Spiderman Electronic Gloves: Let Your Fingers do the Talking
Written: Sep 08 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: purchased inexpensively
Cons: lack of clear sounds, lack of variety in sounds
The Bottom Line: My child enjoys these gloves. I doubt yours will.
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| pluckyduck's Full Review: Spider-Man Gloves |
Dad was walking through Toys ‘R Us the other week and saw a pair of Spiderman Electronic Sound Effect Gloves blister packed for just $9.99. Like many other impulse purchases Don makes for the boys, they seemed a reasonable gamble. Just $10, they had the potential to be a huge hit with our oldest boy, Dan.
Dan is, um “different”, just like his mother. The saying the “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” never applied more than to my tree and Dan’s apple. I have my own peculiar obsessions (Epinions, toasters, hair gel) and Dan has his. One of the things my 10 year old is passionate about is gloves. Goes back, probably, to his earliest years when he had names for both of his hands (which talked, of course - sometimes to him or me and sometimes just to each other). By the time he was 6, I honestly worried that he didn’t understand his hands were just hands and not beings with brains inside of them. Ended up having a long talk with him, where he cried having to face the truth that his hands were just an extension of himself and I cried knowing I’d “killed the hands”. Parenting ain’t easy, is it? After six months of punishing me by never letting the hands talk in my presence, Dan started to ease up and use his hands creatively again while I was around, assuring me at the same time that he understood they were just hands.
Anyway, these days his hand obsession manifests itself in creative play with gloves as an accessory. I’ll often find him wearing his winter stretch gloves in 90 degree weather, two different colors so each hand gets to have his own unique personality. Couple a glove obsession with a vivid interest in Spiderman generated by the recent blockbuster, and a $10 gamble on these electronic gloves was a no-brainer, yes?
The Product
You get two vinyl gloves, styled like the pair that Spiderman himself wears. The gloves are a thick vinyl, promising to be pretty sweaty in warmer weather, not that my Dan would notice. The vinyl itself is stretchy -- I can make them fit on my hands, but the gloves aren’t so outrageously big that a normal seven year old would find them unwieldy. I wonder how well they would fit a five year old, which the package claims the toy is appropriate for.
The right hand glove is electronically enabled. It has three watch batteries inside a plastic sound effects box located in the top portion of the glove. The idea is that the glove makes sounds as you move your hand, increasing the play value.
The left hand glove is just a glove. No sounds. It just functions as a companion to the right glove that is the real ‘toy”.
The Experience
Hmmm. Well, you can see that I’ve given the product just three stars and The Experience would be the reason for my lack of enthusiasm about these gloves. Like many sound producing products we’ve purchased in the last year, the promise was much greater than the actual delivery.
The promise (quoted from the enclosed directions):
“Your Spiderman gloves will make different sounds as you move your hand! There are many different sounds in the Spiderman electronic gloves. To hear punching sounds, make a fist and throw a punch. To hear what it sounds like to fling a spidery web, press the button in the palm of your hand. Experiment with different motions to hear different sounds.”
Many different sounds? We’ve been able to come up with two, and only one is particularly interesting...the web flinging sound. The punching sound doesn’t sound like a punch to me, it sounds like electric static. If the glove is making other sounds with other hand motions, they are electric static too, and sound exactly like “punching sound” to my ears.
The toy has its good points and battery saver mode is one of them. You don’t have to turn the electronic glove on and off. It shuts off when it isn’t played with for three minutes, and turns back on when you start to play with it again. This is a good thing, because I don’t want to ever have to replace the three watch batteries this sucker takes.
Age Levels
I doubt I’d recommend buying these gloves for a five year old, even though the package has that as the minimum age (5 and up, it’s on the box!). My biggest concern would be whether the five year old could fit into the rather large gloves comfortably and also whether he or she would have the manual dexterity/finger length to make the web flinging sound. This sound requires that you press one of your fingers to the button in your palm as Peter Parker does when he flings a web.
I also doubt I’d recommend the gloves for any kid over the age of seven, without knowing the child. My 10 year old plays with them because he loves gloves. My 8 year old, who loves Spiderman, has no interest in the gloves.
Eliminating both ends of the age ranges leaves a very narrow 6 and 7 year old range that I’d think you’d want to consider the gloves for, doesn’t it? Probably explains the $9.99 price at Toys R Us.
Extended play
Dan’s running around outside with his Spiderman gloves on right now. He’s getting extended play out of the purchase. Would your child? I doubt it, unless your tree is like my tree and is putting out some exotic varieties of apples.
Hey, there’s always Halloween!
Now, if you want to consider these gloves as a costume accessory, I’ve got an entirely different opinion.
For $10, you could take a run-of-the-mill Spiderman costume and add some fun. 3,124,751 children on your block will be Spiderman for Halloween. If your kid has sound effects in his gloves, he’ll stand out Halloween night.
Just don’t expect that he’ll play with the gloves on November 1st.
Overall recommendation
I can’t recommend the gloves as a toy purchase, unless you’ve got a glove obsessed child. I can recommend the gloves as a Halloween accessory, if you’re willing to throw an extra $10 into the Halloween costume for something different.
Three stars for the gloves and a heartfelt plea to sound effect toy manufacturers to work a bit harder on making the sounds that come from toys more interesting. I’m sure the technology exists. I’ve got a boy who really wants his hands to talk, crank it up a notch!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 9.99
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Epinions.com ID:
pluckyduck
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Member: Andrea Barton Gurney
Location: Almost Philadelphia
Reviews written: 74
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Gone fishing for awhile.
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