Sci-Fi Happy Meals That Are Too Good To Be True
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Why don’t adults get meals that come with prizes? Some of my favorite rituals from childhood involved being elbow-deep in a box of cereal, feeling around for the prize, or dumping all the food out of my Happy Meal just so I could get to the toy. So how come we don’t get a grown-up equivalent? After-dinner mints and fortune cookies don’t count, damn it. I want to be able to finish my snazzy, five-star meal, and then have the waiter bring me out a Rocket Raccoon action figure on a silver platter. Sadly, I will probably never live in such a world, but at least pretending is a little bit easier thanks to these faux Happy Meals that were ripped right out of my Happy Place.
These awesome fake Happy Meals are the work of Los Angeles digital artist Newt Clements. (He mostly comes out at night. Mostly.) His Pinterest is full of a wide variety of crazy projects, but his Happy Meals collection is one of the most extensive. He’s got over 100 of the things by my count, and they’re all incredibly well done. Designing Happy Meal boxes to tie into Doctor Who, Aliens, or Escape from New York would have been worthy of a story in and of itself, but Clements goes the extra mile by imagining what toys might be included with each meal as well. And I don’t care what bounty McDonald’s has on offer, there’s no way it’s cooler than an action figure of Firefly’s River standing atop a pile of Reaver corpses.
I also love that many of these Happy Meals are for movies or shows that are in no way appropriate for children. “Hey kids, put down your Clockwork Orange Alex action figure and drink your Milk Plus! Finish it up and we can all go kick a hobo to death!”
We’ve got our favorites gathered together below, but if you like them be sure to check out the whole collection on Clements’ Pinterest page. Outside our favorite genre of science fiction, he’s created Happy Meals for Breaking Bad, Saw, and even Showgirls. See if you can guess what the Showgirls toy is without looking…
