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The third week of April, as always, sees two of the most significant red-letter days of the year—National McDonald’s Day, on 15 April, and the birthday of Adolf Hitler, on 20 April. As usual, I celebrated by heading toward the nearest drive-through and ordering a Big Mac and fries while dressed in my favorite SS uniform—and, what’s more, unlike most of the vibrantly diverse criminals whose equally blitzkrieg-like interactions with McD’s are regularly chronicled here on Taki’s, I actually paid for them, even though I was packing a standard, service-issue Luger at the time.

Although correlation does not always necessarily imply causation, occasionally McDonald’s seems to have recognized this curious calendrical coincidence and distributed customers free Happy Meal toys of our beloved Führer, as pictured here, looking on, green with envy, at the rolling fields of the Sudetenland, or even special tie-in swastika-emblazoned McChicken Sandwich buns, as doled out by a rogue employee in North Carolina in 2014.

So popular did these Third Reich-themed lines become amongst many Aryan-heritage burger-guzzlers that, in 2011, one rival restaurant chain in Sweden copied Ronald McHitler’s fine lead and began doling out temporary rub-on, rub-off swastika tattoos with its own-brand Kids’ Meals too (albeit admittedly only by mistake).

Arbeit Macht Fries
The McDonald’s Happy Meal first appeared in 1979, a year that, “fortuitously,” also marked both the fortieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland and what would have been Hitler’s 90th birthday, had he only lived to see it. British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman’s infamous diorama hellscapes showing fake, rubbery Happy Meal toy figures of Ronald McDonald, Hamburglar, and that big purple turd thing with eyes and limbs from the 1980s McDonald’s TV adverts rampaging through Auschwitz and Dachau killing inmates, may have been closer to the truth than the model-makers ever realized.

After sacking the Hitler Youth who had daubed a swastika onto a McChicken Sandwich back in 2014, the relevant McDonald’s franchisees in North Carolina reassured local customers that Nazism was “not what we stand for personally as owners,” but are such individuals really to be believed? When these same people later told the media “we have terminated the employee involved,” should this statement in fact have been taken literally?

Gotta Choke ’Em All!
Down the years, Happy Meal toys have been spuriously and delusionally linked not only with Nazism, but also with child murder, satanism, blasphemy, drug abuse, and teaching children how to masturbate long before this activity became a key part of the national K–1 curriculum. Health-food campaigners are always complaining that McDonald’s menu items and those of their imitators are unfit for children—but so are some of their cheap, tatty toys. Here are a few of the very worst.

In 1999, Burger King launched a tie-in Kids’ Meal promoting Nintendo’s new feature-length cartoon Pokémon: The First Movie, a film so commercial its very title acted as an in-built advertisement for its own inevitable sequel. As in the videogames, the ultra-cute Pokémon came trapped within little plastic spheres called “Pokéballs.” Unlike in the videogames, these items constituted a severe choking hazard for those who wielded them.

Just the right size to fit over a baby’s face, the balls could suffocate them. The more baby breathed, the worse the situation became, as inhalation formed a vacuum within the ball, sealing them to the infant’s lips and nose like the face-huggers in Alien. After being linked to several reported deaths and near misses, Burger King felt forced to issue a massive “Destroy and Discard” notice through the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission: “Gotta Catch ’Em All!—before they commit infanticide.”

Devil Dolls
It is not only children’s physical bodies placed in potential danger by Pokémon-themed Happy Meal toys—it is also their immortal souls. During its disastrous 1999 Pokémon promotion, Burger King also handed out small plastic models of many ’mon, including one called Poliwhirl, a circular blue bipedal tadpole with a big swirl on its stomach, like a cartoon whirlpool.

But was this really just an attempt to hypnotize children? According to one contributor to hardline Christian website demonbuster.com, Poliwhirl was the earthly manifestation of a hitherto-unknown Hell-beast termed “GYROMANCY,” whose swirly-whirly magical sigil was suddenly appearing on product shelves everywhere, even on the label of “the new FRUITOPIA bottled fruit drink.” This mesmeric tummy-coil was an “OPEN DOOR to the DEMONIC WITCHCRAFT” sin of sloth.

Unlike an inoffensive gyroscope, warned the site’s unnamed contributor, the inverted demon Gyromancy sought to keep its victims “OUT OF BALANCE” like he or she clearly was, and “keep you moving in circles so you never accomplish your goals,” a bit like actually working for McDonald’s does.

That same year, warned demonbuster.com, McDonald’s was also trying to damn the souls of innocent youth thanks to a link-up with the now-forgotten 1998–99 Fox Kids adventure cartoon series Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. Based upon ancient Celtic mythology, the show saw the evil Maeve, Queen of Fairies, battling brave warriors to take over “the magical realm of Kells” (re: the Republic of Ireland).

Yet “the so-called heroes” whose action-figure images were being gifted to helpless infants with their fries were in fact based upon ancient pagan Irish deities and thus were truly godless idols and vessels for demons, designed to convert children to “a radical anti-Christian religion steeped in mysticism and the occult.” One minute your toddlers would be playing with plastic dolls, the next they would be doing drugs, committing suicide, or perpetrating mass shootings in schools—much more efficient than Satan encouraging them to turn transgender.

The only solution for believers was to boycott both McDonald’s and the Mystic Knights TV show forever: “This isn’t only a fight for the soul of America: it is a fight for the soul of our children.” Demonbuster.com readers must have won this battle. By 7 May 1999, Mystic Knights was canceled and replaced by a new Power Rangers show.

Corporate Prophets
Unfortunately, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are themselves abominations in the eyes of The Lord—not Jesus Christ, but Muhammad. In 2012, McDonald’s outlets in Saudi Arabia were forced to recall a Samurai Power Ranger figure after it was alleged to be profaning the name of the Prophet. The toy in question had a lever that, when pulled, made it stamp its foot up and down on its blue plastic base in warrior-like anger. Unfortunately, certain random decorative patterns on said base just happened to resemble the word “Muhammad” in squiggly Arabic script.

A grassroots religious campaign called “Help Your Prophet!” was launched by believers, who, unless the djinni-possessed plastic apostate was banished from the Holy Land and melted down into oblivion within the fires of Hell forever, called for “the strongest possible punishment” against the infidel Yankee firm responsible.

Given what “the strongest possible punishment” means within a specific Saudi Arabian context, McDonald’s perhaps did well to quickly cave in and comply.

McHandjob
Sometimes what Uncle Ronald’s toys do with their hands is the problem, not their feet. Ever since 1990, when a range of meals promoting all-time NES classic Super Mario Bros 3 was launched, Nintendo has been a regular partner with McDonald’s.

But in 2015, U.K. tabloid The Daily Mirror reported Mario had since powered up into a dirty old man. Tyler Atfield, a father of five from Plymouth, complained that, if you removed the supplied plastic boomerang from his grip, a Happy Meal “Boomerang Mario” figure looked as if he was performing a certain forbidden action “with a suspicious grin on his mustachioed face,” as his hand moved up and down in a repetitive fashion when triggered, like a bored monkey wanking at visitors in the zoo.

“My kids started doing the action [themselves] and it was so wrong,” Tyler was quoted as saying…except he never said this at all. Someone unknown had called the Mirror up and fed them the story in Tyler’s name as a prank. Yet McDonald’s still responded to his nonexistent “complaint” by publicly denying Mario had become the Nintendoverse’s most notorious mushroom-basher. That dubious honor is actually held by Wario.

If you want to see some penis-related Happy Meal toys that really are obscene, by the way, then check out this truly disturbing Finding Nemo “purple jellyfish,” which proves once and for all that today’s Disney really is out to queer your kids. How long before McDonald’s follows suit and transitions Hamburglar into being Bumburglar?

From Crap Career to Rap Career
To finish, a story that really could have come straight from Takimag’s regular criminal “BlackDonald’s” files. In 2015 it was widely reported that Tyshaun Granger, a black McWorker from Chicago, was fired for placing copies of his own amateur mixtape, Tales of a Real Nigga, into Happy Meal bags instead of the intended toys in an act of deeply misguided promotion of his own wannabe rap career.

Sadly, the story turned out to be a viral joke, copied from a satirical fake-news website. The true story was much more innocent. The “Real Nigga” pictured in the much-shared story was actually a different genuine McDonald’s employee named Theodore Lavon Upshaw, who had not been placing racially offensive CDs into meal bags at all. Instead, he had allegedly been placing heroin in them as part of an undercover drug ring.

And does your 5-year-old daughter want some fries with her burger today, sir? If not, then how about a quarter-pounder of smack instead?

Happy eating, kids!