The Super Mario Happy Meal

This super obese Super Mario from the McDonalds Super Mario Bros Happy Meal was the first time that I had ever been able to have any kind of Mario or video game character in a toy form aside from an early 80s plush Donkey Kong I got from a Goodwill.  Video games used to not be marketed the way that they are today.  Looking back, it seemed that games were marketed as games and not as general products across the market.  Not even Mario had a whole lot of product back then.  Sure, Nintendo put out a ton of shirts (and always has) but there was no aisle dedicated to toys of game characters in Toys ‘R’ Us.  There were no websites that you could go to and import stuff from Japan.  Hell no.  This was 1990!  The internet was used to share scientific data back in those days and not to watch videos of monkeys throwing poop at each other or zombie kids saying how they like turtles.  This was why I played with these toys long into the 90s until they started putting out actual figures of these characters (which I might do a Flashback feature over).

These came out in 1990 as part of a cross-promotion for the release of one of the greatest games of all time, “Super Mario Bros. 3” for the NES.  Up first is our hero, Mario.

Mario eats a lot of fatty foods, I’d assume.  Pizza, spaghetti, lasagna, calzones… the list goes on and on.  It looks like our hero Mario has been pigging out a bit much on them, as he required a spring with a platform to launch himself!  This picture is missing the spring, but I’m sure you can imagine what the mechanism would have looked like.

Luigi, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a body–it was sculpted into a cloud or something!  This was a pull-back toy that went… fast… I guess.  I don’t know.  I never really played with Luigi.  He looks a bit like a genie or something.

Now these were great.  The Koopa Paratroopa (left) and Goomba (right) were common enemies that Mario needed to squash, so I think that I must have gone to McDonalds several times during their available weeks because I have 5 or so of each of them.  Every time I clean the basement, I swear that I find another one of them.

The Koopa jumped when you squeezed on a pump that was attached to his shell and the Goomba did backflips when you pressed his head down to his feet and let the suction cup attach to the circle there.  In all, not bad for a fast food toy.