Starting this week, the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlets in Singapore are selling some cute Transformers Movie 3 - Dark of the Moon (DOTM) toys, with their special set meals! Follow this link for more info and to view some tiny photos of the 4 DOTM toys offered in the set!

The DOTM movie is expected to be screened in local cinemas in July 2011, so this DOTM toys promotion is rather early.  Perhaps it’s to coincide with Hasbro’s early release of the first few waves of DOTM toys to the departmental and retail stores here since 14 May 2011.

The KFC DOTM figures look to be in robot modes only, and they don’t seem to be able to transform into vehicle modes.  Nonetheless, they still make nice additions to the collections of die hard DOTM toy collectors. Happy DOTM toys collecting!

# 5 - McDs Happy Meal Monstrous Nightmare toy review!

# 6 - McDs Happy Meal Terrible Terror toy review!

#7 - McDs Happy Meal Night Fury toy review!

#8 - McDs Happy Meal R.D. toy review!

Following my earlier blog post on the “How To Train Your Dragon” toy review from the US McDonalds Happy Meal, here the video reviews for the other toys in the set.

#2 - McDs Happy Meal Hideous Zippleback toy review!

(Video review comin soon)

#3 - McDs Happy Nadder & Astrid toy review!

#4 - McDs Happy Meal Gronckle toy review! 

He’s here!  He’s finally here in Singapore - the last most coveted Doraemon Pig Lucky Charm Toy from McDonalds’ Doraemon Zodiac Lucky Charm Toys set!  He was part of the toy rage here about 3 months ago.  This little piece of “pork” has been sighted at a McDonalds (McDs) outlet in Orchard Road today!

The better news is that this time, there is no need to make any food or beverage purchase before you are entitled to buy him.  You can just buy him over the counter for SGD 2.00 each!  I believe this is a first time for McDs in Singapore that you can buy their toys over the counter outright.  In the US, you can normally buy their Happy Meal toys or other promotion toys only without having to buy any McDs items. 

This little Doraemon piggy was left out of the original 12 Chinese Zodiac animal characters and substituted with a Doraemon Cupid toy by Singapore McDs in January 2010.  A lot of local collectors were not pleased and made known to Singapore McDs that they want this little porker to complete their Doraemon Zodiac Lucky Charm toys set.  It’s the “completist” collectors’ mindset, that everything they collect must be in complete sets, LOL! 

Hence Singapore McDs invited its customers to vote on their website on whether to bring in the pink piggy.  The expected available date for this last member of the Doraemon Zodiac animal characters was announced as sometime in April 2010.  Now that he’s here on our shores, go and grab him while stocks last!  I’m sure he’ll sell out very fast because the price is so affordable!

You can also read LEon’s blog posts on this Doraemon porky topic at Open The Toy.

Happy collecting of Doraemon Pig Lucky Charm Toy! 

Here’s the first toy review of “How To Train Your Dragon” (HTTYD) from McDonalds (McDs) Happy Meal in the US.  This piece features the main human character, Hiccup riding the main dragon character Night Fury, from the HTTYD movie. 

Overall it looks like a cool toy.  If this set of McDs Happy Meal toys do not come to Singapore, you can consider getting them off US ebay in the coming weeks and months.  I’m sure there will be plenty of them there.  Till then, happy HTTYD toys admiring!

At long last, the local saga about missing Doraemon Pig Lucky Charm Toy from McDonalds is over, or going to be over.  Judging from the initial public and fan reactions so far, it looks like there will still be 2 camps to it - those who are happy with the inclusion of the missing piggy, and those who are still unhappy (probably because they missed the opportunity to collect the earlier Doraemon Zodiac toys over the past 3 weeks as they decided not to collect the set at all in a fit of anger or something).

All the debate both online and offline, for the sake of a little stuff toy (about the size of your fist) that costs you just SGD 2.00 each with any purchase at McDonalds.  You can buy as many of these Doraemon toys as you want with any purchase, which I feel is very generous of McDonalds already, considering they didn’t make its customers be entitled to purchase just 1 out of 3 Doraemon toys available each week with every Value Meal purchase only (shudders at that fattening thought!).

I read LEons blog post with interest about this Doraemon piggy topic in Hong Kong.  With one look, the Hong Kong McDonalds website alone beats our local version hands down.  And they are offering all 13 Doraemon toys over there!  It’s a good thing that Doraemon piggy is finally coming to Singapore, although in about 3 months later only.  I hope that by then, McDonalds will also re-release the rest of the Doraemon Zodiac toys for customers who missed out on some of them (especially for those who regretted not getting them or were not able to pick them up on time).

Finally I hope to get some peace from the ongoing complaints about this Doraemon porky issue for the past few weeks (no offence to my fellow toy bloggers and readers who collect these toys).  I don’t collect these toys so I’ve been neutral about the whole Doraemon swine debate.  However I did help some friends pick up a few of these stuff toys (luckily they don’t collect the whole set!) when convenient and I have to agree that these little things sell out very quickly at many outlets.  No wonder some people get panicky or frustrated.  Next time, they can consider paying a fee to professional toy bounty hunters to do the job for them, LOL!

I’ve been very lucky in each of my Doraemon toy hunts (all hunting requests closed for now), achieving a 100% strike rate for all the hunting requests I received since the toy offer started.  Of course you don’t expect to ask me now to find all those toys that are already over.  The toy requests I had were all made before the toys came out, or during the week itself, even very late in that week (e.g. the Doraemon Ram).  Along the way, I fattened myself on sundaes, ice creams and apple pie snacks for the people who requested my help.  Now I broke one of my new year resolutions of eating fast food only once a month…  

Anyway back to the topic, for collectors who want to lay your hands on the last Doraemon piggy toy, McDonalds Singapore has requested that you go to their website to indicate your interest by participating in an online poll for it.  Be there or be square!  Happy waiting for that Doraemon ham! 

With regard to my previous blog post on the 2009 My Little Pony toys from USA McDonalds, they have been available in the USA since last week.  Some of the collectors there have managed to complete their sets and here’s a photo of them all provided by symmetry of MLP Arena.

The manes are brushable and each pony comes with a hair pick.  The tails are all molded though and their overall colors are not entirely accurate, especially for Rainbow Dash (blue) who’s supposed to have up to 6 different colors in her mane and tail.  

Nevertheless, they still make nice collectible figures for many My Little Pony collectors.  If only this set of 2009 McDonalds My Little Pony will be available in Singapore soon!

This is new series of “G4″ My Little Pony toys will be available at USA McDonalds outlets soon (from 23 Oct - 12 Nov 2009)!  There aren’t any news about these little ponies coming to our Singapore McDonalds, and the possibility seems bleak, considering that we had missed out on almost every of the past McDonalds My Little Pony toys (except for 1 series which didn’t resemble the actual ponies at all).  Hopefully these Ponyville style My Little Pony toys will come to our local  McDonalds as part of their Happy Meals promotions.  We keep our fingers crossed for that!

I walked past this McDonalds outlet yesterday at IMM and saw that they now have Justice League Unlimited (JLU) ’toys’ promotion with their Happy Meals.  The JLU offer just started this week on Thursday.  The first 2 toys for this week are Superman and Hawkgirl.  The toys are acutally mini ‘boxes’ that contain some collectible JLU characters inside (not shown in the above photo).

Actually I was reluctant to take the above ‘pathetic ‘ toy display but as of today (3 Oct 2009), I swear to you that the Singapore McDonalds (McDs) official website is still showing their Happy Meal toys as the previous Doraemon ones, which is over already (The outside world had apparently moved on too fast for their cyberworld to catch up with).  Hence I took the above photo to show how the JLU McDs toys look like. 

In the above photo, the current week toys on offer (Superman and Hawkgirl) are not on display there, but are on display next to the wall behind the counter.  This makes the toys too far to take a good look at before customers decide to buy them.  People would have easily mistaken that Green Lantern, Flash and Batman are available this week.  Furthermore, 3 other toys (Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter & Red Tornado) from the set are missing from the display case (Have they taken time off to go save the world!?).

I had been collecting some sets of movie tie-in toys that came with McDs Happy Meals for many years, and I have observed that in the past 3-4 years especially, the toy display cases at almost every McDs outlet is getting more “hideous” with time.  Their toy displays usually start off as quite presentable in the first week.  Then as the weeks past, some toys go missing from the display, while others have “fallen flat on their faces”.  Regular collectors of these fast food toys will surely agree with me.

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This is Bumblebee, my 3rd Revenge of the Fallen (ROTF) toy that I picked up last week from a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet in town!  Like Starscream before him, Bumblebee’s transformation process looks almost the same as my Transformers Movie Legends Bumblebee, except that the KFC version is very ‘blocky’ and looks way less refined.  He’s also larger than my Ironhide of the same KFC ROTF toy series!

Nevertheless, Bumblebee still looks quite all right in car mode.  The final ROTF toy shall be Optimus Prime, expected to be coming out this week.  Ironhide came out in the 1st week, followed by Starscream in the 2nd week.  I think I’m getting a bit tired of collecting these KFC ROTF toys.  Perhaps once my interest in them has completely waned, I’ll just clear them from my Transformers collection.  Till then, happy ROTF toy hunting!