McBoo Hoo

If you ask any kid that grew up in the United States in the 80's and 90's, an essential Halloween tradition was going to McDonald's during October to get a custom Halloween pail. Usually a Happy Meal would come in the classic cardboard box or a white paper bag (depending on how rough your side of town was).  However, starting in October of 1986 to celebrate Halloween, McDonald's would introduce these beautiful Halloween pails:

These guys used the Happy Meal food as guts that you would then pick out and eat, kind of like how a spider sucks up the guts of a fly.  Gross.  Typically Happy Meals would have the promotional toys inside but in this case, the pail was the treat!  If the toys were a skeleton, this would be an exoskeleton.  Spiders have exoskeletons.  Once you finished the food, you had a nice bucket to go trick or treating with and could fill it with candies and/or pennies from cheap houses.  

After depriving children from these in 1988, McDonald's kind of learned their lesson and introduced the classic three which all the OG's remember:

Now instead of three pumpkin shaped pails, there was an angry pumpkin, a ghost and a witch.  These three would change slightly throughout the years they would be around.  The ghost would glow in the dark so that was of course, the coolest one.  If I remember correctly, the witch had a spider hanging from her hair in the back:

See?  Gross.  After Halloween was over, you could use these pails to keep things around the house, like ketchup packets for example.   As popular as these things were, McDonald's must have had a bad year in general to insult the public in '91 with these Santa Ana Dollar Tree quality vinyl bags:

Yeah, they glowed in the dark, introduced Frankenstein and were double sided but everyone just saw this as a cheap ploy to save money. They knew they were not fooling anyone so the following year, they returned to the pails, this time with detachable  cookie cutter lids that I may or may not have used to cut sandwich bread.    

This would be the last time anyone would ever see the pails in this iteration. RIP  (pause).

When the pails did not return in '93, it was clear McDonald's was phasing these guys out. In 1994 they breathed their last breath with a redesign, most notably the witch was now purple and the ghost, Asian.    

Pails returned in 1999 but with McDonald's character designs on the outside and then did not return until 2010 with a Mr. Potato head theme.   In the United States, there was a drastic reduction in fast food commercials geared towards children because of the childhood obesity epidemic which may have led to the hiatus.  In addition, there was no more kid's programming on broadcast TV where Mc Donald's could advertise their tolerable food. Those of us without cable had no choice but to tune in to commercial-less PBS and watch Arthur and Wild Kratts.  

 From 2010 and on, the pails have returned every year with the caviot that whatever needs promotion (Minions, Angry Birds etc) is going to be splattered on the outside of the pail.  Although sometimes themes like Scooby Doo and Peanuts are seasonally appropriate, it's not the same, nor will it ever be the same as the simple, innocent cute little faces of pails past.