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Size: 8" x 10 1/4"
This came from McDonald's very first Disney Happy Meal, and it showed up the same month Cinderella went back into movie theaters. I love that everything is still here: the picture pages with the paint still dry on them, and the coupons for Mom and Dad bound right into the book.
The cover reads WALT DISNEY'S CLASSIC Cinderella in big pink script, with the McDonald's golden arches up in the corner and Paint With Water on a pink panel at the bottom. The Prince bows to kiss Cinderella's gloved hand between two rows of palace guards in tall black hats with red plumes, the castle glows behind them, the pumpkin coach and four white horses run across the top, and Jaq and Gus are dancing down in the corner. Look inside the big "C" and there's a tiny picture of the two of them waltzing.
The picture pages each have a dashed cut line and a little pair of scissors across the top, and a caption at the bottom: "Cinderella's mice friends help her with the housework." "'Don't cry, you are going to the party,' says Cinderella's Fairy Godmother." "'Have fun, but leave before midnight. The magic stops at the stroke of twelve.'" Those blue, rose, yellow and green strokes along the lines are the paint itself, dry color printed right on the page. The back cover tells you how it works: cut the picture out on the dotted line, use only a little water, start at the top, keep inside the black outline, and let it dry flat.
Bound into the book is a strip of offers from Disney. Share The Disney Channel with your family, 24 hours a day! Subscribe and get a 14-inch Mickey Mouse plush, "a $16 value," free. Then HEY MOM and DAD, TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THESE GREAT OFFERS FROM THE MAGIC OF Disney, and a Walt Disney Home Video rebate coupon, $3 OFF Lady and the Tramp on videocassette. Both are marked ©1987 The Walt Disney Company.
The Disney Channel was a pay channel back then. It started in 1983 at 16 hours a day, went to 24 hours in May 1986, and didn't show up on basic cable until 1990, which is why they were bribing families with a Mickey to sign up. Lady and the Tramp came out on video in October 1987 and became the best-selling videocassette of its day, about 3.2 million copies, and then Disney pulled it back into the vault at the end of March 1988. So that $3 coupon was only good for about six months.
The Henry Ford museum puts McDonald's first Disney tie-in in 1987, with four activity books of classic Disney films. This was one of them. The others were the Lady and the Tramp sticker activity book, The Sword in the Stone activity book and the Dumbo press-out book, and they came out in November 1987. That same season McDonald's had stuffed Gus and Jaq mouse Christmas ornaments from Cinderella too.
The back cover of the book says it plainly: "See Walt Disney's Classic Cinderella exclusively at a theater near you." Cinderella first came out in 1950, and Disney's own D23 says that if it had flopped, it probably would have been the end of animation at the studio. Its 1987 re-release opened November 20 in about 1,650 theaters and brought in about $34 million. It wasn't on home video until October 1988, so "exclusively at a theater" was the plain truth.
The cover painting is the art from that 1987 re-release poster, cropped to fit the book. Bill Morrison painted Disney posters between 1987 and 1990, the Cinderella re-release among them, and he went on to co-found Bongo Comics, the company behind The Simpsons comic books.
🖼️ It's a sweet one for a Disney or McDonald's collection, and the cover alone looks great framed in a kid's room.
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