Cavalcade of Awesome

I’ve talked about fast food collector glasses before. But that article covered collector glasses made of actual GLASS.  There are also a plethora of plastic collector cups.  A few weeks ago Nerd Lunch talked about super hero cups.   So, I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring and talk about a few of my favorite collector cups that have been given away at movie theaters and fast food chains.

I have each of these cups in my collection right now.

This is the Capt America The First Avenger Tri-Color Coolatta Cup.  My boy CT from Nerd Lunch discussed this back in July.  There are three sides/sections.  Each section holds the red (cherry), white (vanilla) and blue (raspberry) flavors of Dunkin Donuts Coolattas.  You can see the second side here and the third side is here.  The cup is sitting next to the stars and stripes donut that also promoted the Capt America movie.  They were both good, but I won’t lie, after consuming both for breakfast it felt like Cap and the Howling Commandos were fighting World War II in my colon.

This was the collector cup given out at movie theaters in 2000 to promote the first Singer X-Men movie. I like the tapered base of this cup so it fits in your cup holder. Many cups now don’t do that.  And check out the web address of the movie with all of those dashes.  http://www.x-men-the-movie.com.  Hello late ’90s.

Everyone remembers the Star Wars cup toppers from 1999 during the whole Episode I merchandising frenzy. There were 12 cups and figure toppers you could collect from KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Well, those toppers were based on an earlier promotion for the Star Wars Special Edition in 1996-97.  It was a set of 4 and featured C3PO, R2D2, Vader and a Stormtrooper.  There were two versions of this set.  Above left you can see the set that came from the Las Vegas FAO Schwartz store.  They had setup their own version of the Mos Eisley Cantina including themed ICEE drinks (like Jabba Juice).  I had visited Vegas in 1998 and was able to buy these at the store.  Click the image to see it bigger and to see the commemortive FAO Cantina cup.  The other version of this set on the right came from Pizza Hut and Taco Bell stores overseas (I don’t believe they were offered in the US).  The toppers were exactly the same but instead of the FAO cup it had a blue cup with a picture of the character on it (see the Stormtrooper above). You can see how these influenced the Episode I cup toppers. For obvious reasons, only the R2D2 was reused in the 1999 Episode I promotion.

This was the LARGE cup AMC used to promote Tron Legacy back in Fall 2010. It’s HUGE.  It barely fits in my kitchen cabinet.  I used it for drinking water after my long Saturday runs when I was training for my marathon.

Here is a cup promoting the Green Lantern movie. These were from Subway. However good the movie was or wasn’t, these cups are pretty nice.

This is another AMC theater cup. This time promoting Cowboys & Aliens. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I don’t hear just wonderful things about it. Mostly I hear “missed opportunities”.

Taco Bell had a set of 4 Batman cups for the release of Burton’s 1989 movie.  They had no images from the movie, the pictures on the cups look like paintings or cartoons.  But they were still pretty cool.  The cups included Batman, Batwing, Batmobile and Gotham City.  See the commercial which did use footage from the movie here.

These are hands down some of my favorite collector cups. I was a huge NBA fan in the 80s and 90s. So I was a freak for the 1992 Dream Team and, consequently, I spent months eating at McDonald’s every chance I got to collect the entire set of these cups.  The picture above only shows 10, but there were 12 cups.  The final two players, Clyde Drexler and Christian Laettner, were added to the team late, so their cups were added very late and they became extremely hard to track down.

This entry was posted on August 12, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under advertising, fast food, McDonald's, movies, pop culture, Star Wars, Tron with tags fast food, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, Star Wars, Tron. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.