McDonald’s is paying tribute to its lucrative merchandising past with a new set of collector’s meal cups that star past McDonald’s cup icons like Grimace, Hello Kitty, and Shrek. They’re plastic instead of glass, but they won’t leach heavy metals into your bloodstream this time either.
The fast-food chain announced the newest Happy Meal prizes last week and will begin giving them out on August 13. There are six collector’s cups in total, each featuring art based on characters and themes from Happy Meals past:
- Coca-Cola
- Beanie Babies
- Hello Kitty and Peanuts
- Barbie and Hot Wheels
- Shrek, Jurassic Park and Minions
- The Grimace Glass, Boo Buckets, and Funny Fry Friends
Collector’s cups have a long history when it comes to McDonald’s Happy Meal giveaways, but none is more notorious than the 2010 Shrek recall. The company had to recall 12 million glass cups promoting Shrek Forever After after the painted images on them featuring the ogre and his friends were found to contain trace amounts of cadmium. The new Shrek cup won’t have that problem, although the jury is still out on how many microplastics come in each drink of soda from them.
Fortunately, the cups are really more for displaying, and I’m as much of a sucker for colorful, commercial nostalgia as anyone else. Less fortunately, McDonald’s Happy Meals are more expensive than ever. A recent study claimed prices on some items, from McGriddles to Big Macs, had gone up over 40 percent since the pandemic. To fight back against the perception that its “value” menu was becoming overpriced, the company launched a $5 meal over the summer.
We’ll see if the collector’s cup campaign can recall the frenzy that occurred back in 2021 when Happy Meals briefly came with special edition Pokémon cards. Now there’s a collector’s cup I would gorge myself on McNuggets to get.