How McDonald’s Ended Up Making One of the Rare Pieces of ‘Tiny Toons’ Merch
They were tiny, they were toony and they were all a little looney. Yet, despite the fact that Tiny Toon Adventures was among the best cartoons of the early 1990s, there were never really any decent toys from the show — except, of course, what McDonald’s included in their Happy Meals.
In 1991, the fast-food chain offered a set of four Tiny Toons “Flip Cars,” an ingenious design in which each vehicle featured two cars in one. A year later, they took things a step further and debuted a set of eight Tiny Toons cars, each with its own character and unique play feature.
Don't Miss
Both were overseen by cartoonist, illustrator and toy designer Jim Engel, who worked on hundreds of promotions for McDonald’s as the head of creative at Simon Marketing. Below, Engel shares the stories behind the best Tiny Toons merch ever made.
1991 Flip Cars
Sometimes when we were developing Happy Meal toys, they’d be based on an established brand, but other times, we’d be on the ground floor of a property. We’d go out to L.A. and see pencil animations from an upcoming Disney movie, or in the case of Tiny Toons, Warner Bros. knew they were going to have this hot new show and they made the connection with McDonald’s.
We got all the initial stuff for the Tiny Toons characters, including a bible from before the characters even had their names changed. Buster Bunny was originally Bitsy Bugsy, and Plucky Duck was Duck Amok. Buster also had a much larger, pink nose, but they eventually toned that down for him to look more like Bugs Bunny.
We were well aware of the fact that these were the first Tiny Toons toys ever made, which was great because part of the selling point was that there were no comparable retail toys to take away the thunder of this promotion.
The creative team at Simon Marketing came up with the flip-car design. Then we had to work with engineers to make sure they could pull it off. The way they worked was, you’d fold the character down into the driver seat, flip the car over and the new character had popped up underneath. Each of the car bodies was different and pertained to the character, and two of the wheels pertained to one of the cars and the two other wheels pertained to the other. For example, Dizzy, the Taz-like character, was a heavy metal guy, so his car was a big amplifier with his purple wheels being volume controls, but when you flipped it over, there was a sub sandwich with Hamton in a chef’s hat and the wheels were tomato slices.
1992 Wacky Rollers
While I did all of the flip cars, I did about half of the Wacky Rollers. The rest were done by The Marketing Store, which was the agency Simon competed with on every McDonald’s Happy Meal promotion. I personally did the Steamroller, the Dodo big wheel car, the Plucky and Hamton one and the Buster Bunny one.
With the Steamroller, I was disappointed that we couldn’t put the sticker on the outside of the steamroller so that it looked more like the cat was run over instead of it being on the inside of the wheel like it ended up being. The reason we couldn’t put it on the outside was a safety thing — that way a kid couldn’t peel it off and eat it.
For Plucky Duck, it struck me as funny to have Hamton in the hamster wheel like he’s training with Plucky driving, wearing a cap like an old trainer. The Dodo one was my favorite. I remember thinking, “I don’t know if we’ll be able to afford this because there’s four other painted Dodos inside the wheel,” but it ended up being doable.
1994 Happy Birthday Happy Meal
The Tiny Toons promotions were so popular that Tiny Toons made it into the 15th Birthday Happy Meal from 1994.
Everybody called it a train, but it was meant to be a parade of toys. The set was unprecedented because McDonald’s got all these different licenses to cooperate and be a part of the same thing. Normally, you could never do a Happy Meal with Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny in the same collection, but when McDonald’s celebrated the 15th birthday of the Happy Meal, we did a collection of toys that were 15 different parade floats that combined several popular Happy Meal promotions of the past. The Muppets were in there, and so was E.T., Tonka Trucks and Tiny Toons. The Tiny Toons one had Babs tilting back-and-forth on a ladder to put a candle on a cake that Buster was holding.
My goal with all the Happy Meal toys I ever made was to make something I wanted myself, and that was certainly true with the Tiny Toons promotions.
