Happy Meal toys celebrating Disney Parks spark a trip down Memory Lane

Happy Meal toys are celebrating Disney Parks.

Happy Meal toys at McDonald’s are celebrating a Disney Parks attraction, which is a good way to virtually visit them during these trying times.

According to Delish, there are currently 10 toys that together make up a train from Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway at Walt Disney World. Even more fun than seeing iconic characters like Goofy, Donald Duck and Mickey and Minnie Mouse is that each character moves as the train rolls along.

It looks like some of the cars include actual cars (or possibly a go-kart?), a spaceship, and a boat, which is a nice variety of vehicles, which will be available until around December 14.

This is at least the second time that a train with moving parts has been used as a Happy Meal toy, which got me thinking back to all the fantastic Happy Meal toys of the mid-to-late 1990s that I got to enjoy collecting.

Many of these were tied to Disney in some way, whether celebrating movies like Tarzan (the professor riding a tricycle was particularly fun) to cartoon TV series from the ABC One Saturday Morning block, like the anthropomorphic cast of the Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series inside bumper cars shaped like hockey pucks and the flip cars based on 101 Dalmatians: The Animated Series. 

These toys were cheap (think about it, they’re basically free since you paid for the food), which made it perfect for a cash-strapped family who couldn’t cook very well, which described my parents at the time. Maybe that’s why they’ve been a staple since the introduction of the Happy Meal in 1979, according to The Toy Report.

It also explained how I collected a group of knockoff Furbies and a nice bunch of mini Beanie Babies (which I treated as the puppies, kittens, etc of my main Beanie Baby collection), and one thing that I was particularly proud of was building the entire Inspector Gadget figure when the 1999 hit theaters. (Unfortunately, a recent rewatch proved that neither of those films holds up. At all.)

One particular McDonald’s worker took a special liking to me for some reason, so she’d save the Hot Wheels from the Hot Wheels/Barbie times for when we’d come in so I could assemble the whole fleet of each batch. (Being a quirky kid, these cars couldn’t race my normal Hot Wheels collection, instead having their own division like sports car racing.)

Fast forward to about ten years later in a town two hours away, we’re shopping in Dollar General when the cashier stares intently at me. “Excuse me, but, um…were you the little boy I used to save all the McDonald’s Hot Wheels for?” That was a fun mini-reunion.

As my parents learned to cook over the years, my siblings didn’t really have the opportunity to collect many Happy Meal toys of their own, though they played with the leftovers that were saved in a box in the garage.

There’s something very low-stakes yet important about the process of assembling an analog group of Happy Meal toys (though perhaps this is just the Pixar fan in me), which is why in the future I’ll likely sometimes purchase a Happy Meal just for the toy for my nieces and nephews. (Everyone does this once in a while, right?)

While the classic Disney characters might not have the same brand recognition now to the current generation of kids, they’re still familiar through video games like Kingdom Hearts and shows like Mickey and the Roadster Racers, and many classic shorts are available on Disney Plus.

But bringing them back as Happy Meal toys seems like an excellent idea.