This is definitely not your father's Batmobile. Whenever Batman slips into his car during the WB network's animated series "The Batman," the lights on the toy that's sitting right there in your living room pop on, the car's wheels swing out and its engine revs up.
Nor is Serafina your average plush toy cat. Whenever her on-screen counterpart appears during the DVD film "Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper," the $40 furball starts to purr and chat -- and she can do it in French, too.
With InteracTV by Fisher-Price, kids answer questions from characters like Dora the Explorer.
(Richard Drew -- AP)
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So much for toys that will pull your children away from the television. This holiday the hottest new products for kids, from cuddly dolls to trivia games, have one thing in common: They all interact with the tube, whether by means of sensors (the Batwave Batmobile) or radio-wave technology (that would be Serafina) or the regular old TV remote control.
With this year's toys, kids can essentially crawl inside their favorite series, cueing up video clips, propelling the plot forward and answering questions posed by characters.
Tying toys to the TV is by no means new -- for years, a walk down the toy aisle has felt like a romp through the Saturday morning cartoons. What's different this year is the type of interaction.
Toymakers and television show producers say they want kids to begin playing with TV shows -- or at least their content, sometimes transferred onto a DVD -- rather than just watch them passively and then play with their spinoff toys afterward.
"It is a natural outgrowth of the medium -- first the TV projected on you, now you interact with it," said Jim Silver, publisher of the Toy Report, an industry trade publication. "It's a big change in the way kids can watch television."
The TV-driven toys hitting the market this year can be broken down into three categories -- educational video games, DVD trivia games and the examples above, stand-alone toys that interact with televised content.
The stand-alone toys, the Batwave Batmobile and Barbie's Serafina, are both from Mattel Inc. Among the educational offerings, there is InteracTV from Fisher-Price, a DVD-based learning system. In what seem like mini-episodes of their favorite shows, children use a hand-held controller to answer questions from such popular TV characters as Elmo and Dora the Explorer.
Then there is the V.Smile TV Learning System from Vtech Holdings Ltd., an educational video-game system based on shows like "Scooby-Doo," "Care Bears" and "Winnie the Pooh." Players navigate TV-themed worlds using a joystick and big buttons, stopping to spell out words and count numbers.
