Review – McDonald’s Happy Meal Toy, Hobgoblin Landglider

Every now and then you encounter something that’s both silly enough and cheap enough that you don’t dare leave it behind. This McDonald’s Happy Meal Hobgoblin Landglider, released back in 1995, is an excellent example of what I mean by silly and cheap. Priced at $0.99, I grabbed this over the weekend at an antique mall near Waco because it’s the Hobgoblin in a screwy car. Hey, it blends one of the coolest Spider-Man villains with a wacky car so how could I say no?

Roughly four inches long with a wingspan of about three inches, the Hobgoblin Landglider is a cheap plastic toy with a weak sculpt, fairly sloppy paint, and a wicked design. The Landglider is a bat-winged car with jack o’ lantern tires, a ramplate similar to the one on the front of the Hobgoblin’s actual glider (this page at samruby.com has some great scans of the glider), and a simple mechanism that moves the wings up and down when the Landglider is rolled across the floor.

I love it when fast food places use their licenses to produce toys like this, because these are the exact sort of toys that help get kids into something new. What five year old boy is going to reject a monsterized car with bat wings? And for a fast food toy, this piece is actually pretty durable, with the car made of a heavy plastic and multiple pieces that are secured together with three screws on the bottom of the car. Where they could have gotten away with a one-piece plastic hunk of junk, the team at McDonald’s actually put energy into crafting a great little toy car with some weight and playability.

The car is no Hot Wheels when it comes to rolling across the floor, but watching those silly bat wings flap as the car races across the hard floor is fantastic. It may not be super fast, but any other toys seeing this thing rolling toward them are sure to get out of the way.

According to this page at spiderfan.org there are a total of nine different toys in this Happy Meal series, four of which are goofy cars. The site lists a value of $5 on this, but unless you’re a hardcore Spider-Man collector I don’t think you should pay more than a buck or two for any of the toys in this series.

There’s not a lot to say. This is a fast food toy from the mid-nineties and it’s a fun, wacky car that will look great in any toy car or Spider-Man collection. I’m glad I stumbled across this, even if it does have me starting to think about the Scorpion Stingstriker from the same series.

Philip Reed should be ignored whenever he’s pushing toy cars across the floor.