2-XL: The Smartest Toy Robot in the World

Maggie and Andrew were staying with Grandma for the weekend while their parents took a trip by themselves for their anniversary. Not thrilled about the prospect, Grandma lived beyond civilization in their opinion. (Granted, it was one they kept to themselves as they knew to say nothing if they didn’t have anything nice to say.) She lived nearly thirty miles away from them on an acre carved out of some woods in the hillside. Riding through all the curves and turns just to get there, nearly getting carsick, was one thing, but cell phone and internet service there was another spotty to nonexistent thing entirely.

They politely hugged and kissed their grandmother before finding where they’d stay. Their room was quaint and cozy, albeit dull-looking for the eight-year olds who were to sleep in it. It made them miss their own rooms full of their own things: Maggie missed her art, makeup, and jewelry kits, and her variety of dolls while Andrew missed his Fortnight and Minecraft things, his Nintendo Switch, and his Nerf gun gear.

After they settled in and saw their parents off, Grandma suggested they work together in her flowerbeds and then in the kitchen to prepare supper. While neither of those tasks were their favorite things, they courteously obliged to listen and do as they were asked all afternoon.

They ended up in Grandma’s tv room (as she called it) after supper where she liked to watch Judge Judy. Or to Maggie and Andrew, where she dozed off watching Judge Judy and, as she didn’t even have cable, even television was quickly boring them. Listless, they turned their attention to Grandma’s cranky cat, Chess, who sat across the room, glaring at the young strangers encroaching on his domain. He spat at them before stalking off to get away from them. Maggie and Andrew trailed him through the house and lost him ducking into a cat flap. Their hot pursuit of him suddenly hindered as they opened the door Chess escaped through. They saw his icy stare and heard his rumbling growls from the bottom of a narrow stairway that descended into a shadowy basement. They frowned at each other at first, feeling intimidated by what they saw, but still set on catching the cat, they slowly shuffled down the stairs, each step creaking underneath their feet.

What was a little more than a minute to reach the cold, concrete basement floor felt like forever to the children. Getting off the stairs, they glanced around for Chess, who had disappeared from their sight by that point. In fact, seeing nothing but looming shadows anywhere they looked, they felt close to panicking. 

“Andrew! Maggie!” Grandma’s call to them from the top of the stairs came just in the nick of time. “What are you doing down there?” She flipped the light switch they must have missed and made her way down herself. The shadows they saw moments ago were now recognizable objects: holiday decorations, more furniture, cleaning supplies, storage boxes, and keepsakes.

“We were looking for Chess,” Maggie answered, running to Grandma’s arms when she reached the basement, relieved that she wasn’t in such a scary place.

“What’s this?”Andrew’s attention, on the other hand, was drawn to something on a shelf. He spied a clunky old robot toy, standing not more than a foot tall and coated with dust.

“That’s 2-XL,” Grandma wistfully answered. “Your mother played with him all the time when she was little!” She took him by his handle and handed him to Maggie to carry upstairs and asked Andrew to carry up the tote box he sat on. They took everything to the dining room where Grandma dusted off the robot.

“When your parents were very young,” Grandma began as she cleaned the toy, “music and recordings were made on cassette tapes.” She diverted from the toy to pulling a cassette out from the box to show the kids. “2-XL here is a special tape player. He came with his own tapes that made him come to life!”

The kids’ eyebrows raised, their heads tilted, and they stared at the little robot, trying to process how that could be. Eager to show them, Grandma searched through the tote box for a cassette tape specific to 2-XL. Upon finding one, she stuck it in its body and pressed the play button. Two red dots on his face blinked on and one more flashed as he whirred and beeped to life.

“Thank. You. For. Turning. Me. On!” Maggie and Andrew gasped as the robotic voice greeted them. “I.Am. 2-XL. The. Smartest.Toy. Robot. In. The. World! And. If. You. Don’t. Believe. Me. Just. Come. A little. Closer. And. I. Will. Try. And. Prove. It. To. You…” Indeed, they were hooked by the robot’s personality and confidence and drew close as he explained how to interact with him. Grandma just stood by, smiling as her grandchildren engaged with her daughter’s own toy. Maggie and Andrew occupied themselves with the robot for the whole thirteen minutes of his tape, even going so far as to run and jump in place when 2-XL encouraged them to exercise for a moment. They were disappointed when the robot said he got tired, but Grandma explained that there should be a few more 2-XL tapes in the box.

“Your mother had more storybooks-on-tape and music that she played in 2-XL,” Grandmother pulled from the box a faded, tattered, pink Disney read-along storybook for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and found its matching tape. “This one was your mother’s favorite,” she added, loading the tape player again.

2-XL came to life just like he did last time but used finer voices throughout the story. A female narrator told most of it, but every so often parts sounded like they came straight from the movie! The pictures in the storybook did too. Maggie and Andrew were amazed. Grandma let them stay up to listen to the Aladdin read-along and then let them fall asleep to the Pocahontas one.

Waking up early the next morning (on an average weekend of all times), Maggie and Andrew could hardly wait to play with 2-XL again, but they had to retrieve the tote box from the dining room. The mission seemed easy until Chess, bird-watching in the dining room window, hissed them good morning. The two froze a moment and watched down the hall... Nope, that didn’t wake Grandma. They proceeded to the table, one of them picked up the tote, but both of them winced and froze again when its contents noisily shifted...Nope, still didn’t wake Grandma but they had to be careful not to rattle it again.

They breathed out when they realized the coast was still clear, only to startle again when they saw Chess dart up the hallway to Grandma’s room. The box jolted again and Grandma’s bedroom door creaked open as Chess slid inside. They froze again, thinking surely they’d be exposed now but the silence that followed after the creaking told them otherwise. What was in reality just another minute of tiptoeing to the bedroom felt like forever to the anxious kids, but they were miraculously successful.

Grandma did wake up a little bit later though. Peeking into the room to check on them, she saw the two of them with the robot situated between them on the bed and hunched close so they could hear another 2-XL trivia tape with the volume low.

“Good morning, Maggie! Good morning, Andrew!” She greeted them.

“Good morning, Grandma!” They said back.

“If I didn’t hear a bump in the night, I heard one this morning,” She admitted. The kids just exchanged glances and smiled up at Grandma.

“Who wants breakfast?” She smiled back at them.

“Me! Me! Me!” They stopped the tape and sprung from the bed. Grandma’s breakfast didn’t take a backseat to much.

“2-XL would be the coolest show-and-tell presentation ever!” Andrew thought as they ate.

“Could we take 2-XL to class?” Maggie excitedly asked Grandma.

“Pleeeeease?” They both chimed in.

“You’ll have to keep being good this weekend and ask your mother,” Grandma told them. The rest of the weekend passed like the day before: with Maggie and Andrew helping Grandma with things around the house, but with the hopeful anticipation that they’d be allowed to take 2-XL to school next week.

“Mommy! Look what we found! Can we take him to school for show-and-tell?” The kids, with the robot in hand, bombarded their parents the minute they arrived at Grandma’s. Their mother took the toy for a moment to get a closer look at him.

“Oh! That’s what his name was!” She suddenly recalled. Despite its name escaping her at some point, her earliest memories she could always remember were playing her storybooks-on-tape in a robot-shaped tape player. “And he looks great for as long as its been!” She exclaimed, turning the toy around in her hands to examine him.

“He still works well too,” Grandma added.

“If you take very good care of him, you can bring him and the tapes home and take them for show-and-tell.” Mother agreed. Maggie and Andrew cheered.

Come the next day in class, the two of them were the first to present for show-and-tell time, for which they specially prepared with some research--which wasn’t typical for show-and-tell, but they still thought it was good to have.

“For our show-and-tell, we are sharing 2-XL, an old robot tape player toy. He was actually our mother’s toy when she was growing up and we found him at our grandmother’s house over the weekend. 2-XL’s name is a play on words for the phrase, ‘to excel’,” which one of them wrote on the board, proud to show off their spelling and vocabulary skills.

“2-XL was an educational toy and one of the first ‘smart toys’. He was very popular between 1992 and 1995, when our mother was growing up. That makes him almost twenty-five to thirty years old! 2-XL has special cassette tapes that make him come to life. When he is alive, he asks you questions that you answer by pushing one of his buttons and he tells you if you’re right or wrong. He can also play cassette tapes that have music or stories on them.” They fascinated their class by demonstrating part of 2-XL’s programming.

“2-XL is old and expensive, but he is special.” They concluded. “Our mother loved him and we do too!”