Raving Toy Maniac

August 5, 2012 - The boy saw a McDonald's commercial last month and decided that he needed the Ice Age toys, even though he's never actually sat all the way through any of the Ice Age movies. The service at our closest McDonald's is less than stellar, so after getting him one toy there, I bought a set via eBay and thought that was the end of it, but he convinced his grandparents to take him to McDonald's two more times. Lots of Ice Age toys in our house now - I can't complain, because the toys are actually quite nice.

The new promo at McDonald's is SpongeBob SquarePants, which the boy again learned about from a commercial, so we stopped on the way to the Bronco's Saturday Scrimmage, and he got a cute Gary toy. You push it along a flat surface and his eye stalks move.

Let's see what's out there in restaurants this month!

A quick check of the web sites for the more popular fast food restaurants reveals the following:

- Wendy's Kids Meals have "Sports Illustrated Kids" toys, with Where's Waldo coming soon.

- Burger King has Discovery Kids toys, with something from Mattel coming soon.

- McDonald's has SpongeBob SquarePants toys in their Happy Meals, with Power Rangers Super Samurai and "Hello. I'm Julius!" (by Paul Frank) shown as the next promotions.

- Carl's Jr. and Hardee's have The Pirates! Band of Misfits toys, with Scribblenauts Unlimited shown as arriving on November 5th at Hardee's and November 7th at Carl's Jr.

No changes from last month at four restaurants:

- Subway Kids Meals have reusable lunch sacks. The sacks feature Disney/Pixar's Brave.

- Sonic has "new old school" toys - updated takes on classic toys like tops and racecars.

- The Arby's web site shows "Xtreme Arby's" toys, with "Re-Arrangers" toys coming soon.

- Taco Bell has two-toned sunglasses. The 'kids under 3' item appears to be a Wow Wow Wubbzy book.

And one new addition to our monthly list:

- I did not know that Chick-fil-A had kids meals (and toys) until recently. The current toy promo seems to be in flux, and they appear to have removed the schedule that was posted on their site. We'll just leave it at that and keep checking the site each month.