Date: 1978
Label: Mego Corp
Date: 1978
Label: Mego Corp
The 2-XL was a toy, a robot-shaped 8-track player which played cartridges like this one. Make no mistake, this is an extremely lame toy. Here's the idea. The robot has four buttons on his front, one for each of the four 8-track programs. There are questions on the tape. A kid is supposed to listen to a question, and then answer by pressing one of the four buttons (in the case of the cartridge on this page the buttons are TRUE, FALSE, YES, and NO). The machine jumps to another program based on which button the kid presses, and then the tape plays an appropriate response ("Very good. You have answered yes, and that is correct.") The voice on the tape is an extremely annoying high-pitched electronic-sounding fake robot voice. The questions are of the TRIVIAL PURSUIT variety - "True or false, male monkeys are sometimes bald as they get older, like some men" (The answer is TRUE, in case you care). The questions are liberally interspersed with fake machine noises and bad jokes - "What do you call a duck that gets straight A's? - A smart quacker."
The Mego Corp, better known for action figures was clearly trying to pawn this off as an educational toy. In fact the name is a pun about achievement ( 2-XL = TO EXCEL, get it?). Speaking of names, MEGO is a 'Net acronym for "my eyes glaze over" meaning boring as hell. How much could you really learn from this thing? You play a tape once, and you've heard all 30 or so questions and you know the answers. Then what? Well, I guess you donate the tape to a thrift store, and somehow it ends up on the Internet. The really scary thing is that according to a thread on Usenet, the 2-XL was still being produced fairly recently, but as a cassette player robot rather than an 8-track robot. Go figure.