McBengal! - kawaii desu ne!!

Got a comment a couple posts ago from Cube, who noted a bit of synchronicity. He had just gotten a stuffed Bengal at McDonalds, and didn't realize they were any different from regular domestic cats. Then he stumbled on this site and learned otherwise.

Wait, back up a second. He got a stuffed Bengal at McDonalds? A quick exchange of e-mails and some Google searching later, and sure enough. A recent promotion from McDonalds - in the US anyway; if they did this here in Canada, they kept pretty quiet about it - gave away little stuffed animals with happy meals, eight different dog breeds and eight different cat breeds, including the Bengal.

It turns out to be a fairly weird alliance, a tie-in with a Japanese thing called The Dog and The Cat, which starts with pictures of cute kittens and puppies and then morphs them into these weird, super-deformed kittens and puppies with enormous anime eyes. (God, that is so Japanese. They'll be balancing pancakes on their heads next.)

How it ended up coming to America as stuffed toys in happy meals is beyond me, but here's the McDonalds take on the Bengal.



He looks sad, doesn't he? But it was goofy enough that I went ahead and bought one on eBay for four bucks. I'm such a schmuck.

Btw, I also tracked down the original Japanese source. I don't know. These just look really creepy to me. But there's a Bengal there too. Dog version here. Somehow it seems to work better. I guess because there's more variation in head shapes among dog breeds and the head's less spherical to begin with.