Elmo Live!
© 2008 Fisher-Price, Inc.
If you could reach into your TV screen and extract Elmo, you'd understand the task assigned two years ago to a team of Fisher-Price engineers. The result of their work, out last month is Elmo Live, a $60 wriggling red robotic toy with a non-stop dialog and moving lips. According to Vince Smart, Fisher-Price's Marketing Director, this is the "most realistic Elmo toy ever" and based on our first out of the box tests, we'd agree. Elmo has certainly come a long way since 1998, when Tickle Me Elmo set sales records simply by laughing and shaking. This year's Elmo Live has seven times the vocabulary as last year's T.M.X. Elmo eXtra Special Edition. The internal speakers deliver a sound track with background music, stories and a pretty realistic nose-blow. From a mechanical perspective, Elmo is impressive. While he can't right himself like last year's model, he can stand, sit, motion with one arm, bend at the elbow and cross his legs. His Pac-man-like head accurately matches speech with the dialog. Of course the theatrics can be seen as eroding the primary value of plush toys -- to let a child imagine. But, at the rate Elmo chatters, it won't be long till the six AA batteries are drained, allowing for this mode of play as well.
$60, Smart Toy
Teaches: language, causality