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Size: 10" x 8"
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Size: 10" x 8"
In 1987 you could get King Arthur with your cheeseburger. McDonald's handed out Walt Disney's The Sword in the Stone Activity Book as one of four Disney Favourites activity books in its Happy Meals, and the book is a perfect snapshot of that year. The story on the cover goes back to a French poem written around 1200. The cartoon inside was the last animated feature Walt Disney lived to see released. The ad inside the front cover pitches a poster from Star Tours, the George Lucas thrill ride that had opened at Disneyland that January. And the back cover says why any of it was in a fast-food bag: "Walt Disney's The Sword in the Stone available on videocassette at retail stores everywhere." This copy is new old stock, with its puzzle pages unmarked and its mail-in order form still whole.
The Happy Meal was tested in Kansas City in October 1977 and went national in 1979. Its roots reach back to Guatemala, where Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño created a "Menú Ronald" for children in the mid-1970s, and Bob Bernstein developed the version McDonald's launched, reasoning that a child with a meal of their own made everyone happier. The first prizes were modest: stencils, wallets, spinning tops, erasers and puzzle books. In 1987 the Disney Favourites promotion put four books into the bag: this one, a Lady and the Tramp sticker book, a Cinderella paint-with-water book and a Dumbo press-out book.
Walt Disney Productions released The Sword in the Stone on December 25, 1963. It was the final animated feature released while Walt Disney was alive. Wolfgang Reitherman directed, the Sherman Brothers wrote the songs and George Bruns the score. Bill Peet, who developed the story and screenplay, chose to write a full script before storyboarding because the Arthurian material was so tangled with other legends and myths. The film cost about $3 million and earned $22.2 million in North America.
Casting Wart turned into a small legend of its own. Rickie Sorensen, the boy first cast as young Arthur, hit puberty partway through production and his voice changed, so Reitherman brought in his own two sons to finish the part. Listen closely and the voice shifts from scene to scene. The film came back to theaters in 1972 and 1983, and in 1986 it reached home video for the first time in the Walt Disney Classics line, the videocassette the book's back cover advertises.
Disney's source was The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White, published by Collins in Britain in 1938. It follows an orphan called Wart through his lessons with the wizard Merlyn, who teaches him by turning him into animals, a fish among them, before the boy draws the sword and is revealed as Arthur. A fitting thought, given the book's underwater Bubble Art page. White reworked the book in 1958 as the first part of The Once and Future King, Time magazine later named it one of the 100 best young-adult books of all time, and in 2014 it received a retrospective Hugo Award for Best Novel. A BBC radio version in 1939 carried incidental music by Benjamin Britten.
King Arthur's sword first appears in writing in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, around 1136, as Caliburnus, from the Welsh Caledfwlch, "hard cleft." The sword in the stone came later. Around 1200 the French poet Robert de Boron wrote in his Merlin that Arthur won the throne by pulling a sword from an anvil sitting on top of a stone that appeared in a churchyard on Christmas Eve. That anvil is still there on this book's cover, and Disney released the film on Christmas Day. Some tellings keep the sword from the stone separate from Excalibur; Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur calls both swords Excalibur, the first broken in battle and replaced by the Lady of the Lake. The legend reached into the real world too: a sword said to be Excalibur was supposedly found when Arthur's grave was exhumed at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191, and the chapel of San Galgano in Italy still keeps a medieval sword in a stone tied to a twelfth-century saint.
The inside front cover is its own time capsule. Star Tours opened at Disneyland on January 9, 1987, built by Disney Imagineers with George Lucas and Lucasfilm around four military-grade flight simulators bought for $500,000 each, at a total cost of $32 million, with a bumbling droid pilot, Captain Rex, voiced by Paul Reubens. The ad offers a full-color 20" x 30" Star Tours poster for a $2.50 check or money order to P.O. Box 4629, Anaheim, CA 92802, "Offer ends March 31, 1988," marked © 1987 The Walt Disney Company and Lucasfilm Ltd. The original ride closed in 2010 and was replaced by Star Tours: The Adventures Continue in 2011.
Below it, "HERE'S A WARDROBE WINNER EVERY KID WILL WANT TO WEAR!" offers a McDonald's T-shirt for $7.95 plus $1.50 shipping, in children's sizes 3-6X and 7-14, mailed to Walt Disney Company, McDonald's T-Shirt, 5959 Triumph Street, Commerce, California 90040, "Offer expires May 15, 1988." Commerce, California is a small industrial city in southeast Los Angeles County, incorporated in 1960 so that neighboring cities could not annex its factory land, and named for exactly that purpose. The Santa Fe railroad came through in 1887, a Chrysler assembly plant ran there from 1930 to 1971, and the Citadel Outlets now stand on the site of an old tire factory.
New old stock with light storage wear to the covers and edges. The puzzle and coloring pages shown are unmarked, and the order form inside the front cover has not been filled in or cut out. Please see the photographs.
The supply is finite - nobody's handing these out with a Happy Meal again, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.
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