McDonald's Might Have Good News For Pokémon Fans
With Pokémon turning 25 this February, reports that McDonald's possibly intends to celebrate the milestone with a Happy Meal promotion might not come as a surprise. On January 27, the Twitter account for the Pokémon fansite PokéJungle uploaded a photo of what it called an apparent leak of the promotion (via Twitter). The potential details were shared by another fansite, PokéBeach.
Beginning on February 9, McDonald's Happy Meals may include four Pokémon trading cards, each featuring one of the 25 starter Pokémon the video game series now boasts. The cards would be reprints that include a special stamp indicating that they came from the 25th-anniversary collection. As with previous McDonald's promotional cards, PokéBeach expects them to be made with holofoil paper.
Fans might also expect, as The Nintendo Enthusiast wrote in their coverage of a separate Pokémon Happy Meal promotion in 2019, that McDonald's will release a Pokémon-themed toy to accompany the cards as has happened in the past.
Pikachu is as ubiquitous as the Golden Arches
Assuming this Happy Meal promotion is in the cards, it would occur just a couple of months after the release of the Berry Bolt Pokémon cereal, which, as The Gamer covered, came out in November. Like the Happy Meal, the cereal is also set to celebrate the 25th anniversary with exclusive card packets, specifically two reprints and one redesigned holographic card. These special cereal boxes will be on offer on February 27.
Still, other brands are certainly going to utilize the sheer marketing power that Pokémon and its mascot Pikachu bring. After all, as Dexerto noted in 2019, Pokémon has been the all-time highest-grossing media franchise, with over $92 billion in generated revenue. So, companies will want in on the action. One of these companies is Pillsbury, which according to a PopSugar article from January, has just re-released its Pokéball- and Pikachu-themed sugar cookies.
Non-food-related acts that have declared their intentions are Levi's, which Comic Book says will collaborate with the Pokémon Company to make a special range of clothes, and Katy Perry, who, according to The Verge, will headline one of the musical events set up to celebrate the quarter of a century that has passed since the inception of Pokémon.