Baby You Can Drive Me Crazy
Written: Apr 15 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: plenty of different sound effects, buttons to push and levers to pull, friendly voices of familiar characters
Cons: can be irritating because of the repetitive sound effects
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| zobovor's Full Review: Sesame Street - Elmo's Talking Driver |
I'll let you in on a little secret about electronic Sesame Street toys. It's extraordinarily difficult to find one in the store that actually works. They're made by Fisher-Price, a Very Reputable Company, so I don't think it's a matter of poor workmanship. I think it's that the toys are so popular that visiting kids will literally wear the things to death.
Meanwhile, I must confess that during my tenure at Toys "R" Us, I fell in love with Elmo's Talking Driver. (The name is largely a misnomer designed to capitalize off the Elmo craze, since three other characters are featured as well.) After the store was closed, I used to get a kick out of playing its sound effects over the intercom. When my wife suggested getting one for our daughter last year, apparently unaware of my fascination with the toy, you can imagine that I offered no protest.
The toy is a rough approximation of a car's dashboard, about nine inches wide. The free-spinning steering wheel is the perfect size for little hands. It also features eight different buttons or levers, each making a car-related sound effect. The turn signal level on the left makes a ding, ding sound, and causes both arrows on the dashboard to flash. (Well, all the buttons on the toy do, actually.) The ignition key makes the sound of the car's motor starting when it's turned. The gear shift is an automatic, and makes the sound of the car's engine revving. There's also a music button on the top of the toy that plays about four seconds' worth of a generic, bouncy little beat.
The best part of the toy by far is the character voices. The car's horn has a smiling Elmo visage on it, and when pressed it says, "Beep, beep! Coming through!" in Elmo's voice. There are three other colorful buttons with the faces of Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Ernie on them. Big Bird says, "Buckle up!" Ernie says, "Driving is fun!" Cookie Monster is my all time favorite: "ME DRIVE CAR!" There's just something inherently funny about that phrase. All of the voices sound exactly like the characters from TV, even if the sound is a tad on the loud side.
There are a few minor things about the toy that bug me. For one, none of the sound effects are programmed to play out in their entirely if another button is pressed (or the same button is pressed again), so you end up having to sit and listen to it belch out insane noises like, "Beep beep ME DRIVE buckle driving driving driving is fun ME DRIVE ME DRIVE driving is fun!" The ignition key tends to get stuck on our toy, I think because one of the kids got yogurt on it at one point. The only other problem with the toy is that the sticker with the Sesame Street logo peeled off long ago. Either that, or one of the kids scraped it off with their teeth.
The toy takes three "AA" batteries; we've only had to replace them once since we got the toy, and it gets a lot of use, from both the kids and their cousin when he visits. It's also endured several instances of one of the kids throwing it on the linoleum floor during a temper tantrum, so I can personally attest to its durability factor.
If you find one at the store, though, just check the mileage on it first. Elmo tends to do a lot of driving.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
zobovor
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Member: Zobovor
Location: Ogden, UT
Reviews written: 350
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