It's All Fun and Games Until the Flying Monkey Happy Meal Toys Come

Some combinations of disparate things work well, and some don’t. Peanut butter and chocolate, yes. Hair driers and bathtubs, no. Wine and cheese, yes. Keanu Reeves and Shakespearean comedy, no. With its latest batch of Happy Meal toys, McDonald’s has an example of each.

The good combination is LEGO Batman, meant for boys, in conjunction with the upcoming video game. They even include codes on the toys you’ll be able to use in the game to give you extra powers of some kind. LEGO and Batman are both awesome, of course, and the combination of the two is funny and geekily cool at the same time.

The bad combination, meant for girls, is Wizard of Oz movie dolls done in the Madame Alexander style. For those who aren’t familiar with them, Madame Alexander dolls all have the same face, with cute eyes that open Monkey_3
and close as the doll moves, along with rosy cheeks and small pouty lips. The dolls are a classic style and work fine as classic-style dolls, but they do not lend themselves well to adapting movie characters. Some of the characters just look odd, like Dorothy and the witches, but some of the others, and particularly the Flying Monkey, are just…well, freaky is the word that leaps to mind. My daughter got a Flying Monkey in her Happy Meal today, and, in all honesty, I think it’s scarier than the ones in the movie.

So, just as with the combination of weird faux-Jamaican accents and space aliens, you just have to wonder "What were they thinking?" Then shake your head a little, and ask for a LEGO Batman toy instead.