The 50 Coolest Happy Meal Toys of All Time

Image via Complex Original

Year: 2007

They're spinning tops that you do battle with. Genius. Kids would never have to battle with flicked quarters again. Actually, that's kind of sad.

Year: 1997

Based off the much less interesting cartoon in which the ducks are some sort of aliens, but still play hockey, these pucks were perfect for whacking the crap out of. You had to take out your frustration at not being Gordon Bombay somehow.

Year: 1974

This toy was not so much fun as it was intensely Jason Voorhees-type terrifying. Hell, it came with the eyes and mouth not cut out. Scaring your sister was never so easy.

Year: 1983

It was the early '80s, the first time that thousands of kids ate Play-Doh for the first time. Jigger of Doh with Coca-Cola back is still the most ordered drink special in the ball pit.

Year: 1989

McDonald's has a long history of anthropomorphizing food, but they took it to a whole other level when they decided to make their menu items into weird transforming robots. They were fun to play with, and had you desiring Mickey D's practically all the time, which makes them possibly the smartest Happy Meal toys of all time.

Year: 1969

One of the first toys McDonald's ever made was, well, a McDonald's, complete with ample trash cans and a detailed interior for you to play your favorite game: McDonald's! This is generally accepted as the starting point of postmodernism, a culture experiencing the hurt of late capitalism.

Year: 2009

The exact type of hand held games we used to pay 30 dollars for were now being given to kids for eating a single order of Chicken McNuggets. Spoiled... jealous.

Year: 2009

Remember in Willy Wonka when the TV kid gets shrunk pocket-sized and his moms throws him in her bag? The folks at McDonald's took a page out of Roald Dahl's classic and shrank your favorite Nerf toys.

Year: 1970

This old-school doll, really just a pillow, was enormously popular and probably a large inspiration for the official Happy Meal toy that would be unveiled nearly ten years later.

Year: 1974

Free paper Valentines from everyone's favorite burger crew. If you brought these to the ladies in your third grade classroom, your swagger tripled.

Year: 1987

It seems like every house in America owned one of these radish cars at one point (a radish car in every garage!). An underrated Henson creation, the denizens of Fraggle Rock are dark horse candidates for best muppets ever.

Year: 1982

The first and most respectable series of books McDonald's would ever offer, these were very short versions of some great stories, beautifully illustrated and free! Well, not free—you paid for them with your burger.

Year: 1985

Little heads popping out of wind-up cars—they're annoying, they're sharp, and you probably shot them into your parents' legs until they threw them away. Then it was on to the next one.

Year: 1987

Bringing your school lunch in one of the two styles of Happy Meal lunch boxes usually meant that you were kind of poor. But they were cool enough to put pencils in, for sure.

Year: 1972

One of a handful of Ronald McDonald records, this one was just weird enough to be desirable (because listening to a record of corporate jingles is only funny in theory).

Year: 1997

The most successful Disney/McDonald's yielded some hugely popular toys, these plastic pieces from The Little Mermaid among them. These toys, all of which floated in water (duh), were pegged to the '97 re-release of the Disney flick.

Year: 1990

These irresistible wind-up guys from the Disney classic were pretty charming. The only possible source of beef is how lame they made Shere Khan seem. He has one of the baddest names in the history of cartoon villains, and yet his toy seems remarkably bitch-made.

Year: 1989

You got a book about dinosaurs and a tape so you didn't have to strain your eyes reading it. All that was left to do was grab a box of cookies on the way out and call it a fucking day.

Year: 1990

Sports! Kind of. This was the first go-around for McDonald's and sports, and the results were pretty soft (hehe). But just a few years later, the chain brought in Michael Jordan for a Happy Meal release for some much-needed sports credibility.

Year: 1987

The first pairing of Disney with McDonald's was a timid one, a litmus test if you will. Unsurprisingly, these activity books proved to be incredibly popular, cementing a long-lasting relationship between the two titans of American culture.

Year: 1990

New Berenstein Bears stories written specifically to accompany your Chicken McNuggets!? Score. But can we be real for a second? Bears would never wear clothes like that.

Year: 1970

Is this the first ever silly straw? Probably not. But ask your parents to see what kind of a big deal this was. For a detailed break-down of different straws and their respective merits, see Nicholson Baker's short novel The Mezzanine. McDonald's should consider handing that out with upcoming Happy Meals.

Year: 1986

They're no K'Nex but you could build a space ship with them, as well as go off on your own to make something good for poking your friends with. Or trying to feed the cat.

Year: 1969

Why exactly you were launching a clown into the sky is irrelevant. Just look at that Mary Poppins clown smile floating down gently in the parking lot. Crash-landing in the asphalt jungle in front of the strip mall is the closest any of our generation ever got to Vietnam.

Year: 1976

At last: an actual mock-scientific gadget. There are surprisingly few moderately practical and educational toys in McDonald's history, and two of them are from the '70s, before the Happy Meal proper was invented. Thus you can plot humanity's decline to the tune of McDonald's toys.

Year: 1985

Lego got into the mix in 1985. With these sets, you could build a helicopter, an airplane, a boat, and a race car. Each one could be piloted through the McDonald's drive-thru of your dreams.

Year: 1976

Not the most fun you'd have with a toy from McDonald's, but we applaud them for still believing in the potential of America's youth.

Year: 1977

If you don't know what a wrist wallet is, think of those trick rings movie villians wear that contain little portions of poison for slipping into drinks on the sly. Got it now? Time to pour some salt and pepper into your sister's milkshake.

Year: 1981

Toys are really the only thing that made bath time fun (maybe also bubbles), and toys that move on their own in the water? C'mon, man! What's better than that?

Year: 1979

The first official Happy Meal toy was a video communicator. It held one of four Star Trek comics in a realistic-looking holder. Because Star Trek is hard sci-fi. Don't you forget it.

Year: 1980

Projectiles are always fun when you're young. Even the ones made from balsa wood that therefore possessed a life expectancy of approximately 10 minutes.

Year: 2010

Even the people that make the burgers know that there is nothing more bankable than superheroes. Mickey D's put your favorite Marvel cats in with the Nugs for ultimate satisfaction.

Year: 1995

Perfect for rescuing things from space. Draw out your plans, look through your astro viewer, grab your loot with your three-inch long grabber, and resport back to base.

Year: 1978

Hands down the best trick glasses after X-ray specs, these insinuated that people are always doing things behind your back that you need to know about. Which is a harsh lesson for a youngin'. But you gotta grow up sometime. Thanks, McDonald's. Look what you've done for us.

Year: 1990

Actual working camping gear, including cutlery, a collapsible cup, a canteen, and a kit with bandages—because things could get rugged in the ball pit.

Year: 1988

The first stuffed animals offered at McDonald's were hugely popular. It was probably the closest these animals would come to freedom in the whole of their lives. Free Willy.

Year: 1985

The same year that Happy Meal toys were really picking up, McDonald's introduced gender-specific toys, thus making children feel unified in their horror at receiving a toy meant for the other sex.

Year: 1987

Crayola: tapping into the more creative parts of the sugar-addled child's mind since the dawn of the coloring-book era. Fuck them lines up, little ones!

Year: 1992

A series of paranormal tools for finding Grimace's lost voice? McDonald's put in some real creative work crafting these. A stamp that is also a calculator, a video camera that's also binoculars, a compass/watch, and a walkie-talkie = old school ghost hunting. Busting feels so good.

Year: 1992

Michael Jordan's fitness toy line attempted to improve upon the sports ball toys of yesteryear. They added a neon jump rope and a baseball that might have been filled with something besides cotton. Be like Mike!

Year: 1988

These single-handedly blurred the line between food and toys at an early age. Who knew that dressing up Chicken McNuggets could be so fun? Ronald McDonald knew.

Year: 1985, 1989

Everyone who trick or treated in the '80s and '90s knew about these coveted treasure chests. What they lacked in candy-toting capacity, they made up for in style. You might have kept a pillow case in your back pocket for real collecting, but you had to stunt on the block with one of these—shorties expected it.

Year: 1996

Michael Jordan re-entered the Happy Meal toy arena just four years after his successful line of sports equipment (read: toys). These were very challenging to collect. Chains only carried one at a time, a strategy McDonald's employed from the mid-'90s on out.

Year: 1985

Hot Wheels were always cool, but what if your car ACTUALLY TRANSFORMED into a fighting robot!? It did if you bought a Happy Meal in 1985. Coincidentally, this is the moment when Happy Meal toys became huge.

Year: 1992

Perfect for driving your parents insane, these wind-ups had clear domes where little balls would dance magically for you while you played. They also made a hell of a lot of noise. The individuals who designed toys for McDonald's were all childless.

Year: 1992

Probably the longest lasting and most interesting toys Mickey D's ever offered, these came during the the true heyday of Nickelodeon. The hand clapping gun was great fun, and the microphone vibrated because of a spring inside, making it the go-to for fake sports announcing and marrying stuffed animals.

Year: 1990

Now here's a winning combination: cheeseburgers and video games. And one of the greatest video games of all time, at that. Didn't warm the kiddies up to mushrooms, though. They should've started making the Happy Meal burgers topped with paper thin slices of 'shrooms to start developing sophisticated taste buds at an early age. After all, that's the whole point of the Mario franchise, right? To promote one of nature's most delicious vegetables?

Year: 1990

Barbie finally made her way into the toy rotation at the dawn of the '90s. She wouldn't leave, earning a spot as the third most popular Happy Meal toy ever.

Year: 1983

Hot Wheels are the highest-selling toys in the history of the burger chain. Those iconic cars, along with their partner in crime, Barbie, were the most heavily featured toys on the rotation, popping up somewhere near 15 times in the first 25 years of the Happy Meal.

Year: 1997

To this day, these soft pieces of plush crack remain the most popular Happy Meal toys of all time. Everyone completely lost their shit for Beanie Babies in the late '90s, and though the fever has subsided, there are still collectors out there. The McDonald's ones were smaller, but they had the tag, and bitches were bloodthirsty for the tag. It was like keeping the sticker on your flat brim, a status symbol if you will.