Inspector Gadget

In summer 1999 McDonald's tied its Happy Meal to Disney's live-action Inspector Gadget, released on 23 July 1999. Each meal contained one body component, and collecting the run assembled a single large figure that stood somewhere between eleven and fifteen inches depending on how far his legs were extended.

This promotion is documented here as a research record rather than as individual component pages, and it is worth being plain about why.

Why there are no component pages yet

Every other collection in this database rests on something solid: dated packaging, an in-store display, a manufacturer's mark, or a toy examined in hand. Inspector Gadget has none of that. There is exactly one piece of primary evidence for the whole promotion, and it establishes the film's release date rather than anything about the toys.

What does exist is a set of bag numbers, one through eight, observed independently across many listings. That is a real thread, and it is the reason the set size is given as eight. But the names attached to those numbers are collector and seller usage rather than documented McDonald's premium names, and two entirely different name sets circulate. One retrospective claims nine pieces. Sources disagree about which component holds the spark mechanism. No assembly order has been documented anywhere at all.

Publishing eight pages built on that would mean presenting seller shorthand as fact, which is exactly what this database exists to avoid.

What would unlock it

One sealed U.S. bag, photographed front and back, together with the molded stamps on each piece. That single pass would likely settle the piece count, the naming question and the spark-mechanism conflict at once. Period newspaper archives would be needed to firm up the promotion dates, which currently rest on a single retrospective article.

One thing to watch for

A purple Inspector Gadget car circulates widely in search results and is easy to mistake for a 1999 under-3 toy. It almost certainly belongs to the separate 2003 Inspector Gadget 2 promotion, a six-toy set. Do not file it under 1999 without physical confirmation.