Here are the five most McAwesome Happy Meal toys: I wish I had them today.
See also: - Michelle Obama should stay the hell out of my Happy Meal! - Happy Meals do not decompose, and McDonald's not lovin' it - Asian Flavors vs. Happy Meals
5. The McChangeables 1989 was a pretty good year for Transformers -- or Go-Bots if you were poor -- and McD's was there with the cross-marketing (and not paying for copyrights), designing its own menu items to transform into....well, I was never really sure what they were supposed to be, but the transforming part was the important thing. To this day, I regret that I could never get my hands on the transforming ice cream cone toy, and I ended up with like seven Big Macs, four fries and two cheeseburgers. The neighbor kid next door had an ice cream cone toy -- and he made sure to keep it in his little sights at all times because I would have poached it if he hadn't. 4. McLunch Boxes These crappy, cheap, sticker-décor-capable lunch boxes were all the rage with munchkins in 1987 -- for about ten minutes. Parents and kids alike quickly discovered that the handles were always loose, there was no heat/cold lunch insulation, and if you actually used them more than a couple of times to actually take lunch to school, they broke. So '80s kids, myself included, used them for Crayon and/or pencil boxes, at least until the stickers got dirty and fell off, and all the fun went with them. 3. McPoison bracelets Okay, technically these were pre-official Happy Meal toys, and technically they weren't named "McPoison bracelets," but I managed to get a red one thanks to my older cousin, and my very favorite thing to do with it was fill the little plastic compartment with dry Kool-Aid powder, tell my little brother it was poison, and listen to him scream in horror as I would pretend to put it in his food. This was the absolute height of fun, at least until my folks figured out I was scaring the shit out of my sibling because he refused to eat, and I got whupped -- and got the bracelet permanently confiscated. 2. McHalloween buckets 1985 was a good year for Happy Meal toys, especially at Halloween, because nothing made you cooler than sporting the official McDonald's candy-grab bucket. I took it out for a test-drive on Halloween, quickly figured out that it was neat-looking but functionally useless, and used it just to hold my best candy pickings -- the mini candy bars and taffy bites -- while relying on my old Strawberry Shortcake pillow case for major collecting. As I look back on it, McDonald's should have just put McDonaldland pillow cases in the Happy Meals, but it's possible that would have sent a strange, unwelcome message to kids and parents alike -- remember, this was the era of hospital x-raying Halloween candy. 1. McStar Trek I like to call this one "the Happy Meal toy(s) that got away." Star Trek: The Original Motion Picture came out in 1979, the same year that Happy Meals were officially introduced. And McDonald's went where no hamburger fast-food chain had gone before: movie marketing tie-ins. The Trekkie-themed Happy Meal was the first, but I didn't get one of these because at the time I was too young to eat solid foods. In fact, I didn't discover Star Trek until Star Trek: The Next Generation in the early 1990s, and I've been a Captain Picard fan ever since. But the seriously neat thing about this vintage set is that with every single Happy Meal, you got several toys: a nifty plastic communicator ring, a bracelet, a space map, stickers and even a comic strip on the box. I could probably acquire one now, because people on eBay do sell them, but for what they're asking I could buy William Shatner.Follow @CafeWestword