Product Review: Crawling Crab Baby Toy,Tummy Time Toys,Electric Dancing Crab Toy for Kids with Music and LED Light Up,Sensing Crawling Crab with Automatically Avoid Obstacles,Walking Crab Baby Toy...
Toy Technology Takes a Leap Sideways
One of the joys of parenthood that I knew was coming, but still pleasantly surprises me, is getting into toy shopping again. This makes sense, because I clearly love toys. I have a whole Substack here that (purportedly) focuses on consumer technology, and that’s really just toys, when you get to bottom of it.
As a dad, I now get to acquire legitimate, actual, toys, for kids, and have them around the house. My favorite, so far, is this dancing crab thingy, pictured above. If you’re a parent to a child under 1, and you are on Instagram, then you undoubtedly have seen ads, and are familiar with this. The dancing crab toy is one of these things that tends to have ads algorithmically delivered to everyone and anyone who could be a potential customer.
It’s unclear who makes this toy, or what it is called. Nobody wants to take the credit/blame for it. It’s more of a generic product that somebody came up with, and has convinced all of the world’s most aggressive drop-shippers to do their best to spread the word about it. It’s sold by the type of internet savvy, drop-shipping side-hustlers who don’t even bother to name it, and rather just stuff so many SEO search phrases into the product title, that it won’t even fit with Substack’s title character limit (I had to cut off “Gift For Toddler” on the above).
What this toy does, is produce a scene of total, random, loud, chaos. It has a loud, electric motor, that whirs and drives a couple of somewhat hidden grooved wheels at the base. These wheels roll the crab frantically to the left or the right. The product descriptions site obstacle avoidance as a feature, but I haven’t really observed that in practice. It seems to me like there’s something mechanical that randomly, suddenly, and violently reverses the direction. I don’t know how it works, but nonetheless, I’m entertained, and I like it.
The turning of the axles also power the six plastic crab legs on the sides, making them flap loudly and dramatically. The giant crab eyes light up brightly. I can’t remember whether they flash; they probably flash. And as a final touch, the thing plays some sort of whimsical techno music - like if Goofy went to an EDM festival, this would be getting the crowd going there. This music is played at such a volume as to be heard clearly above the rest of the noise.
The use case for this toy is to distract a baby from something that the baby might otherwise be upset about. We have found, in our household, that no matter what our daughter is going through, the dancing crab will distract her for at least a few minutes. Before deploying the dancing crab, however, one must ask one’s self whether the dancing crab is better or worse than a crying child. This is a very personal question and can vary, person to person.
I, for example, am willing to activate the dancing crab even when I’m just at home all by myself. So you all know where I stand. But others find some aspects of the dancing crab experience to be in poor taste, or a bit irritating, and even go so far as to request that I not hum the dancing crab’s theme song at various times throughout the day.
I really wish I could record a video and show it to you in action, but I’m writing this one past everybody’s bedtimes, and the Crawling Crab Baby Toy etc is, as I’ve mentioned, VERY loud. And on that note, I’ve got to go to bed. Till next week!