When Toys Rule The World: Review: Mr Colour Maker

Thanks to Tomy for supplying the following item for review.

Entropy.

aka Chaos or Mess.

Entropy is a thermodynamic property, and has it's own associated law: entropy must increase unless work is done on the system. All parents will be know this law intimately. Take a child and a tidy room and within seconds the room will be in a state of complete devastation. Making a complete tip of a room is easy. Tidying it up again is a nightmare.

But no matter how much we want to yell at the child and make him tidy up, it's not the child's fault. They're forced to do so by the laws of the universe.

There are certain items which exacerbate (what does that mean?) entropy. Paint is a good one. Paint + child = levels of chaos previously unknown to man. Paint is best encountered only in a carefully controlled environment. E.g. a school or someone else's house.

But then how to learn about the mixing of colours? How will a child learn that blue + yellow = green? Artistic careers are doomed instantly. Well, this is the 21st Century and in the 21st Century with have Technology to deal with such problems. We have Mr Colour Maker!

With Mr Colour Maker you take a couple of cute little paint pots -

And 'pour' (ie pretend to pour) them into the big pot, Mr Colour Maker himself -

Mr Colour Maker recognises which colours have been poured and with a 'mix' (doesn't really mix since there's not really any paint in the pot) tells you which new colour has been made.

It's really rather clever.

I'd like to tell you how it works, how the big pot recognises which of the smaller pots have been poured in, but without taking it apart - which would result in some children being reduced to tears - I can't. For the moment we'll just have to put it down to Magic.

There are a couple of other functions. There's a 'told by Mr Colour Maker what to put in' mode and a singing mode. Mr Colour Maker has quite a nice, non-irritating voice. He has a British accent, although, having only just remembered but not tested yet, I did read in his instructions that there is also a button to change the language.

From the toys we've tested from Tomy it seems that they're pretty darn good at putting the right age recommendation on the packaging. Mr Colour Maker is recommended from 2 years and I'd agree with this. The beautiful little girl in the pictures is a tad too young to play with this and mostly just throws it round the room (her older brother refused to pose for photos). Saying that, since Mr Colour Maker arrived she has learnt to recognise & say 'yellow'. Coincidence?