When you need to rant...

[D'Snowth]

Okay... seriously... WHAT is up with all the pedophile remarks whenever you watch a McDonald's commercial or something featuring Ronald McDonald? Oh, let me guess... he's a clown, and I guess since clowns are always entertaining children, all clowns must be pedophiles... just like all puppeteers are pedophiles, Kevin Clash proved that didn't he?

 

[Drtooth]

I thought the stereotype was clowns liked to kill you in your sleep.

Or, when it comes to Ronald McDonald, he's tying your kid down to a chair and force feeding them french fries like Homer Simpson in the ironic torture device in that Halloween special.

Truth is, Ronald McDonald does have a secret...

He moonlighted for Toyota.

 

[AquaGGR]

Clowns are anything but fun, the overall goofiness of clowns alienates kids and often turns into Nightmare Fuel.

(yeah, Captain Obvious right over here)

 

[Sgt Floyd]

Yes I went there.

 

[AquaGGR]

I was never really afraid of clowns, but I think they're hilarious (unintentionally).

Like this:

 

[Drtooth]

Clowns are anything but fun, the overall goofiness of clowns alienates kids and often turns into Nightmare Fuel.

(yeah, Captain Obvious right over here)

I'm more of the school of thought that clowns are depressing. They're entertainers who put on the lowest brow comedy imaginable so people can like them. And if the creepy clown meme has taught us, often times they fail at it. I tend to see them more like Krusty the Clown if he wasn't successful. And the successful ones have to go out and act like idiots for kids who are growing less and less fond of them.

Look at Ronald. Guy started out very popular, as a Bozo expy (long story), and now he's pushed aside for pug fugly cartoon kids and weird animals saying that the milk and apples you get in a kid's meal turn you into Popeye after eating spinach.

Very depressing, if you ask me.

Then again, I like the clowns that are intentionally creepy, just not Steven King It levels... like Binky the Clown, Captain Buggy, and everyone's favorite murderous merchant of menace, The Joker. Even people who are terrified of clowns love the most frightening one! You just can't hate that guy.

 

[AquaGGR]

McDonald's Happy Meals are very cheap and pretty much useless now. They're just some little action figures that can't move at all and the only thing they do is light up when you press their back. I wish they were more like this:

*Disregard the freaky 3D animation in the middle*

There was this one Transformer toy that all it did was move it's arm a little when you pressed something one it. A kid would get bored with it in like two minutes.

 

[Drtooth]

McDonald's Happy Meals are very cheap and pretty much useless now. They're just some little action figures that can't move at all and the only thing they do is light up when you press their back. I wish they were more like this:

(Angrilly slams head on Desk).

Age difference, I guess, but have you seen the original Happy meal toys? Know what they are? Little, tiny 2-D plastic model kits that you had to snap together. And then there was the HUGE revelation where they made ACTUAL 3-D figures and toys. Yep. Quarter sized pullback vehicles with the McDonaldland characters coming out of them. Sure, they had some decent PVC's when they progressed. Flocked Berenstain bear figures, some green little alien ripoffs of the Smurfs. But I got a Despicable Me Minion figure that says "OOh! Banana" when you move its arms. Is it as complex as an LCD game? No. But it's completely revolutionary compared to the stuff that I got as a kid.

Of course, they did give out book and tapes read-a-longs at one point.

I'll agree they aren't as big as the Kung Fun Panda and Monsters Inc. toys. Large action figure sized things.

The REAL complaint should be Wendy's or Burger King. At least McD's still has some great licenses. The last decent thing I saw at Wendy's was a Word Girl story CD (where they couldn't afford any of the voice actors from the show, except WordGirl and did the rest with the guy who played Kid Muscle/Casey Jones). Now all I see are Klutz books and reality competition show crap. This is the SAME Wendy's, mind you, that had Hey Arnold and Super Mario figures MOC strangely in the same promotion as crappy little cardboard board games. And Burger King... you know how BAD their licenses got? They, and I'm not kidding, got a license from a cheap CGI Mockbuster Jungle Book movie. The same kinda cheap mockbuster CGI films they have polluting RedBox.

And seriously... When Iron Man 2 came out? They had a HUGE snap together Iron Man that was 8" tall when assembled. To go from that to... I don't even know what the Jungle Book toys are.. that's a jump.

 

[AquaGGR]

I actually think books or audio tapes/CDs would be a better choice for a fast food toy than plastic stationary figurines, but that's probably a pretty unpopular opinion.

 

[Drtooth]

I'd rather have plastic stationary figures than having to listen to wrong sounding characters. The Word Girl thing was... okay... but they could have used the already recorded audio from the episodes, but they went the cheaper route and got a non-union voice actor to voice everyone that wasn't Word Girl and the results were completely mixed. He tried his best with Dr. Two-Brains and Chuck... but Granny Mae sounds like a generic old woman.

Still, I like the stationary figures. i'm a collector, you see. They're much better than having to pay 8 bucks for essentially the same thing in a store. I mean, you can't replicate a Transformer without really compromising how it looks in either form (The Transformers Animated Line tried its darndest, but only Optimus and Bumblebee came out looking good in both forms), but most action figures today under the price range of 15 bucks are the size of Star Wars figures and really not all that great either.