Fijit Friends Toy
Yes, it’s only June, but we’ve seen a sneak peek of the Christmas Toys that are tipped to be hot favourites for 2011 and we wanted to see if there were any scientific toys in there among the usual cheap and cheesy plastic throwaways.
So, here’s the list…
1 Fijit Friends
2 Kidizoom Twist Camera
3 Barbie Doggie Water Park
4 Transformers 3 Optimus Prime
5 Baby Annabell
6 Bob The Builder Construction Tower
7 Lego City Police Station
8 Bopit XT
9 Nerf N Strike Night Finder
10 Monopoly Banking
Showcased at the New York Toy Fair, 2011, the Fijit is made by Mattel and is expected to sell well in the USA when it’s released in “Fall 2011″. The Teletubby-lookalike is 10.5 inches high, comes in pastel colours with soft plastic “skin” and is able to interact by responding to basic voice commands such as “goodnight” which causes it to close its eyes and snore. It can also tell knock-knock jokes, dance, use 100 phrases as responses and laughs when tickled. Interesting, it can respond to a “Fijit” iPhone app, which could be pretty cool. Perhaps they can get it to speak in actual English for the UK market, instead of the grating “robo-American” the toys in the videos use!
The Fijits will be marketed to girls more so than boys using a “best friend” marketing pitch. See the movie, below…
Congrats to Mattel for getting their publicity machine cranked up more than six months early with a toy that isn’t even for sale in the USA yet being pitched as a potential Christmas best-seller in the UK by Tesco!
From the video it seems that the USA suggested retail price will be $49.99. Let’s guess what the UK price will be… £49.99? Nope, I just checked Amazon USA vs UK and while the US price is $49.99, the UK has £54.99. So, again the UK gets ripped off, even though the Amazon “stockist” is, err, out of stock. Not surprising really, as you can’t buy the toy yet!
Of course, no marketer worth their salt would offer just one “Fijit friends”, so there are multiple versions called Willa, Sage, Serafina and Logan, each with their own “personalities” and individual jokes! In case you were wondering, Willa is the “Trend-Setting” Fijit Friend, Logan is the “Sporty” Fijit Friend, Sage is the “Adventurous” Fijit Friend and Serafina
is the “Sweetie-Pie” Fijit Friend! Interestingly, according to Amazon USA, they also get individual release dates… June 15th, June 29th, July 16th and September 2nd. Perhaps that’s so they can have different “Birthdays”? Of course, it could just be that the factories need the time to ramp up production…