McDonald's Happy Meal POG 2019 - Sylvester at the Dentist
Welcome Back to the Box - This One's a Keeper
Hey there, Happy Meal hunters! If you've ever found yourself digging through a bin of spinning tops at a toy show and pulled out a Looney Tunes disc you didn't recognize, there's a good chance you stumbled onto something from the McDonald's POG 2019 wave - and if that disc had Sylvester the Cat sitting wide-eyed in a dentist's chair, congratulations. You found one of the most charming little pieces in the entire set.
The POG 2019 promotion ran through McDonald's Happy Meals in France and featured a wide-ranging assortment of collectible spinning tops - small, flat, disc-shaped toys printed with colorful character art. The word "POG" in the French Happy Meal context refers to these spinning toupie-style tops, and the 2019 wave turned them into a full collectible event. The lineup was substantial, pulling characters from Looney Tunes, DC Comics, and original McDonald's-adjacent designs into one surprisingly cohesive set.
The Toy: Sylvester at the Dentist
Sylvester at the Dentist is exactly what it sounds like - a printed spinning top featuring the beloved black-and-white puddy tat in a full dental examination scenario. The art is classic Looney Tunes in every sense: Sylvester's eyes are wide with panic, his mouth open in that exaggerated way only Warner Bros. animation can pull off, sitting in what appears to be a dentist's chair with the full comedic dread of an appointment gone wrong. It is funny, expressive, and instantly recognizable as the Sylvester everyone knows.
The disc itself is a standard size for the POG 2019 series - flat, lightweight, and made from a smooth hard plastic. The print quality is solid, with the character art staying clean and crisp around the edges. Spinning it shows off the full art panel in motion, which is part of the fun with this format. These aren't prestige sculpts - they're printed discs - but the POG format has its own nostalgic charm, and the Looney Tunes selections in this wave were particularly well-chosen for visual impact.
What makes a spinning top collectible? In the case of the POG 2019 wave, it's almost entirely about the art. The Looney Tunes pieces in particular lean hard into expressive character moments - Sylvester at the dentist isn't just a portrait, it's a story. That specificity is what separates the keepers from the filler in a flat-format set like this one.
The Full POG 2019 Wave
Tracking down individual pieces from this set is genuinely satisfying because the wave covers so much ground. The Looney Tunes contingent is the strongest part of the lineup and includes multiple Tweety variations - Tweety 1, Tweety 2, Tweety 3, Tweety Cool, Tweety Mimi, and Tweety on Ice - alongside Taz in multiple moods (Taz Happy, Taz Grumpy, and Taz Basketball), and several Tweety-and-Sylvester pairings covering Golf, Tennis, and Joke scenarios. Sylvester Dreamer rounds out the solo Sylvester appearances alongside this Dentist piece. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck appear together in a joint Taz pairing, and Wile E. Coyote shows up in both a standard pose and a guitarist variant.
Beyond Looney Tunes, the set includes two Flash discs, three Wonder Woman discs (including a Wonder Woman's Emblem standalone), and a handful of original characters - Tickles, Team 1 through 3, Team in Desert, Team Investigation, and the Véra 1 and Véra 2 spinning tops. The wave is wide enough that completing it takes real effort, and the Looney Tunes section in particular has enough variants to keep collectors hunting for a while.
Collector Notes
The POG format is a slightly underappreciated format in Kids' Meal collecting. Because the toys are thin and flat, they tend to get overlooked in bins and resale lots where bulkier figures take center stage. That actually works in a collector's favor - POG 2019 pieces turn up at reasonable prices when they surface, and the printing on the better examples has held up well over the years. Sylvester at the Dentist is one of the more expressive pieces in the wave and earns a spot in any Looney Tunes-focused Kids' Meal display.
For storage, flat-format toys like these work well in small plastic sleeves or shallow divided trays. Grouping the POG 2019 wave together by franchise - Looney Tunes in one section, DC heroes in another, original characters in a third - makes the scope of the set visually clear and gives any display a clean, organized look. Because many of the discs share characters across multiple variants, displaying them side by side also highlights the subtle differences in scene and pose that make each piece distinct.
I have this one on my need list in the Collectiblz app - the Dentist pose is too specific and too expressive to skip, and it's one of the few in the wave that tells a full comedic story at a glance. If you're tracking your own POG 2019 progress, the Collectiblz app is a great way to log what you have and flag what's still missing.
- K.M. 🧸
