To commemorate the Nissan GT-R NISMO being added to McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, Nissan built an actual size of the car with the same design as the toy car. How was it made?
A Special Collaboration With McDonald’s
Nissan unveiled the 2022 model for the GT-R NISMO and the GT-R NISMO Special edition on April 15th, 2021. At the same stage, Nissan also announced their collaboration between McDonald’s.
A golden GT-R NISMO Tomica toy car will be added to McDonald’s Happy Meal as part of the collaboration, and an actual car was also unveiled in the color of the toy.
An online event in which the GT-R NISMO unveiled, Hiroki Motohama from the Marketing Division at McDonald’s Japan and Hiroshi Tamura, Chief Product Specialist at Nissan, took the stage to explain the story behind the project.
According to Motohama, Happy Meal was relaunched in January 2021, and in addition to the latest trends and topics that have been focused, the company has decided to develop toys that contribute to the healthy growth of children.
The new Tomica Happy Meals will be rolled out as a 5-week program, with the first set consisting of buildings and cars (April 16th to 29th), the second set consisting of roads and cars (April 30th to May 13th), and the third set consisting of all toys from the first and second sets (starting May 13th).
Among these toys, the “Curved Road & 2022 Nissan GT-R NISMO” set will be added as one of the second and third toys, and there will also be the aforementioned golden GT-R NISMO as a secret edition.
This is the first time in the history of Tomica Happy Meals that a secret edition has been revealed in advance.
Motohama said, “The roads that come with the cars can be connected by purchasing multiple sets. We hope that kids will have fun imagining what kind of layout they can build and how they can drive the car.”
Tamura from Nissan explains the key points of the Tomica GT-R NISMO 2022 model.
“We didn’t want to just make the car as elaborate as possible, but we also wanted to make sure that it would bring out the best of the GT-R. For example, the smaller that model is, the more it is necessary to adjust the color depth. That’s one thing that only a scale model can do, and designers at Takara Tomy are really good at doing that. Also, I really wanted to include the NISMO accent color of red, and they did a great job for that.”
But what made them build an actual size car? Tamura explains, “As we got excited about our collaboration, we decided that we should make an actual car anyway. Marketing also said they wanted to do it, and we managed to gain budget to make it.”
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The golden Tomica GT-R NISMO, which is the secret edition in this Happy Meal, has a strong presence even at the size of a toy car, but the actual car gives off an unmistakable aura.
This little toy car also captures the characteristics of the real car, which was specially produced for the collaboration, with having the same “McDonald’s” logo on the rear wing.
