One day, as he goes through his routine, WALL*E finds something unusual on his rounds—a landing spacecraft, and a sexy she-robot named Eve that he quite fancies. Eve, however, wants nothing to do with this stranger. Her one-track mind is set on its mission—to discover whether the Earth has yet become habitable again.

WALL*E is a natural source for toys for kids of any age. What's not to like? Robots, more robots, spaceships and more robots. It's almost as if Pixar had designed this film in order to make money off toys. Wait, wait, I'm being cynical. No one would do that, would they? George?

Seriously, I couldn't care less that Transformers, the cartoon, was simply a long series of half-hour toy ads. Gimme the toys!

WALL*E toys are, after all, cool toys. In a recent review, I talked about several of the Deluxe Action Figures, and now I'm putting Thinkway Toys' U-Command WALL*E through its paces and having a lot of fun.

Packaged in the standard WALL*E yellow box, the U-Command WALL*E is something for everyone who loves robots and can't wait 175 years to get a real thinking robot toy.

It comes packaged with an Infra-Red remote control that puts WALL*E through its moves in a fun and easy way. On the bright yellow control box are 12 buttons. Each does a particular function; some are multifunctional.

WALL*E has animatronic movement, real tread locomotion (well, kinda, anyway), moving arms and head, light-up eyes and authentic sound effects.

U-Command WALL*E measures about 9 inches all round. He requires four AA batteries in the body and three more AA batteries for the remote control. Demo batteries are included.

Great toy, but not the Ultimate Wall*E

The simplicity of the WALL*E controls are this toy's strength and its weakness. In the center of the control is a joystick that can move only forward and backward. Again, simple, but you'll see why not ideal shortly.

Pushing the joystick forward does what it should—WALL*E happily responds by driving forward on his rubber treads. Pull back, and he turns in a backward direction. So if you want to turn WALL*E, he has to be going in reverse. If you want to turn left, back him up 90 degrees. But turning right means backing him up 270 degrees, which is annoying. Four of the buttons on the control mimic these functions.

But this toy's main strength lies not in its mobility as such, but in its automated dancing motions. Because at the heart of it, this toy has some very cool animatronics.

The hands and arms are posable. You can rotate the arms along the axis, and the two main fingers on each hand are hinged, the thumb doubly so. But the arms rise and fall with the action being played. The head turns, and the beautiful eyes light up a nice blue. The head tilts at the binocular split.

Four more buttons on the control make the robot go through a series of preprogrammed moves, seeming to move a bit, turn a bit and make great sounds while the head is turning, the eyes are lighting up and the head halves are tilting. WALL*E does some lengthy dances, complete with musical accompaniment.

The talk button produces various sound sequences, some of which include calling longingly for "Evahhh," and another button produces compacting sounds. All this is tons of fun, but be careful, as the robot will dart off on his own without warning or much predictability. And if it runs into something, it's going to fall over backward, period.

Finally, WALL*E has the ability to remember the last 10 commands given, and will replay those in the sequence in which they were given.

The treaded movement is supplemented by two wheels under the treads. This is one of the reasons the robot is so unstable, falling over if it hits the edge of a carpet or a stationary object while moving forward.

I said that the simplicity of this toy is also its weakness. Most people who have control of tracked vehicles want two joysticks, one for each tread, so it can be controlled more precisely, pressing both forward to go forward, both backward to go backward and one in either direction to turn on the spot.

But for the money, this WALL*E is quite good. Despite the lack of precise control, the animatronics are quite nice, and the claim is that it has 1,000 action combos. Not bad at all.