Magnawheels Hummer 2

We bought this toy for our three year old son last year for Christmas. I know the recommendations are for older children, but my son loved this toy! He played and played with the hummer every day until 9 months later the parts are starting to be lost. He would like another one for Christmas and we are going to buy him one. The toy is educational for spacial skills and the fact that he can crash it over and over again is great. If you have a child who likes to take things apart and put them together again I would recommend this toy.

When I was a kid back in the early '70s, I had the best toy in the universe: Ideal's Smash-Up Derby. Oh, did I love that toy. Imagine: a toy you were actually allowed to break! Wow! I used to play for hours on the kitchen floor, ramming those two poor, hapless cars into one another (and then asking my Dad to help me retrieve the pieces out from under the refrigerator).

Personally, I drive a Prius and a motorcycle and positively loathe the Hummer H2--in my mind driving a vehicle that gets 10 miles per gallon practically qualifies one as an eco-terrorist; I feel it is the very personification capricious, wasteful, arrogant, ostentatious consumption. So naturally, when I saw this Hummer in the store, visions of it exploding all over my kitchen floor danced happily through my head. I couldn't resist: a chance to relive a childhood memories of a beloved toy and totally bash the Hummer H2 in the process? Ring that bad boy up!

The toy is a wonderful idea that was executed very poorly. It has the worst production quality I've ever seen in a toy outside the dollar store: The parts are engineered badly, molded badly, and trimmed badly, and consequently they don't fit together very well, to say the least. When assembled, it sits lower in the back than it does in the front. And when handled rough, the dashboard--a piece that's not supposed to come off--comes off. The rear windows, which aren't even squared off properly, do the same.

The only reason I'm giving this thing two stars instead of one is because when it rolls off the counter and onto the tile floor, it violently and oh-so-satisfyingly explodes into more than a dozen pieces--which go flying in all directions.

That is so unbelievably super-cool. The first time I did that, I was giddy with excitement.

So I'll happily relive the memories of my youth, pretending Brittney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Eminem, P. Diddy, Paris Hilton, or some other arrogant, obnoxious, bling-encrusted celebrity idiot is behind the wheel, screaming out their last breath as they plummet to their gruesome, horrible death.

Yes, there's probably something wrong with me. But I still don't like the production value of this toy.