Happy Meal Toys and Childhood Nostalgia

What are you most likely to remember: the calorie intake, the money your parents spent, or that cool Beanie Baby?

This month, I’ve been eating at McDonald’s more frequently than I care to admit – though as much as I crave their french fries (my favorite french fries of all time – love those soggy boys), I haven’t been going for the food.

Craig and I have been trying to collect all the Halloween-themed Hello Kitty toys currently being featured in McDonald’s Happy Meals.

As some of you millennials may know, Sanrio and McDonald’s have partnered on Happy Meal toy collabs since forever. There was that amazing 2017 collection featuring various Sanrio character teacups, this 2004 collection I remember getting a plastic toaster from, and these adorable Hello Kitty plushes dressed as various McDonald’s mascots from 2015.

This iteration is to celebrate Hello Kitty’s 45th anniversary, featuring eight different and very cute Hello Kitty costumes. So far, we’ve gotten Pumpkin Hello Kitty, Witch Hello Kitty, and Superhero Hello Kitty. We’re probably going to stop by one more time before October is over.

I’ve always respected, from a marketing standpoint, the concept of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. There’s typically eight different kinds of toys you can expect to get in each release, which encourages kids and families to keep returning to collect them all. I’ve heard countless stories of parents who’ve turned into collectors after originally buying toys for their own kids.

Toy partnerships are usually timed around the release of a kids movie (I remember my Lion King 2 plush collection fondly) or toy fad (Furby, Hot Wheels) to capitalize off its success. And even in 2019, McDonald’s offers a choice between a “girl toy” and a “boy toy” as a way of maintaining two partnerships at once.

Remember the 101 Dalmatians release? You could literally collect all 101 Dalmatians – a collector’s dream!

McDonald’s also saw Happy Meal toys as a way to make lifetime customers out of kids through nostalgia. Yes, over the years Happy Meals have stirred controversy with health-concerned parents, but at the end of the day, are those full-grown kids going to remember how sluggish they got from those chicken nuggets? No – they’re probably going to associate those meals with happy times, and think about the toys that planted them in a moment of pop culture. They were there, and they have the Tamagotchi to prove it.

At least, as an adult, that’s how I see them, though I’ll admit it’s not as joyful an experience for me anymore. Now, I can’t help but think about all the other companies that are trying to profit off of millennial nostalgia (Disney live action movie remakes, increasingly expensive Disneyland passes - hello, Star Wars Land - old video game reboots). But for three or four dollars, I feel slightly less guilty about being suckered into this particular scam.

During my research I relived some of my favorite ‘90s memories looking at toys, but the coolest thing I discovered was that the Happy Meal, though officially coined by a McDonald’s advertising employee named Bob Bernstein, was actually invented by a Guatemalan woman named Yolanda Fernandez Cofino.

Yolanda invented the “Ronald’s Menu” in 1977 at one of the McDonald’s restaurants she and her husband ran in Guatemala, which contained a hamburger, small fries, small Coke, and a sundae. She’d even purchase small toys from a nearby market and add them in for kids. She was inspired to create the menu to help mothers feed and tend to their children more efficiently.

All calories aside, it makes so much sense that a woman created the Happy Meal. Shout-out to Yolanda for making my childhood that much more delicious.