Review – McDonald’s Changeables Chicken McNuggets (1987)

“By the late 1980s, fast-food restaurants had become vastly reliant on the toy giveaways as their major weapon in a business in which there were too many chains and when many boomers were starting to turn away from junk food.”

—The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America’s Youngest Consumers*

The third McDonald’s Changeables cheap transforming robot toy that we’ve looked at here at battlegrip.com (Quarter Pounder review, Large French Fries review), this Chicken McNuggets toy robot is every bit as silly and fun as we’ve come to expect from the Changeables line. These aren’t amazing toys, but they are amazingly fun toys.

Roughly the same height as those other two Changeables toys, the Chicken McNuggets is another McDonald’s food package that opens to reveal an ugly robot design. What may stand out most about these toys (after the fact they’re based on food items McDonald’s sold when these were new) has to be the faces of the robots. Sharp, angular designs that are — at times — a bit abstract, the Changeables robots are actually closer in design to the earliest transforming robot toys than they are the more humanoid-looking Transformers of 1986 and later. Just look at those 1984 Transformers toys vs the 1986 designs and you’ll notice that as the series developed the faces became a bit friendlier and more like people. More mouths, noses, and eyes in the later years.

An Awesome Series!

These Changeables cheap transforming robot toys continue to be fun to track down and display. It’s kinda neat that McDonald’s went with their own line of toys instead of licensing Transformers or another brand; this is something we don’t see often today since marketing demands McDonald’s partner with popular brands for Happy Meal toys instead of crafting their own intellectual properties. Too bad, because I’d love to see what McDonald’s could do today with the Changeables. Just imagine a webseries on YouTube that shows kids updated versions of these robots in action. Am I the only one who thinks it would be kinda awesome to watch McDonald’s try to revive the Changeables today?