Grimace's Birthday Meal Review: A Dash of Disappointment

Well man, McDonald's marketing really seemed to work this time, didn't it? I wrote about that Grimace's Birthday Game Boy Color game, and so did a whole lot of others! Seems everyone was talking about Grimace in some form or another for weeks! So it didn't take long for me to get the craving for my own taste of just what Grimace's birthday meal was.

In a word? Underwhelming! I feel like if they are going to go all out in this way, they could have jazzed up the meal just a bit! First of all, I will say I didn't really know what to expect. I knew there was a meal, and that it came with a Grimace purple shake (like the ones I collected in that fun video game!), but that was really it. Initial impressions were pretty good. The meal came in a special bag and so did the Big Mac, with a Grimace's Birthday logo on it and some fun confetti imagery printed around it. How celebratory!

But that was it, apart from the special images on the packaging, there was a Big Mac, fries, and the special Grimace shake. So okay, the purple Grimace shake! This is obviously the big thing they've been touting. And using the shake for Grimace's birthday makes a lot of sense for anyone that knows some history behind these McDonaldland characters, as Grimace was originally named the Evil Grimace, and his thing was he stole shakes, much like how the hamburglar steals hamburgers. So having his special birthday item be a shake makes sense. Apart from the Game Boy Color game, I knew nothing about the promotion, so I didn't know if the shake was a special flavor, or just colored purple. And after having some...I still wasn't sure! At first I thought I tasted something different, but the more I had of it I was sure that I was just imagining things and it was plain vanilla. Turns out it's supposed to be berry flavored. Which now that I know that, yeah I could definitely taste some of that during, but it was awfully light on berry if I could distinctly taste the vanilla shake for most of it!

And that's all there was to it. I really feel it needed some other little thing to really push this into special event territory. It could even be something like if the buns for the Big Mac were purple, something to make them distinct. There wasn't even anything on the bag pointing you to the birthday website where the video game was, which I thought was odd.

I think it was about a year ago that McDonald's made some news online for a bit with their announcement of a special Happy Meal for adults. These Happy Meals featured a couple of different McDonaldland vinyl toys done by an artsy indie toy company. I loved the idea but hated the execution. As a person who grew up with these characters, I would be all over new Happy Meal toys featuring them. But the designs they settled on were, in my opinion, grotesque and unappealing. They were so close to something I would have been all over!

But I mention them because they made Happy Meal toys for adults, and I think this should have been their time to return. This Grimace Birthday meal should have come with like, a Grimace figure or something, that would have felt like the complete package. As it stands it was just a Big Mac meal with a shake and a colorful logo on the bag. I couldn't help but be a little let down.

But I hope they paid the people that made that Grimace's Birthday Game Boy Color game well, because that game certainly made me go out and get some McDonald's for the first time in years! Kudos to you, developers!