The two fast food establishments that I remember going to the most was McDonald’s and Burger King. During the 1990s, the Big Mac and the Whopper were only $0.99, so for around $10, you can comfortably feed a family of six. I remember wanting the Happy Meal toys, but financially it didn’t make sense as a family living on a tight budget, so I only got the Big Mac. Same story with the Whopper. I was still satisfied and content with that because I like food!:)
The thing that I do remember a lot is the activity newsletters that the restaurants had, especially Burger King in addition to giving out their paper “crown” (which I think they still offer in their restaurants today). I have a couple McDonald’s examples here, but the one that I remember the most because it was within access inside the restaurant was the “Burger King Kids Club” newsletter.
These were newsletters that features Burger King’s in-house characters, the Burger King Kids Club Kids. Each newsletter has various activities like mazes and crafts like “door knob hang signs” and would sometime feature various holidays theme/design throughout the year. It would also feature advertisement of the kids toys offered at the time.
From what I learned recently, the characters were used by the Burger King restaurants from 1989-1999 as part of their marketing strategy. In my opinion, it worked because I still remember how awesome these characters were while I was a child, browsing the newsletter activities as I enjoyed my Whopper.
Sometimes the characters would be on the cover page, other times a certain franchise that was tied with a Burger King promotional at the time would grace the cover, but the Burger King Kids Club characters would be featured on the inside pages.
The newsletters I have pictured in this blog post are just a few examples of what the newsletter cover page looks like. Although not a complete collection, I am glad that I kept these around and was able to share images of it here.
I appreciate all the Burger King Kids Club characters, but if there was one character that I just thought was the “coolest”, that has to be Kid Vid. With his trendy sideways red baseball hat, to his cool visor goggle glasses, to the finger-less gloves, extreme sport knee pads, and athletic sneakers, I thought he was the perfect example of what it was to look “cool” in the 1990s.
By around the year 2000 or so, the Burger King Kids Club was phased out and in such quiet manner that I hadn’t noticed for many years. I hadn’t really notice and looked into it until quite recently. An example of this can be seen the “Batman Beyond” newsletter pictured just above, on the right. Nowhere in this newsletter did I see any images or mentioning of the Burger King Kids Club characters. As far as I can tell (I hadn’t research it thoroughly yet), the characters were retired from use in Burger King’s marketing campaign sometime after 2000.
Maybe in today’s world, with all the handheld devices, mobile games, and social media that kids younger and younger are getting easy access to, things like activity newsletter and stickers just isn’t enough to interest them and therefore it may not be worthwhile for a company like Burger King to put an effort in providing to their customers. But I will can always appreciate the time when activity newsletter like these were more than enough to bring a “fun-factor” to kids while they were enjoying a family meal together inside their restaurants.