A line of questionable toys
The amount of puns that are possible with this topic. In 2008, Burger King had a line of toys that referred to itself simply as “?”. Usually, Burger King partners with well-known IPs such as a noteworthy movie in theaters or a hit video game to sell kid’s meals. What piqued my curiosity for this toy line was when I tried to Google Lens my panda bear variant to find other Burger King toys similar to it. I could not find anything but one other image used as a profile picture. A Fandom wiki post for Burger King kid’s meal toys didn’t have anything written for the Question mark [?] toy line in the 2008 column.
The Question mark [?] line of toys came out the same year as other notable collaborations like: [Fandom: Kidsmeals]
- Neopets
- Pokémon Diamond & Pearl
- iDog
- SpongeBob SquarePants: Pest of the West
- Wii themed toys
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
- The Simpsons
- Iron Man
2008 can be defended as Burger King’s best year for toys. So I’m confused as to why this toy line existed. The obvious answer was to fill a gap in the kid’s meal toy release window. I speculate that something got canceled, and they fell back on an in-house design they saved for backup. This could also be untrue as they sold premium toys which you’ll read below.
The Unique aspect
The Question mark [?] toys came in 18 unique toys you could collect. Separated by 3 styles of toys with a different art style used to differentiate toys. The three styles of toys from this set were plastic vinyl figures, small tins, and plushies. The simplicity of using just 3 shapes for the 18 toys showed the creative potential for a concept like this. My main question I am still trying to figure out is:
Who made this?
Clearly a talented artist, or artists were tasked at making designs that used the fixed shaped of the 3 molds. The Abstract designs are beyond the quality expectation for a kid’s meal toy. A lot of careful consideration was done to craft beautiful collectable toys. Hopefully we soon can learn who created these toys.
The premium toys
Mentioned above was how these Question mark [?] toys likely filled a gap in Burger King’s kid’s meal catalog. I am led to believe that because they also included these rabbit blind boxes during the promotion. This was intentional. From current speculation and research, there were 6 designs total. Each using the same rabbit vinyl mold with unique designs. They follow the same design schematic as the 18 kid’s meal toys and have question marks on the figures. –There is potentially more of these blind box figures, maybe using different shapes and designs.
I’m hoping we get to learn who created these! Currently there’s no known studio or partnership for these toys. They were directly created by Burger King Brands, Inc.