These Are The 5 Most Valuable McDonald's Happy Meal Toys Ever

It's a conundrum. How do you make someone happy? Happy Hogan from the MCU is happy because Jon Favreau gets an executive producer credit no matter what. Happy Days was happy because it existed in a world where machines work better after you punch them. As for Happy Meals, they took the easy route: include one wad of plastic in every box of salty meat, and watch the smiles pour in like a waterfall made of teeth and lips. 

And, believe it or not, if you possessed the foresight to leave your sacks of plastic joy unopened after noshing on your McSustenance as a child ... well, you just might have your rent figured out for next month.

The fifth most valuable McDonald's toy on the market, according to LoveAntiques, is a completed Inspector Gadget set, which promoted the live action film adaptation in 1999. The key word here is "completed." Long time Happy Meal aficionados will recall that the good Inspector came in component pieces, each attaching to the others to form a fully functioning action figure. If you have all of his bits, this guy can fetch you as much as $350. If you don't, you're stuck with the sparking open chest cavity of Matthew Broderick. You know, for kids.

Morphing mightily into fourth place is a complete set of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers figures from their first big screen outing. A set of all six, complete with their morphonomical Ninja Zords, will go-go for around $350.

In third and second place, respectively, are two lines of toys from 1979: Robots by Diener Keshi, and Underwater Monsters. They're early-days additions, coming out the same year as the Happy Meal itself, and simple to the point of looking like those zany pencil topper erasers from the school book fair. They don't move. They don't make noise. If you pull them back on the table like a wind-up car, they will stay exactly where you drop them. But their place in history, and relative rareness, have led to sales at upwards of $400.

And so, this leads to the coveted number one spot, and a revered place in fast food history. The most valuable Happy Meal toy to date is...

To quote Watchmen: "Nothing ever ends." Not that this toy has anything to do with Alan Moore, or comic book superheroes. No, spitting in the face of common sense and society's capacity to move forward, the most valuable Happy Meal toy is the TY Teenie Beanie Baby collection from 2000. This marks the first time since 1998 that the words "Beanie Baby" and "valuable" have been used in the same sentence, hopefully. 

There's so much to say about the TY Teenie Beanie Boo Happy Meal toys. Many lines were released. But for some reason, the ones from 2000 are the prettiest girls at the animal-shaped-bean-bag collector's Harvest Moon Ball, going for $450 or more. According to TY Collector — your one-stop shop for remembering what parents used to develop ulcers over during the mid-nineties holiday seasons — it included such favorites as Lips the Fish, Goochy (the jellyfish that lets you get away with saying the word "Goochy" aloud), and a pitch black bear named, simply, The End.  If that last one's name didn't creep you out enough, it also featured the following poem on its tag:

"All good things come to an end

It's been fun for everyone

Peace and hope are never gone

Love you all and say, 'So long'!"