Adventure Time; a show famous for it’s awesome lead characters and bros for life, Finn and Jake but also for it’s great supporting cast of diverse female characters. Princess Bubblegum (Peebles), Marceline the Vampire Queen, and countless other princesses from the magical Land of Ooo. Yet McDonalds thinks that only boys deserve the show’s toys in their Happy Meals. What gives?
Indeed, what does give? Cinemablend posted the promo image below:
Clearly it’s a bunch of male characters from the show which plays into McDonald’s practice of segregating their Happy Meal toys along gender lines. As a result, there are no female figures from the show. Yet as Kristy Puchko ponders, why does a character being female imply that boys won’t want to play with them?
Why limit a boy’s playtime from these kind of adventures solely because these characters gender-identify as female?
It’s maddeningly frustrating! Adventure Time is a great example of a show, while skewing towards a male audience, makes a solid effort at not only including female characters, but also placing them in roles you wouldn’t normally see girls. Hence Princess Bubblegum’s devotion to science.
It’s easy to sound off against McDonalds for a situation like this, but the truth requires a different level of thinking. McDonalds itself isn’t necessarily to blame seeing as they will often roll out toy lines for both genders simultaneously.
Nope, somewhere within the vast industrial complex that is the McDonalds Happy Meal, someone made a call based on an infinite number of factors. It could have been that the manufacturer had a limited colour palette (it happens) or that the fast food purveyor simply couldn’t get the rights to the female characters in time (again, this happens.) Since the answer is locked up within the McDonalds Corporation, we’ll never know the truth. Either way, it’s a disappointment that the company is reinforcing old stereotypes when it comes to animated shows, especially when it’s one that’s known for defying them.
I honestly thought McDonald’s had done away with the Happy Meal toys since so many activist groups were outright banning them from their cities.
I do wonder how many of those people that are afraid their children will become obese from the allure of plastic trinkets offered by crappy fast food chains would care about gender inequality.
I had honestly completely forgotten they existed at all; no kids myself.
That’s a good point about the parents. Clearly the majority don’t have a problem with the inequality and if the success of the Disney Princess brand is any indication, they actively encourage it.
I don’t thnk that using toys to lure kids in is right, but then parents ought to know better than to let their kids get the better of them for the sake of a ten cent piece of plastic.
Actually, they will often NOT roll out toy lines for both genders simultaneously. They have been offering two alternate groups of toys, one aimed at girls and another at boys, for years now. That seems to be their trend nowadays. I haven’t seen them use one group of toys at a time in a loooong while, and it only further tells children that you are only allowed to be one type of person and not the other. I have no idea who the idiot was who allowed this Adventure Time toy group to be released, but not including any female characters is incredibly ridiculous. BEEMO sounds, and is voiced by, a woman. Did they ever think of THAT??