Pokémon are back in McDonald's Happy Meals

New decade, new collaboration between Pokèmon and McDonald's. In fact, the partnership between these two mainstays of today's pop culture has been renewed after a two-year hiatus: in fact, The Pokèmon Company and the American fast food chain have announced the return of Pokémon Happy Meals, featuring those yellow cardboard boxes reproducing Pikachu's face that made iconic the first collaboration between the two brands started more than a decade ago. The new collaboration is dedicated to Pokémon Trading Card Game Match Battle and includes a pack of cards, a token and a spinning top that will be used to play a new and more simplified version of the classic trading card game. The return of the Pokèmon Happy Meal, which will currently take place between the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, is just the tip of the iceberg of the latest developments in the Pokèmon universe: in addition to the new Match Battles game mode, in fact, the new Pokémon: Scarlet & Violet game and the upcoming Netflix debut of the animated series Pokémon: The Arceus Chronicles will be released later this year.

Even in the face of some initial organizational difficulties in distributing the Happy Meal in America (Sisi Jiang discusses this in the digital magazine Kotaku), it is clear that the move to bring the celebrated yellow box in the shape of Pikachu back to McDonald's locations indicates a willingness to revive the popularity of the collectible card game and bring the Pokèmon universe even more to the center of the cultural mainstream than it already is. After the huge success of their debut in the West, in fact, Pokèmon had managed to puncture the mainstream bubble with Pokèmon GO in 2016, while remaining among the most popular and profitable franchises ever. However, the evolution of the card game and especially the video games had shifted Pokèmon's audience to gamers and collectors but now, through collaborations with huge global distributors such as Netflix and McDonald's, the company seems set on expanding it outside their niche again and return to find a more properly mainstream popularity-the same popularity it has had for the Millennials audience since the early 2000s.