Batman: The Brave and the Happy Meal Toys

When McDonald’s released the Smurf set, I only picked up Papa Smurf. Since they gave up the Disney license (probably a good business move on their part, but it still sucks from my point of view), I just haven’t really liked any of the toys they’ve been fielding. Not even the recent Kung Fu Panda 2 toys really got me going. I just picked up two of them, Baby Po and The Balance of Justice set, only because you can never have enough panda in your life.

But when someone told me that they had Bat man toys, I dropped my lunch plans and bought myself a few Burger Mcdo sandwiches.

It was not worth it.


Before we start, note that this review is late. These are no longer available at McDonald’s and have been replaced by the Puss in Boots toys. I procrastinated. You can write me an email to complain (which I will blatantly ignore).
Now that that’s out of the way, last month the toys in the Happy Meals were either Batman: the Brave and the Bold toys for boys, or My Little Pony toys for girls. There was a curious assortment of 4 boys toys and 4 girls toys:

When I heard “Batman” from the Web, I was thinking of toys along the lines of the Spectacular Spider-Man or Marvel Superheroes sets: small figurines of the heroes and villains with some kind of action figure. Sadly that’s not the case here. We get one superhero toy (Plastic Man) and three crappy toy vehicles that you’d have to be Adam West to drive.

I was disappointed.

By default the best of the four is Plastic Man, but to be fair, the figure is very nicely made. The pose is nice and dynamic, with a fairly unobtrusive action feature. It’s a great looking desktop toy. The action feature is a display of his powers with his neck extending upward, and his torso mounted on a corkscrew that allows that to extend his height as well.

As an added bonus, he’s also got some articulation that allows you some posing options with his arms and head, though the hip swivels are fairly useless since he’s pre-posed already. He is fairly stable though.

The rest of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold toys are pretty crappy. The three vehicles are the Batcopter, Penguin Submarine and the Jokermobile. Both the Batcopter and the Penguin sub offer the go-to cop out when it comes to action feature: the missile launcher. The submarine fires a projectile that is shaped like an umbrella, while the entire front of the Batcopter pops off at the push of a button.

The Jokermobile is slightly better. Its action feature is that the bomb shape on top of the car looks like it’s lit, with a spark at the top of the wick. Press the button and that spark goes BOOM! It’s silly, but it is fun. Plus the toy comes with cheap stickers to apply.  I honestly miss applying stickers to toys and wish Hasbro would bring that back.

In the end, I’m not really sold on this set. It’s a little odd that they couldn’t decide on a theme here: one figurine and three scale vehicles? It would have been cooler if they had changed Plastic Man to a Bat-Vespa or something. Better yet, McDonald’s could have given us a set of four 4” hero figurines to match against the Marvel Superheroes set.

I honestly don’t know why I completed the whole set when I know I’m gonna end up just giving them away to my cousins or something.