If you were a creature of the ‘80s and ‘90s, you may remember pining for the colorful plastic Boo Buckets McDonald’s gave out every Halloween with its Happy Meals. You could trick-or-treat with them, use them to give out candy, or just chuck them in the closet with the rest of junk in your room, only to be discovered months later like a strange artifact from a spookier time. Well, the Boo Buckets are back for 2024, but not as many remember them.
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McDonald’s announced the newest Boo Buckets earlier this week. On sale with Happy Meals starting October 15, the jack-o-lantern and ghost-style faces have been replaced with smiling monsters, and there’s now a blue bucket in addition to the iconic orange, white, and green. I’m sure the kids will like them a lot more. But let’s be honest, Boo Buckets are for adults at this point, and not everyone is onboard with the UwU-fication of a once glorious nostalgia-trip.
“Tthese look awful and have those garbage fake lids that do nothing but make them harder to hold, do something right or don’t do it at all,” wrote one militant McD’s poster on Twitter. “Can you just rerelease the 90s ones that glow in the dark and have actual lids! Please!!!!” pleaded another. “Also the 90s Halloween McNuggets buddies! I’m giving you free ideas and all is old aholes in our 30s and 40s will give you money!”
The Instagram comments were even more brutal. “Fire the design department,” read one. “Where’s the glow in the dark one,” read another. “WHERE ARE THE LIDS ??!!!” begged a third. Not everyone is up in arms about the overhaul, though. Some claim they are “cute” or “REALLY EXCITING.” To those oozing with positivity I can only say, in the words of one new Boo Bucket hater, “Some of y’all never had the 1980’s Boo Buckets from McDonalds and it shows.”
The Boo Buckets were first rolled out in 1986, with several variations and iterations in the years that followed. The unbranded simplicity was part of their charm. Just pure mashups of late capitalist pastiche and workmanlike utility. It’s also hard to overstate the omnipresent power of McDonald’s at the time, which burned itself onto every child’s retinas through truly excessive ad buys during the afternoon and weekend cartoon slots, especially around holidays like Halloween.
Which is to say that I never got a Boo Bucket growing up but was made to feel like everyone else in the world had. So it was an obvious stroke of genius when the company decided to bring the nostalgia-bait merchandise back with the original look and style in 2022. Millennial parents who were stressed to the max and looking to post an easy W with their kids could get 15 minutes of quiet and fill the gap in their own childhood with one quick trip to the (non-AI) drive-thru. It was a nice dream while it lasted.
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