The Earth is a garbage pile. Or at least it is at the opening of the newest Pixar film, WALL*E. Mankind has moved into space for five years in order to let the megacorporation, Buy'n'Large, clean the place up with the help of millions of small, autonomous trash-compacting robots. But the plan fails, and 700 years pass, the Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-class compactors break down and the job is never finished. One WALL*E, however, remains active and has gained intelligence. One day as he goes through his routine, WALL*E finds something unusual on his rounds—a landing space craft, and a sexy she-robot named Eve that he quite fancies. Eve, however, wants nothing to do with this stranger, her one-track mind is set on its mission—to discover whether or not the Earth has yet become habitable again.
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And despite the lack of precise control, the animatronics are quite nice ... |
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Seriously, I couldn't care less that Transformers, the cartoon, was simply a long series of half-hour toy ads. Gimme the toys!
WALL*E toys are, after all, cool toys. In a recent review I talked about several of the Deluxe Action Figures, and now I'm putting Thinkway Toys' U-Command WALL*E through its paces and having a lot of fun.
Packaged in the standard WALL*E yellow box, the U-Command WALL*E is something for everyone who loves robots and can't wait the 175 years they will have to wait to get a real thinking robot toy.
It comes packaged with an Infra-Red remote control that puts WALL*E through its moves in a fun and easy way. On the bright yellow control box are 12 buttons. Each does a particular function, some are multi-functional.
WALL*E has animatronic movement, real tread locomotion (well, kinda anyway) and moving arms, head and light-up eyes and very legitimate sound effects.
U-Command WALL*E measures about 9 inches all-round. He requires four AA batteries in the body, and three more AA batteries for the remote control. Demo batteries are included.
Great toy, but not the Ultimate Wall*E
The simplicity of the WALL*E controls is its strength and its weakness. In the center of the control is a joystick which can move only forward and backward. Again, simple, but you'll see why not ideal shortly.Pushing the joystick forward does what it should—WALL*E happily responds by driving forward on his rubber treads. Pull back, and he turns in a backward direction. So if you want to turn WALL*E, he has to be going in reverse to do it. If you want to turn left, back him up 90 degrees. But turning right means backing him up 270 degrees, which is annoying. Four of the buttons on the control mimic these functions.
But this toy's main strength is not in its mobility as such, but in its automated dancing motions. Because at the heart of it, this toy has some very cool animatronics.
His hands and arms are posable. The arms you can rotate along the axis, and the two main fingers on each hand are hinged, and the thumb doubly-so. But his arms lift up and down with whatever action he's playing. His head turns and his beautiful eyes light up nice blue. His head tilts at the binocular split, and he makes very authentic sounds from the film.
Four more buttons on the control make him go through a series of pre-programmed moves, where he seems to move a bit, turn a bit, and make great sounds while his head is turning, eyes are lighting up, and his head halves are tilting. He does some lengthy dances complete with musical accompaniment.
The talk button gets him making various sound sequences, some of which include calling longingly for "Evahhh," and another button has him making his compacting sounds. And this is all tons of fun, but be careful, as he will dart off on his own without warning or much predictability. And if he runs into something, he's going to fall over backwards, period.
Finally, he has the ability to remember the last 10 commands given, and will replay those in the sequence in which they were given.
His treaded movement is supplemented by two wheels under the treads. This is one of the reasons he's so unstable, falling over if he hits the edge of a carpet, or hits a stationary object while moving forward.
I said that the simplicity of this toy is also its weakness. True. Most people who have control of tracked vehicles want two joysticks, one for each tread, so it can be controlled more precisely, using both forward to go forward, backward to go backward, and one in each direction to turn on the spot.
But for the money, this WALL*E is quite good. And despite the lack of precise control, the animatronics are quite nice, and the claim is that he has 1,000 action combos. Not bad at all.
For those who want more, however, it should be on the way. The press pack I got included pictures of the Ultimate WALL*E which has controls that appear from the photos to be more like the ones I describe above. Now that one I'm really looking forward to!
-Sean
