VTech Catch-Me-Kitty review
Have a lazy infant you’re trying to come up with an incentive to have them crawl? The VTech Catch-Me-Kitty presents a moving target to grab your infant’s attention and give them the desire to go and chase this cat as it sings and taunts them with tales of meeting the queen for reasons unknown.
While Maggie has not exactly managed to figure out the crawl to get it, she has developed some amazing grab action and is working on the ability to use tools to grab the feisty feline as it frolics and sings to catch her.
The only complaint I have about this thing is that when it’s caught, it gets pretty loud as it cycles through all the music as baby keeps pressing button after button.
The cool thing about this is that it has a sensor to detect when your baby is near / when it should run again, so it will keep out of reach for a bit until your child manages to display that she’s the mighty kitty hunter. These sensors also supposedly keep it from running into thing, but ours will occasionally whack into something.
It seems to work on short carpet and hardwood, although from reading some it appears on longer thread carpets you might be running into some quicksand-type bogging down of the kitty.
The kit-travery
Until I sat down to write this, I had no idea there was a controversy over on Amazon (and FOX news) about one of the songs sounding like it’s saying “shave me, r*pe me” – having heard the song 30 times at least I never heard anything but “chase me, race me,” so I think if you’ve got a dirty mind or a really blown speaker you’re going to hear what you want to hear out of it. That or there was a bad batch of these.
There’s an Amazon video review (you can go through the reviews to find it) that the recorder claims it sounds like “chase me, r*pe me” but I hear race in their video. I’ve never heard the other word with an S in the P position so… maybe if you’re extremely hard of hearing and have been listening to Nirvana recently.
I’d probably bet on people who have convinced themselves that’s what it’s saying so they can be outraged about something. VTech evidently changed the song in 2012 to “chase me, catch me, you’ll have fun” which sounds pretty darn dirty right there.
Wrap-up
All in all it’s a pretty good toy with room for improvement, but not so much room that you should bypass it completely. It would be nice to see a furry version of this, have the option to make it a bit quieter, variable speed settings for faster crawling babies or the ability to figure out it’s about to be caught.
It also is not an educational toy as far as I can tell, unless it’s to educate your child in future cat hunting, but then again that’s just me.
Availability
The VTech Catch-Me-Kitty is available from Amazon for $21.99, although there are some of their sellers going for less. For a kids toy I’d say it’s probably worth more around $15, but I’m a cheap kids toy enthusiast.
