I lovedYu-Gi-Oh!as a kid. I watched the anime every Saturday, played the card game with my friends, and went to go see the movie in my local theater for a friend’s birthday. But no matter if it was the show or card game, the legendary monster Exodia fascinated me.
The Forbidden One’s body was split across five cards and you could win the game by collecting each body part in your hand. On their own, each card was weak, but The Forbidden One overpowered anything in your opponent’s deck once played together.
Easier said than done.
I was already familiar with Exodia’s animating idea by the time I started watching Yu-Gi-Oh!. In fact, I attempted to form my own Forbidden One a few years earlier: collecting all nine of the McDonald’s Inspector Gadget toys offered in Happy Meals for one fleeting month in the summer of 1999.
The Extend-O-Fist Of The Forbidden One
What does Inspector Gadget–a friendly cybernetic man–have in common with a being of obliterating might? Well…body parts.
See, instead of offering multiple action figures based on characters from the Matthew Broderick film, McDonald’s offered something much more fitting: gadgets. Each plastic toy was shaped like a different body part, and you could connect them together using the red knobs that jutted out of the end of each piece. You could Frankenstein together your own 11" to 15" (depending on whether he has his legs extended and his hat donned) Inspector Gadget action figure.
The piece I remember most clearly was the left arm–called the Arm Grabber in marketing materials. It had a blue shoulder and if you pushed a button on the forearm it made the hand open and close, and you could slide the button toward the wrist to extend the hand out an extra inch or two.
I also had both pieces of Inspector Gadget’s torso. The chest, which snapped into place over his mechanical guts, had a big red button and a faux-digital screen. It was called a Secret Communicator, but it didn’t actually do anything comms related, it just made arcade noises when you pressed the button. The interior of the chest was probably the coolest piece. Inside there were plastic cogs and gears that sparked if you pressed down on Inspector Gadget’s attached head.
Our big bionic boy also had a helicopter head that made a siren sound when you twirled the rotors, plus two extendable legs.
Alas, my personal Exodia would escape full completion.
An Incomplete Set
I never managed to get the right arm, which looked normal, except for a huge red water gun strapped to it. I remember seeing it at a friend’s house, though, which was how these promotions often went. Unless you could convince your parents to go to McDonald’s nine times between July 16 and August 12 in 1999, there was no way you were gonna get the whole set. Even then, you typically got repeats on some of those visits.
My Inspector Gadget remained frustratingly incomplete. In the years since, I’ve seen the full thing assembled online and glimpsed pieces of it for sale at flea markets back when I was working at a small town newspaper…But I never was able to collect the full Gadget. As impossible as it felt as a kid, it would be bizarrely easy now, as an adult with disposable income and internet access.
I’ve occasionally checked up on the toys online and, right now, I could get the full set on eBay for anywhere between $12 and $60, depending on the listing.
This isn’t something Ineed, and it probably isn’t something I’ll buy. I don’t realy have a ton of extra space. But when I think about the Happy Meal toys I got as a kid, this was the clear pinnacle.
Even without his Extend-O-Legs or Helicopter Hat, Inspector Gadget stood head and shoulders above the rest.
