Natural World Elephant With Sound ($1.99, from $3.99)
This clumsy, cheap plastic elephant looks like clumsy, cheap plastic elephants the world over, with one important exception: the clumsy plastic drainpipe-cover-looking button-thing on its belly. All the Natural World animals have them. Press the zebra's button, and it produces a weird little pony whinny. Press the lion's or the tiger's, and it makes a grinding but sort of credible roaring noise. But elephants? According to this toy, they scream like a woman in agony. Was there a messy, fatal factory accident just as these were being made, or what? The A.V. Club tried the button on the only dinosaur in the box, but it was jammed stuck and wouldn't play its noise. We're really hoping that the dinosaur's original sound effect was of a panicked plant supervisor saying "Okay, just remember, no one saw anything, she didn't come to work today at all. Got it?"
Basic Fun Yu-Gi-Oh! Keychain ($1, from $8.99)
First lesson of Cheap Toy Roundup: If a toy says "Really works!" on the packaging in big, bright letters, it almost certainly doesn't. Second lesson: Most of the other boasts on toy packaging are also big fat lies. (Words to watch out for in particular: "fun," "safe," "child-proof," and "totally worth the $99.99 you're about to shell out in hopes of making your kid happy.") The Yu-Gi-Oh! keychain line is particularly cruel about dashing kids' hopes: It promises that when they press the button, the Duel Monster (think Pokémon, but a little more current) depicted will come to life. No, of course it doesn't, it just flips around to reveal a more detailed plastic bas-relief version. If it "Really works!", which of course it rarely does.
Electronic Mobile Phone ($1)
Man, kids really seem to love imitating adults. Hence the toy-store sections full of cheap little plastic kiddie versions of pots and pans, vacuum cleaners and scrub-brushes, and briefcases and cell phones, all so Junior can happily pretend to be doing something you yourself would really rather never do again. Namely, work. Well, at least if the kids want to imitate Mommy or Daddy trying to deal with irascible clients and after-hours work demands on the phone, you can minimize the irony by buying them the cheapest, shittiest fake phone imaginable. Say, this lump of plastic. "Each button haue their own function," brags the packaging. And it's true. Some of the buttons make irritating noises, while others "haue" their own function of doing nothing whatsoever. Just like those clients that won't stop calling you on your grown-up electronic mobile phone.
Walkie Talkie ($7.99, from $9.99)
Shouldn't cheap-ass fake cell phones have rendered cheap-ass fake walkie-talkies irrelevant by now? Actually, in theory, these walkie-talkies work, in spite of the decal standing in for a channel-display window, and in spite of the fact that they look like they were carved clumsily out of primal plastic by some klutzy Neanderthal artists. However, the packaging doesn't say "Really works!" anywhere, so chances are good that they really do function. What it says instead: "Simulating the true styles and making carefully push button to talk." Wow, it's like your secret spy gear came with its own secret special non-English code.
Dig A Glow Dinosaur ($1)
Why is this kit so amazingly cheap, when it comes with a little soft plastic hammer, a whisk brush, a scraping knife, and a pointy stabbity thing, in addition to the fist-size, rock-hard faux fossilized dinosaur egg? Probably because there isn't actually a "glow dinosaur" inside, whatever that is. It's probably just rock all the way through. But what better way to keep children occupied silently for weeks than giving them a rock, telling them there's totally a dinosaur in there, and then giving them some ultra-light plastic tools to dig for it with? This might be the meanest but most efficient child-occupying project of all time. Warning: toy not suitable for children ages 0-3, probably because those kids are too young to have learned about false hope yet.
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