long wakes up screaming when he realizes he's contractually obligated to make another one of these things? Anyway, he's making another one of these things. At press time, nothing was known of the film beyond its release date, but given that the previous films starred Jason Lee and Zachary Levi, we're hoping this one casts their NBC stablemate Donald Glover ("Community") as the munks' latest caretaker -- he was the Internet's choice to play Spider-Man, you know!

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