McDonald's Is Bringing Back the Adult Happy Meal (Toys Included)
McDonald's adult Happy Meals were such a cultural touchstone that it's wild to think that the Golden Arches wouldn't have made them a regular menu item already. Thanks to prankster extraordinaire Kerwin Frost, though, the adult Happy Meal is back, baby, though not as you knew it.
McDonald's Kerwin Frost Box cheekily updates the amusingly inexplicable phenom that was the adult Happy Meal, serving up a soda, french fries and a choise of 10-piece McNuggets or Big Mac inside a super-sized cardboard box.
Pretty straightforward stuff as far as McDonald's collaborative meals go but the idea is there: adult Happy Meals are returning just in time for the holidays. Who needs Christmas dinner!
Plus, to Frost, the food is the least important part of this equation.
McDonald's clearly recognized the immense demand — we're talking red-hot six-figure eBay auctions — for the cute characters that came with the adult Happy Meals created in partnership with enigmatic streetwear label Cactus Plant Flea Market in 2022, so it doubled down on collectability with the Kerwin Frost Box.
Frost has designed six unique McNugget Buddy characters, one of which will be packaged inside each adult Happy Meals (or Kerwin Frost Box, if you please).
And, to really amp up the personality, each Buddy comes with different clothes that can be swapped between characters, reflecting the playfulness inherent to Frost's resume.
“I’ve loved McDonald’s since I was a kid,” said Frost said in a statement.
“I even had my own Ronald McDonald doll that I brought to picture day at school, and it was my dream to collect all the McNugget Buddies. Now, coming up with my own special set of Buddies – each one representing different aspects of self-expression – it's unreal, a dream come true.”
Frost's new adult Happy Meals will be available at McDonald's restaurants from December 11, the same day that Frost launches tie-in merch on his website. A portion of sales from those items will benefit the Harlem Arts Alliance, a fitting organization for Frost, a Harlem native himself, to select.
Cactus Plant Flea Market and McDonald's original adult Happy Meals were such a landmark moment that they made the mainstream news, smashing through the niche streetwear market that CPFM typically dwells in.
The fact that these things were everywhere were a testament to McDonald's acuity in selecting collaborators, CPFM's memetic design sense, and the innate comedy that is "Adult Happy Meal." I mean, the TikToks write themselves.
The adult Happy Meals predated a new era of McDonald's-related virality, actually. Just about a year later, the Grimace Shake was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public and, with it, a flurry (no pun intended! McDonald's joke!) of ironic clips showing the milkshake's mutation-inducing effects.
The Kerwin Frost Box is so intentional that I can't imagine it'll achieve the same level of accidental virality of its forebears but I also can't imagine that it won't be a hit.
Still, Kerwin Frost is a fitting McDonald's collaborator.
His widely wacky output — ranging from quirky doodads devised for companies like Beats and adidas to the all-purpose Spaghetti Boys — makes the ungeneralizable streetwear chameleon a natural fit for the kind of ingenuity that McDonald's craves in its collaborators.
Previous McD's co-signers include Japanese streetwear designer Verdy, Palace Skateboards, and both Cardi B AND Offset, remember.
This will be a lot of folks' first interaction with Frost or anything bearing his name so it's important to know that there's a method behind the semi-madness.
It's easy to see Frost's creative creations as the dabblings of a grown-up class clown — especially when you see his giant McDonald's top hat in the campaign photos — but Frost really cares about what he does. To him, it's as important to have fun as it is to envision authentic, sincere expressions of imagination.
“I don't consider myself a comedian at all, but I try not to take things super serious," Frost told Highsnobiety in 2021. "There's definitely humor in everything I do. I think you need that in life, period. But it shouldn't take out how serious you are about your craft or work.”
