LITHIA – A Lithia family says a cuddly, programmable Elmo doll revealed its dark side yesterday after fresh batteries were installed. Instead of singing songs or reciting the favorite color of its 2-year-old owner, James Bowman, the doll started making death threats, the family says. With a squeeze of its fuzzy belly, the Sesame Street character now says, in a sing-song voice, “Kill James.” “It’s not something that really you would think would ever come out of a toy,” said Melissa Bowman, James’ mother. “But once I heard, I was just kind of distraught.” The Elmo Knows Your Name doll, which connects to a computer to learn certain phases and names, recently ran out of battery power, Bowman said.
About an hour after she put new ones in, “I noticed exactly what it was saying,” Bowman said. “And my son was repeating exactly what it was saying.” Bowman said Elmo is James’ favorite character. James even has Elmo slippers, but the malfunctioning, death-threat-spouting Elmo Knows Your Name doll is now being kept away from her son, Bowman said. “This is his absolute favorite toy,” she said. “So we’ve been going through a lot of hassle because he’s trying to climb up the counter and up the closets to get it.” Fisher-Price, the toy company that manufactures the dolls, said it will issue the Bowmans a voucher for a replacement doll. The company said it will examine James’ model for the source of the problem and check whether other Elmos are experiencing the same malfunction.
Elmo knows your name, and where you live. See video here.
So it connects to a PC to learn new phrases? Not SP3 RC2, by any chance?
Perhaps it’s Elmo – Al-Qaeda Edition? Either way, call DHS….
Man, I love this Twilight Zone — Telly Savalas is awesome!
Oh, wait …
Did they check the back of the doll to see if the Good/Evil switch was set incorrectly?
And I thought clowns were scary…
It is also possible it was switched to Spanish by the hardware glitch. This happened before with talking dolls and in most cases (outside of mischief) the problem was that non Spanish-speaking people misunderstood “quiero” for “kill”.
This is not even worthy of a write-up. Elmo is a friggin’ toy, for pete’s sake! Death threats can only come from humans. F-P should have said that is a minor glitch, not worthy of their time, and told the mother to move on. That is not the politically correct thing to do, I realize, but in a sane world it is what would happen.
GIVE ME A FRIGGIN BRAKE HERE!!!!!!
Would one of the rocket scientists here like to explain how a friggin stuffed toy made death threats…come on people……Mom or Dad or nasty cousin Bob made death threats as a friggin joke or in hopes of getting a settlement….nothing more.
someone HACKED the program..
Hacked Elmo..
Do a RESET of the thing and START OVER.
Boy, I’d so burn the damn toy…
Naw. It’s not “Kill James” that it’s saying. It has some other syllable in there that sounds close to it, though, probably some sort of look-up table error. Listen to the video report. It’s closer to “Quell James” or “Gell James” in its enunciation.
That’s what this is all about. Poor machine voice enunciation. Stukid robat.
“Hello James” probably got truncated.
Yea, a non issue here. Obviously something in the toy’s memory glitch’d up when the batteries were replaced. A sound file screwup. This is what you get from cheap processors and easily corrupted memories.
Now when the next gen Tickle-Me Elmo gets up and grabs a kitchen knife, I’ll be worried.
As a Tampa resident, I’m a little disappointed this story wasn’t posted under the
“More Wacky News from Florida” banner…
See… this is what happens when you put the batteries in backwards. Kind of like playing records backwards. They are evil!
Awesome! I want one of those.