by Jonathan Alexandratos
Fast food toys are something of an enigma. They’re made to be disposable, but are permanently affixed to our nostalgias. They’re not quite the toys you’d buy at a toy store, but they’re (generally) more than the food you’d get at a restaurant chain. They’re both hyper current, frequently responding to immediate cultural trends (we all recall the Teenie Beanie Babies), and they carry a long history. This both/and quality of fast food toys inspired me so much, I had to write a cultural study of them.
My book titled Free with Every Kids’ Meal: The Cultural Impact of Fast Food Toys, is in preorder (get yours here!) now from McFarland, to be shipped in a couple of months. Instead of creating a picture-heavy catalogue of the toys (there are many of those that exist, and plenty of free online sources for that, too), I wanted to go deeper. What emerged was a peer-reviewed, academic history and cultural impact study of fast food toys. Through interviews with those who made them, I establish a timeline for fast food toy creation early on. Then, things get weird. I look at how various fast food toys reinforce corporate messaging around health, how they establish meaning in fan and collector communities, the ways in which they contribute to fast food immersive theatre, and more. The response I usually get to my work is: if college were like this, I would have graduated!
And that’s the point. We know toys are important threads in our cultural tapestry, and we may even understand fast food toys contain special memories, but questions around how they got to us and what they mean remain mysteries. I think we can use the same critical thinking skills we use when we read books and see movies to find answers, here. But most of all, I think that process can be fun. It doesn’t have to limit itself to college classrooms and self-important professors. Anyone can do it, because anyone can be curious about their world.
I have to think that’s what brings you to a site like this, after all.
So when I think about McDonald’s 1992 Food Fundamentals toys (you know, those cute plastic food items that transformed into tennis players [the apple], bodybuilders [the steak], rollerbladers [the sandwich], and aerobics junkies [the milk]), I think about the larger “health” push the chain was trying to make at the time with menu items like the McLean Deluxe (1991) and other media produced around being physically active. Never mind that the food represented by those toys wasn’t really offered by the restaurant (milk and apples would come along later, though they never looked like the glistening beacons of health depicted in plastic), “health” was the chain’s image, and that was good enough, right? Well…
And when I think about the 1993 McDonald’s Animaniacs line, I think about my friend, interviewed for the book, who sculpted them. I think about the secrecy around the IP, and how for that and other media, designers are given anything from a lot of background information to next to none, making plenty of these rapidly made toys true works of fun innovation.
I think about what Jaws, of the Burger King Kids Club, would have looked like had they used his original concept art, then named “Calvin,” which looked straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. (The art, rescued from a now-demolished L.A. building, is in my collection, and in the book; the produced art is below.)
I think about how an entire kids meal relies on you destroying it. You eat the food. You tear apart the box, sometimes through perforating lines that evolve it into a cave or a raceway (as in 1992’s McDonald’s Hot Wheels Mini Streex). And, if you don’t like the toy or already own it, you might turn it into a victim of play, as I did with my 1995 Burger King Governor Ratcliffe action figure when I froze him into a “block of Carbonite” (read: ice) and then smashed him to bits. Believe it or not, this type of toy destruction would be a lot less accessible a century and a half ago, when a new toy was a costly purchase.
I think about fast food toy controversies (the 1992 McDonald’s Batman Returns toys), weird offerings (1990 Roy Rogers Critters – look ’em up!), and the legacy of getting “stuff” with our food, and what that’s meant for those who get it (the coin in the Vasilopita, the féve in the King Cake, the fortune in the cookie, and of course: the toy in the meal).
And I absolutely think, heavily, about how this whole tradition started with a chain few still remember. Burger Chef, anyone?
I was thinking about all of this (and more!) when I wrote my book, to my knowledge the first to study the cultural impact of fast food toys, and, as a result, it’s all in there. If you’re up for a bit of an analytical discussion full of new perspectives and ideas, I’d love for you to come on this journey with me. There is no one “type” of person who is able to unpack the world we love. We all can. And it’s better when we all do.
For Free with Every Kids’ Meal, I brought my best research to each chapter, hoping to give all readers at least one new idea to kick around. I’m lucky to come from a history of doing this: I was a toy expert in the Emmy-nominated documentary Billion Dollar Babies: The True Story of the Cabbage Patch Kids, I’ve been seen on PBS talking about toys, I use toys in my classrooms all the time, and I’m lucky enough to write for Toy Wizards, which allows me to see lots of upcoming toy releases before they hit the market. It’s a joy to immerse into this world, as you know, and it was even more the delight to further that through writing this book
I hope the future holds deeper appreciation for fast food toys, often overlooked in toy studies, broadly. Once you pop open those little bags, they truly have so much to offer.
Jonathan Alexandratos writes and talks about toys. Based in New York City, you can catch them online via their YouTube channel Fast Food Toy Files.