The Happy Meal's Controversial History
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ย. 2024
- The McDonald's Happy Meal is an iconic part of many people's childhoods. The toys, the box, the perfectly-sized portions... But did McDonald's steal the idea from another restaurant?
On today's episode, we're breaking down the history of the Happy Meal. From million-dollar lawsuits to a brilliant experiment in Guatemala, the path to the famous McDonald's kid's meal can be a bit controversial.
Food History is a show all about... well, the history of food. Join host Justin Dodd as he brings you the stories of how your favorite meals ended up on your plate. Today, we're talking gummy bears.
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When 101 Dalmatians came out my parents went to swap parties to collect all 101. And yes… they got all 101.
🤣🤣🤣I remember those lol The swap parties
I don't think swap parties mean today, what they used to mean in the past...
@@Divine_Evil Oh they meant that. But it was usually with keys, not happy meal toys.
Shit I worked at McDonald’s back then and I still wasn’t able to get all 101’s. Lol
That sounds super gay
We got our kittens a couple months before my son turned five. Periodically, Happy Meal toys that had been long abandoned in the basement, kept appearing upstairs, especially small stuffed toys. It turns out that the cat had been raiding the toy bins for the stuffed animals and bringing them upstairs to play with them. My son is now 18. The cat's favorite happy meal toys are still scattered around the house. The cat has especially strong feelings about a stuffed frog and continues to treasure it.
My mom was a store manager for McDonald’s and and we got the happy meal toys before they came out. We thought we were the cool kids
Because you were. The 5 year old me inside my 30 year old heart is jealous as hell rn.
My niece does too she's a manager too.
Fun fact, childhood obesity (and all obesity for that matter) rates rose dramatically in the late 90’s/2000 in large part because the BMI definition of it was lowered, instantly making far more people categorized as obese.
I don't see how that's fun, but ok
I rarely got Happy Meals as a kid because my mom said we were always hungry right away when we got the smaller portions. She said we don't choose food based on toys. Clearly, my mom just didn't get it 😂.
The last time my mom popped me in the back of the head I got my first check and asked if she wanted McDonald's .. then asked if she had McDonald's money 🤣 I waited over 12 years to do that to her. Kids don't forget
She clearly understood what the marketing was trying to do
@@Laurpud oh, most definitely. She was absolutely right. I just hated it as a kid 🤣.
Burger King in the early 2000s had some of the best toys in their “big kids” meal
I was working at McDonalds when they did the Beanie Babies. At the time, you couldn't order just the toy, so people were ordering 5 happy meals and then tossing the food out in the parking lot. The three "sister" locations (owned by the same person) all had answering machines hooked up that announced to people calling which toy was currently available. This was a pain, since people would constantly mix up two of the locations, of which I worked at one of them, then come in demanding the toy that was advertised on the other location's machine.
Customer: I want the monkey.
Me: We don't currently have the monkey.
Customer: YOUR ANSWERING MACHINE SAID YOU DO!
Me: Did you call or ?
Customer:
Me: This is . The one you called is .
Customer: I'm not going all the way over there!
Oh, I remember women in their 40's asking me in the middle of lunch rush to please go check all the boxes we had out back to see if I could find a leopard. Um, HARD no.
Omg same here... The McDonald's I was at didn't sell the beanie babies separately either! I told the customers take them happy meals to homeless people around the city instead of wasting them 😡
@@nicolepettus894 You'd be hard pressed to find homeless people around the area where I was, so that wouldn't have helped back then for me :p
I have very vivid memories of opening my happy meal and finding a beanie baby in it! It was the first day the promotion and we had no idea. The maddnes that followed, the frozen hamburgers in our freezer, and driving all over the place with my mom trying to collect them all. 😂 Somewhere in the depths of my mom's closet is an old McDonald's bag full of unopened McDonald's beanie babys.
I remember being a little kid in the 80s and getting play doh in my happy meal. My abuela sat with me and made me a little doll from that play doh
I also worked in a McDonald's while in HS during the beanie baby crazy in 1998. People were literally losing thier minds and yelling at us because we didn't have the one they wanted. They didn't understand that stores only got sent a box and whatever was in the box is what we had
Never had a Happy Meal in my life. By the time they came out, I had just hit the age at which I wanted items from the regular menu. At sit-down restaurants, the servers instinctively brought three kids' menus to the table, and one of my parents would simply let me look at theirs.
That said, I've seen many adults order Happy Meals because they're the right size for smaller appetites.
As a small child, I was adicted to the mcdonalds cheeseburgers, the cheapest ones, it was like $2.12 to ge the double cheesburger deal. Now as I grew up, i realized I would only get this type of mcfood when my mom was especially tired and giving up. My mom would make amazing food, that I remember and love, but is it weird that I remeber the mcburger that I would get durring "special" times when my mom was exhausted. As an adult now, it makes me feel bad knowing that, and that I can't ask her anymore why that happened, my mom died a long time ago.
I remember in the mid 1970's, McDonald's had "McFun Saturday"...where when you bought a kid's meal, your got a toy...and I STILL have my mini license plate with stickers that you could spell your name...
as an adult i really like when they give out drinking glasses if theres a promotion going on
When Disney was reissuing their movies on VHS a second time, they had little dolls of the main characters come in their own mini VHS boxes. I don't know why, but I thought then, and still do, that it's one of the coolest things ever lol
Man, I remember being in 4th or 5th grade when the “boo pails” were introduced. I used those for a couple of years until I figured out that a pillowcase holds a lot more candy!
The Rugrats watches were EVERYTHING!!!
My favorite was the inspector gadget toys, but I never got all of the pieces to actually build him. I still have all the pieces that I did get at my grandparents house right now, I would eventually like to get the other pieces off of Amazon or something, at this point it’s just curiosity of what it would look like fully built
Yeah those were hard to get for me too. What a time 😂
I remember we went to McDonald's summer of 79 and getting one of those Star Trek meals - ours came with a translucent blue wrist decoder thingy - looking up online looks like it had a strip of comics/pictures in it.
My absolute favorite is the little Polly pocket locket. I think it was McDonald's. From burger king I had the collection of Lord of the rings figures.
One of our neighbors growing up used to come grab me whenever the local McD's got a new teenie beanie shipment. They kept the toy, and I got free nuggets. Win/win.
my favorites were when they came with A) Lego, B) (Miniature) Stompers and C) Hot Wheels. That dates me but whatevs.
When we were kids, there was an older gentleman, drinking coffee with a happy meal. I asked him about why he was eating kid's food and he said "I just wanted the car," gave me a Santa Clause-like wink and held up the same Fiero my brother and I had already busted out of the packaging and were playing with.
I have done that... bought the happy meal just for the toy (I am over 40) occasionally they have some cool ones. I did like that at Burger King I was able to buy the toy for a few dollars rather than have to buy the meal which was even better...
Christmas toys/collectable of when my older children were little. And of course about 25 to 30 mini beanie babies.
Love this series and I'm old enough to remember all of this. :D
I loved the muppet babies figurines. They each came with a transportation element. Kermit had a skate board and Gonzo had a Big Wheel type of trike. I don’t remember what Fozzie came with or the others but I had those a long time.
I've been...oddly attracted to the "Happy Meal" as an adult. It's a nicely compact meal, nicely contained in a nice square box. (Even if the small meal is not enough to fill an adult, lol). I don't even throw away the box when I order one, it's almost too nice to throw away, lol.
As soon as you mentioned Hercules I got the song stuck in my head....
Who put the glad in gladiator?
Her-cu-les!
As a kid, the best Happy Meal toys were the McNuggets that were in little Halloween costumes. My favorite one now is from the Marvel run they had last year, Winter Soldier merch is so hard to find so getting my fav as a McDonald's toy was like striking gold.
I vaguely remember a darth vader mcnugget from a collection my grandma had. Unless I’m mistaken.
I still have some Teenie Beenies somewhere, but my favorite kid's meal toy ever wasn't from a Happy Meal. It's a tiny plush tiger I got from a kid's meal at Taco Time back in the 90s. More than 20 years later, it still sits on my bedside table. For years I also had small book of shark facts from one of their meals.
I worked at McDonalds when the Happy Meals first came out. In our market they came in a colorful paper bag, and the "toy" was a Ronald McDonald hand-puppet made of plastic film similar to what is used in sandwich bags.
I like how the Burger Chef characters look like characters from the early adult animated sitcom Wait Till Your Father Gets Home
In 1999, McDonald's had an Inspector Gadget Happy Meal based on the live action film starring Matthew Broderick featuring individual parts to collect to build a large Inspector Gadget figure.
I worked at the Golden Arches when I was younger and it was BABE toys. Moms would show up in droves to bribe us to get the toy they wanted or call and place an order. They would then "donate" the food to us. Free lunches!
All of the allegations against McD are pretty unfair. The consumer needs to take more responsibility. The toys being bad for the environment for example- if you’re going to throw it out immediately just decline it when you order.
And then what happens to the toys? they still end up in Landfill, just en-masse.
1. I remember years ago that (at least at some locations) staff would not let you decline the toy. If you wanted everything but the toy, they'd charge you for the individual items rather than giving the better price for the Happy Meal. I hope that's changed; I can't eat the food at McD's these days so I only know about their coffee pricing.
2. Kids who get the toys would often play with them for somewhere between 10 minutes and 3 days before losing interest for the next shiny thing. The toy saw some use, but was usually intentionally designed to be a throwaway item rather than something that would keep kids interested/busy for a long time. Design choices of disposability and using plastic materials lie in the hands of McD's, not the parents buying the meal -- often caving to a 5 year old who swears they will really play with this toy because they saw the cartoon ad that promises it can do more than it can. McD's was behind those deceptive ads, though to be a little fair ALL the toy ads over-promised what the product could do.
In short, company choices of what and how to offer these toys matter at least as much as customer behavior in accepting them.
@@PhosphorAlchemist A much more reasoned answer than mine :)
@@PhosphorAlchemist I don’t mean that the company has *no* responsibility, just that the consumer shouldn’t shift all blame. Like blaming them for childhood obesity… soooo many more factors are involved in that problem and at the top of the list is parenting, not McDonalds.
I have a full set of Wizard of Oz toys as well as a full set of My Little Pony toys from McDonalds.
I can't imagine going through the effort of pestering your parents for a Happy Meal only to throw the toy out.
Those tiny, hard plastic toys are incredibly durable and stand up well to cleaning. They're perfect for little kids.
They could replace all the toys with POGs you punch out of the box and kids would still collect them and they'd be compostable. Would be significantly cheaper too.
Miss me with those beanie babies, I was there for the Neopets partnership. My all-time most treasured Neopet was a blue Ixi, so when I saw that was an option for the McNeo toys, I absolutely had to have it. It's still in my bedroom to this day.
We had the original toys like Birdie, Ronald, hamburglar, etc, and the McDonald's tray was yellow a place you placed in the window, a place for the hamburger drink and fries
If anyone reading this is from New Hampshire or follows the "Bike Week" crowd . . . as a teenager I worked at a McDonald's closest to Weirs Beach during Laconia Bike Week. By some horrific turn of events, Teeny Beanie promotions overlapped with Bike Week. And if you think bikers didn't care about Beanie Babies - you'd be wrong. It was unending chaos for a week. But a few of my co-workers sold their employee-only Ronald McDonald bears to some bikers for $50 each, so . . . strike while the iron's hot, I guess. 🤣
I no longer have it but it would have been the Tanuki Mario from Mario brothers 3 with the suction cup and spring. I loved that little dude...
Here in Holland, all Happy Meal toys are completely csrd board nowadays. You can get the toy, or a book, also packaged in paper.
I do still have the purple Halloween basket from the States of 1995! Right on one of the side tables in the living room :)
Somehow, I still got an Elephant toy from Aladdin in its wrapper. Much like Beany Babies, I don't think this toy will ever be more valuable than it was when it was first offered to a hungry kid, close to 30 years ago.
My favorite Happy Meal set was Sonic 3 back in the day. The Super Mario 3 toys were cool too.
I heard that autopsies on soldiers killed in Vietnam had arteries that were so blocked some were a heart attack waiting to happen. I never had a happy meal and I didn't collect toys.
And now you can have one delivered to your door for only $364.99
the toy I remember being most excited about was the Tarzan talking drink straws
I also had the food transformers and the super Mario bros toys. My granddad lived by a McDonald's and when my dad would drop us of,granddad would take us to McDonald's.
It has like this huge tree with a fave inside, the kids seats were hamburgers and it had a outdoor playplace
The McDonald's is still there but it's been renovated to look like the modern version. To be honest, I'm amazed it's still there after all these years
As an 80s kid, it wasn't necessarily Happy Meals that were cool but their birthday parties. Just about everyone I knew had Ronald MacDonald pens and other stuff you got in their party pack kicking about at home.
As a kid nothing ever beat Hot wheels in your happy meal, it was simple and stood the test of time.
Second best was probably when they gave out Lego pieces, an easy way to add to your collection!
Oh, and I forget how she ended up swinging this because she never worked at a McDonald’s, but after the Tigger movie came out somehow mom ended up getting the whole display with all of the Pooh bear characters wearing Tigger costumes
I am old enough to not only remember Burger Chef, and the Burger Chef and Jeff characters, and the Fun Meal with the 45 rpm record that came with it. Hard telling what happened to it, along with all the other items that disappeared over the years of my childhood, but considering how collectible some of the things became later on, I'm sure a fortunes worth of history disappeared by way of the trash can during my and my younger sisters years growing up between 1964 when I was born, and 1987 when she also became an adult. Generally speaking if we wanted something in peticulqr such as a certain toy or whatever,, and it was something within reason, our parents tried, and were usually successful at making it happen.
I was expecting you guys to mention the whole McDonaldLand/HR PuffNStuff debacle
The Flintstones build it yourself houses from the hit movie in 1993-94
I remember some kind of Fraggle Rock car I played with quite a lot (Mokey was driving and she was my favorite). Also some bizarre transformer things that looked like McDonalds food (I remember a soft-serve vanilla cone, a burger and a carton of nuggets but I am sure they were others) that became different kinds of robots when you adjusted 2 or 3 parts.
I worked at McDonalds when the mini fries came out and as a (semi) health conscious teen, I really liked the idea of having just the right amount of fries.
I decided to buy a happy meal a few years ago, Toy included, just to see what it was like.
I don't think I remember having one as a kid...
The only Happy Meal toy I ever collected was an Interplanet Janet :-D
Those happy meal transformers were the SHIZZ
The actual burger's & fries that transformed? they were awesome
For the next topic, can you do the history of curry? It seems like it originated from India, but the version of it spread all over the world with the name "curry" but tasting wildly different.
Burger King had the glasses for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Taco Bell had the glasses for Star Trek III (The Search for Spock).
Still remember the Super Mario Bros 3 Happy Meals and hype for that game!
Despite being older than the happy meal, I was 16 before I got one. Our local McDonald's gave me an undercooked burger when I was small so we never went back there. We ate at Wendy's, Arby's, or Burger Chef instead. First time I had a happy meal, I was working there as my first job. It's not real food, so gross. Yes, I still eat it. Wish my new town had a Wendy's...
My cat still carries around a teeny beanie leopard like it's her kitten.
Great, now they are gonna cancel another childhood memory because its "controversial".
Mom got the beanie babies, I collected the mini barbie and the Madame Alexamnder dolls
you wouldn't catch me dead in those overalls.
I have had so many Happy Meals toys (still have boxes filled with some of them and buy more occasionally). I've never been overweight so I don't understand the correlation... though I'm not from the US. I comprehend it's not healthy but I wouldn't go as far as solely blaming Happy Meals for obesity in kids. Not a big fan of the paper toys, mostly because in my country they didn't distribute anything interesting like famous authors' books.
In Canada Happy Meals can have a toy or a book
I had all the tellatubby Keychain plushies 😻😻😂😂
It always amazes me how people who believe that the general public is too stupid to pick their own food, also believe that they aren't too stupid to vote. Or maybe they are betting on it.
you reminded me of a time when happy meals came in red/yellow/blue/green UFOS
I had a burger chef distributed set of Star Wars posters…
I still have a collection of monster-nauts toys from McDonalds 1980-81. I've been unable to ever find any info about them, or where they came from.
I have a complete set of the Hercules figures. My favorite being the ice titan.
Hey, don't hate on the Hercules plates, I still use them lol
I ate at the Cookville TN or ...Cookvull as its said around here.Burger Chef in 1992.... It was lacking to say the least...burned down.
"But if they were called sad meals people would buy them." -- Pinky
I loved Burger Chef as a kid.
We had two in my small town
So after the lawsuit to take down the patent for the “og happy meal” did mc. Donald’s turn around and re-patten it? Wondering because out of all the chain restaurants I’ve eaten at from my days of youth up to now, I’ve only seen something similar to a happy meal at maybe 3 different restaurant chains
Mcnugget buddies!!
Burger Chef's cookies were the best! I had the fun Meal or the Mariner.
Those food transformers for sure.
Actually, the Burger Chef murders caused them to shrink duh.
Reading comments and everyone had memories with their families and their favourite toys. Now kids might get books instead? Somehow i think not as many cute childhood memories will be made ... that or it'll make the childhood obesity problem even worse with kids foregoing the happy meals for the bigger meals if the toys are going to be so lame.
my most prized happy meal toy was when they had those pokemon things, I think it was just a medalian but I thought iwas still pretty cool.
How do you talk about collectable Happy Meals, and have NO MENTION at all of the 1980's LEGO Happy Meals.
Thank you for being objective
Astrosniks from the 80's.
I thought having a McDonalds prevented the US from invading you :(
(whoops, that was Panama, which also had a McD's)
Correction - it made fat kids in to collectors
Today i buy The Happy Meal's t he super Mario bros movie princess peach
Fun Fact: You can make your own happy meal from scratch at home
👍❤️👍
its super mario BROTHERS. THERE IS A PERIOD AT THE END. YOU PRONOUNCE IT "BROTHERS" NOT "BROS"
Oh my God - THIS!!! THANK YOU!!