If you were born in the 1980s and 1990s, you may remember the colorful plastic buckets that McDonald’s gave away with Happy Meals every Halloween. You can go trick-or-treating with them, use them to hand out candy, or just toss them in the closet with the rest of the junk in the room, only to be treated like a strange artifact a few months later. Discover from a scarier time. Well, the band Boo Buckets are coming back in 2024, but not many people remember them.
McDonald’s announced its latest Boo Buckets earlier this week. The Happy Meal, which goes on sale October 15, sees the jack-o’-lantern and ghost-style faces replaced by smiling monsters, and now comes with a blue bucket in addition to the signature orange, white and green colors. I’m sure kids will enjoy them more. But let’s be honest, Boo Buckets is currently for adults, and not everyone agrees with the UwU-ification of a glorious nostalgia trip.
“These look terrible and have those crappy fake lids that do nothing but make them harder to grab, either do the right thing or don’t do it at all,” one activist McDonald’s poster tweeted . “Can you repost those 90s stuff that glows in the dark and has real lids? Please!” another person begged. “And 90s Halloween McChicken guys! I’m giving you free ideas, all 30+ Old guys in their 40s and above will give you money!”
The comments on Instagram were even more brutal. “Fire the design department,” it read. Another wrote: “Where is the light in the darkness?” “Where is the lid?!!!” pleaded a third. However, not everyone is opposed to the reform. Some claim they are “cute” or “very exciting.” To those of you filled with positivity, all I can say is, in the words of a new Boo Bucket hater, “Some of you have never had McDonald’s Boo Buckets from the 1980s, and it shows.”
Boo Buckets were first introduced in 1986, with numerous variations and iterations appearing in the years that followed. Unbranded simplicity is part of their charm. Just a pure mishmash of late-capitalist imitation and craftsman-like practicality. The ubiquitous power of McDonald’s at the time cannot be overstated, imprinting itself on every child’s retina through a truly excessive amount of ad buys during afternoon and weekend cartoon slots, and especially during holidays like Halloween.
That said, I never got a bucket growing up, but it made me feel like everyone else in the world. So when the company decided to reintroduce nostalgia-baiting merchandise in 2022 with its original look and feel, it was obviously a stroke of genius. The quietness of my life, filling the gaps in my childhood through a quick trip to (non-artificial intelligence) drive-thru. It was a nice dream while it lasted.
