McDonald's TV Commercial Prop
During April of 2003 I was lucky to be able to purchase this wonderful and interesting piece of Beanie Baby history. The Teenie
Beanie Babies promotion at McDonald's was McDonald's biggest and most successful promotion ever. Millions of Teenie Beanies were sold, and it all started in 1997 with the introduction of 10 Teenie Beanies, Patti, Pinky, Chops, Chocolate, Goldie, Speedy, Seamore, Snort, Quacks, and Lizz!
To help promote the new Teenies, McDonald's produced several commercials for TV! At the end of the commercial run, several McDonald's items and props were put up for auction for charity at the McDonald's Collectors Convention in St. Louis, Missouri in April 1997. All proceeds from the auction were given to the Ronald McDonald House of Los Angeles. One of these pieces included a display with the words "Teenie Beanie Babies" carved out made to sit on top of each other and surrounded by Teenie Babies. This was a prop used in 4 McDonald's Teenie Beanie commercials in 1997.
The original commercial story board and prop design were created by Rich Seidelman. Rich was the creative directory at Leo Burnett.
Prop Master Peter McKenney at Electric Avenue Films in Marina Del Ray, CA created the finished prop based off of Rich's design.
Peter said that the Teenie Beanie logo prop was made out of thick PVC Plastic Materials that come in sheets 1/8th of an inch thick to about 3/4 of an inch thick.
To create the prop they first laminated pieces together to get the right thickness. They then put logo design into a computer that was connected to a controlled router. The router and computer cut out the lettering design.
After that, they rounded each letter by hand, sanded it, and painted it. The time and materials to make the logo was estimated at $2,000 - $2,500.
When I purchased the prop from an auction on EBay.com it came with the prop, the original 10 Teenie Beanie Babies, a video of all 4 commercials that used the prop, a notebook with the original auction paperwork from 1997, and over 20 still shots take from the commercial.
I hope to have videos of the commercials up on the web for you to view soon! I did manage to get them on to my computer but not into the correct internet friendly format I need! After I setup the prop for pictures I moved it into one of my display bookcases where it will live from now on:
| 
Printer Friendly Page
