My Favorite McBoo!
With all the talk and scuttle-butt surrounding McDonalds bringing back the McBoo pail for a very limited run, I got to thinking about my favorite piece of Halloween ephemera which instantly transports me back to being a kid. Allow me to take you back to 1990 and a fateful trip to McDonalds so I could get the glorious GLOW IN THE DARK MCBOO PAIL!!!
Yes. Look at him. Still glows too:
By 1990, McDonalds had been about 5 or so years into the McBoo pail game and for the most part, they were all great. Mainly pumpkins, but somewhere around 88/89, they started offering others like a green witch and a white ghost. Essentially if you wanted to trick or treat using the Silver Shamrock masks as treat receptacles, this was the closest you’d get. To the untrained eye, they were nothing more than cheap Halloween buckets that the dollar store employee would laugh at. But to us kids? These were high class trick or treating technology. And they looked better than those generic pumpkin pails from KMart.
Now what set this apart from the others? It only GLOWED IN THE DARK NO BIG DEAL! As a kid, I was fully invested into anything that had a glow in the dark gimmick and it would automatically become my favorite thing ever. Of course, McDonalds was on fire at that time and producing toys and promos that every kid wanted, so all they had to do was slap some GITD on a bucket and I wanted it.
Before I continue, is there anything better than getting a happy meal and eating it out of a McBoo Pail? The taste of the burger was just that much better coming out of a warm and flimsy plastic bucket. And the smell that lingered in the pail even after you were done was absolutely intoxicating!you remember that smell and taste.
So while it wasn’t the biggest pail to use for trick or treating, it was still fantastic to use. Naturally I got record number of low amounts of candy that year but I don’t know too many other kids on my block who had a glow in the dark pail! Yeah, they got more candy by using their sister’s New Kids On The Block Pillowcase, I but still found a way to stand out. Sorry not sorry but glow in the dark anything beats out Jonathan Knight anyday of the week. My stupidity as a kid mixed with the excitement of owning this and looking forward to the big night that year blinded me and…ya know what? I’m ok with that.
I’ve lost count of how many Halloween (and holiday in general) decorations or other stuff has been lost, thrown away or forgotten through the years in my family. But this? This is just one of those things I refuse to let go of. Something I admire all year round and it never fails to make me smile. It’s perfect in every way and can still be used for a great decoration on the table or…
Well, some things never change…
—Chad
