McDonald's Front Counter (1990)
One of the more ridiculous purchases I've made on eBay was this photo. It was snapped at the front counter of a McDonald's restaurant in the early 90's. I don't remember the counter at the ones in my area looking like this one, but those translite signs next to the menu definitely ring a bell.
Here's a close-up of the ones that are visible in this picture:
McDonald's had frozen yogurt in the early 90's and they used it to make Coke Floats for a brief time. These ones were served in a collectible Coca-Cola glass that I'm pretty sure that my grandparents kept in their kitchen cupboard for about the next twenty years. I'm not sure why these got taken off of the menu. They always have Coca-Cola and root beer, and their ice cream machines have to be working at least some of the time... right?
The early 90's was also a time when McDonald's tried to muscle in on Taco Bell's turf with a line of breakfast burritos and chicken fajitas. I tried each of these once when I was a kid, and let's just say that Taco Bell had absolutely nothing to fear from the competition.
The sign on the far left in this photo is for one of the coolest toys that was ever available for any fast food chain: the McDino Changeables.
This was the third and final series of McDonald's Changeable toys, which seemed to be the fast food chain's answer to Transformers. They were actually a pretty high quality toy for a kids meal premium. Each toy was made out of thick plastic and metal that really held up when you played with it. In fact, in all of the years that I've gone to flea markets and fished through different boxes of toys, I don't remember ever coming across a broken Changeables toy. There aren't a lot of kids toys from the 80's and 90's that I can say the same thing about.
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| photo source: Robot Robot |
The first and second series of Changeables toys transformed into robots while the third series transformed into dinosaurs. The robots were my favorite when I was a kid, but two of the eight toys from this series are among my favorites: the Hotcakes O-Dactyl and the Quarter Pounder With Cheese O-Saur. The face on that cheeseburger dinosaur never fails to crack me up every time I see him.
