Star Wars fans have been anxiously looking forward to December 2019 for a long time now. With the release of Episode IX, we’ll see the end of the cycle. The end of an era. The closing of the loop. The Skywalker Saga will (presumably) be finished.

It might feel like we’ve been deluged with Star Wars merchandise and a four-year-long marketing blitz (since the run-up to The Force Awakens), and in many respects, that’s true. It’d be folly to say that there hasn’t been a LOT of merch available. But there have also been four films released in that time.

So anyone who gets hyperbolic about the excitement that develops in advance of any one of those films clearly doesn’t remember 1999 and the months leading up to the release of The Phantom Menace. That hype was profound; it was unreal. People were beside themselves with anticipation.

Back then, there wasn’t the level of secrecy we’ve grown accustomed to in the franchise, and, from all accounts, The Phantom Menace was going to be the greatest cinematic achievement of the decade. I mean, come on, there hadn’t been a new Star Wars movie in 16 years! How could it be anything but phenomenal?

Episode I merchandise was everywhere. I mean everywhere. Every aisle in every store had something branded to Star Wars. Not only was there was no escape from little Anakin and Jar Jar, but someone must’ve told the marketers about fans’ tendency to be obsessive completists. (Guilty.) The variations were endless.

Remember the plethora of Pepsi and Mountain Dew cans and the mad hunt for the elusive gold Yoda can? Of course you do.

If you were a Star Wars fan in 1999, though, perhaps the most memorable tie-in was the unprecedented crossover promotion between Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut. Tricon Global Restaurants (now known as Yum! Brands) – the parent company of all three chains – scored a major coup by securing the Star Wars license. And boy did they take advantage of it.

Think about your average fast food kids’ meal promotion. Depending on the license, there are usually between 4-6 random toys available with the meal, right? Well, the Episode I promotion kicked things up a notch.

There were 26 toys spread across three different restaurants. Taco Bell became Tatooine, KFC was Naboo, and Pizza Hut morphed into Coruscant. The toys available at each were ostensibly related to those locations. Therefore, if you wanted Anakin’s podracer, it’d come with a few burritos. Want the Gungan sub squirter? Hope you like fried chicken. And if you just had to have Lott Dodd’s walking throne, greasy pizza’s on the menu.

Obsessive fans who wanted them all? Spring of 1999 found us on a never-ending fast food scavenger hunt… and a particularly unfortunate diet. As an added incentive to lure in collectors, the back of each box was one piece of a much larger puzzle. Yes, not only did these toys come in boxes (fancy!), but if you got all of them, they’d assemble into an awesome montage image from the movie.

Which, you know, meant you couldn’t tear them open. You had to keep them nice and sealed. And that’s exactly what I did. Because I’m a total nerd.

And lest you think the kids’ meals toys were the end of that license, think again. Also available were plastic cups with oversized character toppers (12 in all) and “flying bucket toppers” (2 different designs), and each restaurant participated in the Defeat the Dark Side and Win game/promotion. This bears repeating: the scale of the Phantom Menace event was crazy big.

Fast forward 20 years. We’re staring down another new Star Wars movie, and kids today are spoiled for choice. They get a new movie in the theaters EVERY YEAR, there’s been an animated series consistently on television for YEARS, and the deluge of books, video games, comics, and toys just keeps growing.

Yet I was curious. How would those Episode I toys hold up today? I mean, of course I still have them. Unopened.

Well, I had them unopened. As an experiment, I dusted off the collection, put the pile of boxes in front of my kids, and let them go to town. Here’s what 20-year-old kids’ meal toys do for today’s kids. Keep an eye out for Captain Pancake and Anakin Skywalker’s Balloon Fighter!

They tore through all 26 boxes in short order. Some toys were played with, some were tossed aside immediately, and all of them have since disappeared into the black hole of my house.

If you couldn’t tell from the video, a vast majority of those toys are worthless pieces of plastic that do very little. Some do absolutely nothing. And some (like Jar Jar there at the end) are literally quite stinky.

Even though we were, generally speaking, fairly disappointed with the toys, it turned out to be a fun afternoon experiment with my kids. And that was really the whole point.

I just can’t believe all those toys followed me through several moves.