The Robot with a Personality: Remembering Mego’s 2-XL

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In 1978, Mego introduced a small, toy robot that could play 8-track tapes: the amazing “2-XL,” described in promotional materials as “the robot with a personality.”

2-XL was a small plastic robot that could speak, and would, according to Mego, “tell jokes, “ask you True-False Questions,” “Tell you if you’re right or wrong,” “give you the correct answer,” give you more information on many different subjects,” and “play games with you and your friends.”

 

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Okay, so 2-XL isn’t exactly Siri, but this toy robot could play “standard 8 track cartridges” too. The result?  According to TV commercials: “Teenagers love him! Adults can’t resist him!”

Indeed, 2-XL wasn’t just a fun buddy for children in the late seventies, he also considered an educational toy because parents could purchase as accessories a variety of 8 track tapes on various subjects.  There was one cartridge about the Metric System, another concerning Astronomy, and yet another reporting about the Animal World.

 

Other 2-XL eight-tracks that were available included Sports, Interviews with Great People from History, 50’s and 60’s Nostalgia, U.S. Presidents and American History, and even — in the spirit of In Search Of  — Monsters, Myths and Legends. Thirty-six such cartridges were available in total.

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I have a 2-XL on a shelf in my home office to this day, and one thing that the promotional materials don’t reveal to prospective buyers is that 2-XL doesn’t sound like you would expect.  His voice is not mechanical-sounding.

Instead, he sounds like he’s a comedian from the Bronx.

This fact makes interaction with the robot all the more…unusual.  Still, the toy was a great seller in the late 1970s, and 2-XL was voiced in 7 different languages at the height of the toy robot’s popularity.

 

2-XL disappeared in the early 1980s — a relic of the immediate post-Star Wars (1977) toy boom — but the resourceful little answer man was re-booted in 1992 by Tiger Electronics.

2-XL received a dramatic face lift for this update, looking more like a traditional robot and less like an electric heater.

Also, this time around, 2-XL could play cassette tapes, rather than 8-tracks.  Today, that still sounds terribly antiquated.

Sadly, 2-XL never got a second upgrade to play CD, but for kids of my generation, and indeed, for children of the nineties too, this is one toy robot who has never been forgotten.

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