The Retro McDonald's Happy Meal Toy Collection That Might Be Worth Good Money

Even as adults who have ostensibly outgrown the target demographic, we find that McDonald's Happy Meals are a singular delight. McDonald's may not have invented the chicken nugget, but it captured lightning in a bottle with its signature kid's meal, which currently comes with your choice of McNuggets or a hamburger, a diminutive serving of fries, apple slices, and an extra-small drink — a full meal for kiddos or a great snack for a grown-up. And, of course, you can't forget the toy. Happy Meal toys have captured the public's imagination for decades, from Hot Wheels to Halloween buckets, from the Playmobil figures of 1982 to the Pokémon Happy Meal toys that landed in 2025.

As adults, we were dazzled to discover that some of those old McDonald's Happy Meal toys are currently worth a fortune — specifically the iconic Changeables, which were movable plastic figures that were shaped like McDonald's entrees, but transformed into robots or dinosaurs, kind of like Golden Arches Transformers. There were three waves of Changeables between 1987 and 1990, and, today, they're selling for a pretty penny on eBay, Etsy, and other reselling platforms, with individual toys averaging about $10 apiece (two or three times that when still packaged). Full collections have gone for a few hundred dollars. What makes these particular Happy Meal prizes so special? Well, the Changeables are objectively cool and arguably much more creative and original than contemporary Happy Meal toys. But they also play into our cultural obsession with tiny versions of everyday objects.

In 2021, a New York Times columnist tackled the mysterious allure of Mini Brands, a children's "blind bag" toy, and concluded that we like to play with tiny cereal boxes, spices, or cartons of milk because they capture a small-scale fantasy of impulse shopping at a grocery store. Bustle similarly compared humankind's fascination with all things miniature to a desire to find order in our universe, while also pointing out that well-crafted miniatures invite the beholder to really appreciate great construction. Moreover, McDonald's Changeables are very satisfying, weighty scale models of vintage drive-thru food and packaging, including Big Macs, hot cakes, and ice cream cones. Plus, they look cool as heck when you manipulate them. They also tap into another emotion that hits adults in the wallet, which is nostalgia. As with so many other things, McDonald's food items no longer look the same way they did when we were kids, but Changeables take us back to the halcyon days of childhood.

If there aren't still a few Changeables sitting in a big plastic box of McDonald's Happy Meal toys in your parents' attic, you could certainly amass a collection little by little through good secondhand deals. Ten bucks barely pays for a full combo meal at McDonald's nowadays, the memory of which will be forgotten by the time you clock out of work, but a Big Mac-o-Saurus dino-robot figure will sit on your desk and keep you smiling for a long time.