If you were a creature of the ’80s and ’90s, you may remember longing for the colorful plastic boo buckets that McDonald’s gave away with its Happy Meals every Halloween. You might go trick-or-treating with them, use them to hand out candy, or simply throw them in the closet with the rest of the trash in your room, only to be discovered like a strange artifact months later from a scarier time. Well, the Boo Buckets are back for 2024, but not that many remember them.

McDonald’s announced its newest Boo Buckets earlier this week. On sale at Happy Meals from October 15th. The jack-o’-lanterns and ghost faces have been replaced with smiling monsters, and alongside the iconic colors of orange, white and green, there’s now also a blue bucket. I’m sure the kids will like them much more. But let’s be honest: Boo Buckets are for adults right now, and not everyone agrees with the UwU fiction of a once-glorious nostalgia trip.

“They look terrible and have these fake trash lids that do nothing other than make them harder to hold, do something right, or don’t do it at all,” one militant McD’s poster wrote on Twitter. “Can you just re-release the 90s models that glow in the dark and have real lids? Please!!!!” another pleaded. “90s Halloween McNuggets friends too! I’ll give you free ideas and everything is old, a hole in our 30s and 40s will give you money!”

The Instagram comments were even more brutal. “Fire the design department,” one said. “Where is the glow in the dark,” read another. “WHERE ARE THE LIDS??!!!” begged for a third. However, not everyone is enthusiastic about the revision. Some say they are “cute” or “REALLY EXCITING”. To those who are brimming with positivity, all I can say is, in the words of one new Boo Bucket hater, “Some of you have never had the 1980s McDonald’s Boo Buckets, and it shows.”

The Boo Buckets were first released in 1986, with several variations and iterations in the following years. The brandless simplicity was part of its charm. Just pure mashups of late capitalist pastiche and artisanal utility. It’s also hard to overstate the pervasive power of McDonald’s at this time, burned into every child’s retina through truly excessive advertising buys during the afternoon and weekend cartoon slots, especially on holidays like Halloween.

This means that I never got a boo as a kid, but rather that I felt like everyone else in the world. So it was an obvious stroke of genius when the company decided to bring back the nostalgic lure in 2022 with the original look and style. Millennial parents who were stressed to the max and looking for an easy W with their kids were able to get 15 minutes of silence and fill the void in their own childhood with a quick getaway to the (non-AI) drive-in. It was a beautiful dream while it lasted.