Captain America Shield Launcher

Figure 1: Final toy design, rendered in color. Background and Key Design Features

With the long anticipated Marvel movie Avengers: Endgame coming to theaters in April 2019, our team designed a Captain America shield launcher for the McDonald's Happy Meal toy line. The toy, shown in Figure 1, is wrist-mounted and uses a spring-loaded lock and release mechanism to launch a Captain America themed shield. The wristband is designed to fit the wrists of a young target demographic and is made with two rails on the top to hold the launcher in place. Inside of the launcher, there is a spring and a curved lip protruding from the top of the barrel which constitutes the locking mechanism. The shield itself is attached with an adhesive to a mount which interfaces with the launcher and spring pad. For purposes of safety, the spring is securely held in place by an adhesive applied to the back spring pad and is completely covered by the barrel of the launcher. All edges of the toy are rounded and there are no choking hazards that could harm a child.

Figure 2: Exploded view of toy design. This toy has three main components: wristband, launcher, and shield (with mount). The toy will be delivered in separate components in a happy meal and assembled by the user. During use, the launcher is snapped into place on the wristband and placed on the user’s wrist. The user loads the shield into the launcher by sliding the shield mount into the barrel. The hook on the shield mount interfaces with the launching mechanism to lock the shield in place with the spring compressed. A specially shaped component attached to the end of the spring holds the mount securely in place, ensuring that the shield is never accidentally fired. When the toy’s button is pressed, the hook is released, the spring extends, and the shield is launched out of the toy. A string attached to the shield keeps it from firing too far and becoming dangerous. An exploded view of the assembly is shown to the right in Figure 2. In total, the cost of manufacturing the toy is about $0.31 per unit. A price analysis, including the costs of material and injection molding, is shown below in Table 1.