McDonald’s recently announced that it’s getting back into the collectible glasses game with a series of tumblers featuring art celebrating the many cross-promotions that have been successful for McDonald’s throughout the years. Barbie! Minions! Hot Wheels! Beanie Babies! And yet, they left out their incredible Batman Forever mugs. Disgraceful.
In case you weren’t aware, there was a bad Joel Schumacher Batman movie after the two classic Tim Burton ones but before the really bad Joel Schumacher one. It was called Batman Forever, and as one of the four VHS tapes I owned, I watched it a lot as a kid. Val Kilmer played the Caped Crusader. Chris O’Donnell played a version of Robin closer to retirement than childhood. Jim Carrey played the Riddler as you’d imagine Jim Carrey would play the Riddler. Tommy Lee Jones played Two-Face with so much more scenery-chewing vigor than Jones usually put into performances that I’m pretty sure he slept for an entire year after production.
In the summer of 1995, McDonald’s immortalized each of these four characters in the form of a glass mug. My mom did not indulge my wild childhood purchasing whims often, but she did when it came to the Batman Forever mugs. I still own them to this day and regularly drink my morning coffee out of them. They are perfect. If one of them were to shatter, I don’t know what I would do with myself. Maybe buy another one off of eBay for $8. But before that thought occurred to me, I would be inconsolable.
Here they are, in a picture taken straight from my cupboard. My pride and joy…
The mugs are gorgeously crafted. They brim with more detail than a McDonald’s cross-promotional Batman mug has any right to. Each one is a wraparound character portrait featuring embossed glass. The Riddler’s thought-stealing machine can’t just be seen like the art painted onto these new low-energy collector’s cups McDonald’s is trying to hock. It can be felt. Yeah, the flipping coin of the Two-Face mug that begins on the body of the mug and then seamlessly transforms into its handle has way more uncomfortably sharp edges than a mug handle should—but dammit is it gorgeous. Conversely, the cragginess of the Batcave makes for a surprisingly pleasant handle-holding experience on the Robin mug. I’ve been fondling Val Kilmer’s sharp Batman nose with my thumb for years as I stared out windows sipping coffee and contemplating life. They are crass commercialism at its most beautiful and most practical.
For whatever my opinion is worth on the subject, McDonald’s Batman Forever mugs represent the peak of fast-food collectible innovation. It’s crazy that all these decades later, no one has even come close to topping them, not even McDonald’s themselves with their new line of collectible glasses.
What’s funny is that one of the new glasses honors the McDonald’s x Jurassic Park collab from way back before we denoted such pairings with an “x” and the word collab. They were also cups, but plastic ones featuring illustrations of scenes from the film. They are beautiful in their own right. I still have some of those, too. As I’m now realizing that I have a problem letting go of the past, it’s nice that McDonald’s does too, and is honoring the memory of those gorgeous Jurassic Park cups. But not featuring the absolute peak of your collab powers during a promotion honoring your collab powers is irresponsible. Tribunals should be assembled. Investigations should be conducted. The tribunals will determine whether executions are necessary.
Every once in a while, capitalism produces a disposable work of art that no one in the right mind would dispose of. McDonald’s Batman Forever glass mugs are one such masterwork. They’re silly, a little impractical, and sometimes my bottom front teeth clank against Robin’s forehead, but they feel lovingly crafted—weird for a dumb promotional tie-in for a movie that isn’t fondly remembered. These mugs might be the best Batman Forever thing ever released, and that’s including the movie itself; a series of novelty glass mugs that outshine the multi-million-dollar Hollywood superhero production that that spawned them. That alone makes them worthy of a spot on a collectible glass as a part of McDonald’s collectible glass Hall of Fame. It’s a shame that they weren’t.
Published: Aug 14, 2024 11:32 am