The ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ Happy Meal Toys That Never Were
Unless you’re willing to settle for a bootleg decal of Calvin pissing on a Ford logo, it’s not easy to get your hands on Calvin and Hobbes merch. Feeling it compromised the integrity of the strip’s thoughtful messages about childhood, creator Bill Watterson has always been adamantly opposed to licensing his characters for adaptations and products.
Still, given the strip’s popularity when it ran from 1985 to 1995, all manner of big corporations tried to convince Watterson otherwise, including McDonald’s.
Back in the twilight of the 20th century, cartoonist, illustrator and toy designer Jim Engel worked on hundreds of promotions for McDonald’s Happy Meals as the head of creative at Simon Marketing (the other McDonald’s promotion Simon Marketing was famous for: the notorious Monopoly game). A big Calvin and Hobbes fan, Engel tried to convince his corporate overlords that Watterson would never go for a Happy Meal version of the characters, but they were undeterred, enlisting Engel to develop four such toys anyway.
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In Engel’s own words, here’s what those toys were, and the fate that they ultimately met.
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Just recently, I had to move some stuff in my basement to have a new furnace put in, which gave me access to some files I hadn’t seen in years. I just opened one to see what was in it, and I found a stack of glossy 8x10s that were photographs of presentation boards of potential products and ones that were made. Pretty close to the top of the pile was this Calvin and Hobbes one that I posted on my Facebook page. I thought people might find it interesting given what they may or may not know about Bill Watterson.
Calvin and Hobbes began in 1985, and I was a huge fan from the beginning. I even wrote to Watterson early on to ask him if I could buy an original from him — I played the card that I had a young boy named Calvin, which I do. I got a nice letter back from him, explaining that he didn’t part with originals, but it was on cool stationary and came in a cool envelope with the characters on it. He signed it and everything.
I also knew that he was very vocal about the fact that he never wanted to do any licensed products. So when Calvin and Hobbes came up a few years later at Simon Marketing, I immediately said, “This won’t happen. The guy is adamant that he won’t do it.” But they said, “Do some designs anyway.”
I ended up doing four designs. One was Calvin and Hobbes with a tentacle coming out from under the bed. One was Calvin reading a comic book on a chair, and the seat pops up with Hobbes hidden underneath it. One was Spaceman Spiff in prison with a dinosaur-looking guard. And one was of them in a wagon.
They were all really conventional things from the strip. I wanted to pick mainstays — the iconic Calvin and Hobbes images. They all had little functions that I thought would be fun. But I told everybody all along, “He won’t do this.” He’d even once said something like, “I never want to see my stuff in a burger restaurant.” Nobody believed me, though. The attitude was, “Yeah, everybody’s got a price, and this is McDonald’s.”
Anyway, I drew them up, and we put them on a big presentation board to pitch to McDonald’s. Somewhere in my house, I know I have a little prototype of the Spaceman Spiff toy made out of styrofoam with the mechanism in there. I think they added a feature where the dinosaur guy would turn his head to look at Spaceman Spiff.
After we presented it to McDonald’s, I have no idea what happened. Somebody on behalf of McDonald’s probably went to the syndicate, and they obviously got a “no” from Watterson. What remains now is some photocopies of presentation boards, and that’s about it.
Either way, they were fun to design because they were things that I wanted, even if I knew they’d never come to fruition.
