#compact caller

Miraculous Ladybug’s YoYo - Compact Caller vs Make Up YoYo

This is a review I would have liked to make much sooner, since I guess that the Ladybug Compact Caller is one of the key toys this Christmas (it is sold everywhere here), but life happens and I had no time before.

Oh well. These are still cool toys and I wanted to share ^_^

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Let’s start with the Compact Caller!

As I said, this here seems to be the go-to toy this Christmas. I don’t know how Ladybug became so crazy popular in Spain, but I’m so happy that it is doing so well! It has also replaced the Paw Patrol as the omnipresent franchise, and however that happened, thank youuuuuu!

The packaging of the Caller is very eyecatching, with lively colours (Ladybug has started to suffer the same pinkering as Spiderman, but thank goodness is not very spread... yet) and a multilayered shape that makes it easy to spot even in the all-black-and-red Miraculous Ladybug aisle.

The front is open enough to see all the available cards:

And the back shows them all, plus instructions and a not-very-thrilled girl:

The 9 friends that you can talk with are: Ladybug, Marinette, Tikki, Chat Noir, Adrien, Plagg, Marinette’s mom, Marinette’s dad and Alya (who has Marinette in her picture). This is a very Marinette-centric toy, is what I mean.

The screws are way too obvious for my taste, though. At least it closes (with a rotation), which was not obvious at first glance:

Now, at first I wondered if the cards were electronic themselves, but this toy works pretty much in the same was as the Teletia S from PGSM: press certain keys (in this case, the four peripheral buttons) in a certain order and then press the call button, and the character answering depends on the key combination. It works without cards just the same.

The Teletia had it better in that the numbers on the card were obscured and could only be read when the card was inserted, because the screen had a filter that made the number combination visible. However, you could also try random numbers, all the sentences were pre-recorded anyway.

This is the Spanish version of the toy, so all the recordings are in Spanish. This is not as usual as it should (I’m looking at you, Disney!) and I’m glad ZAG has bothered to make this toy’s fun actually accessible to the kids.

On the other hand, they didn’t bother enough to choose recordings that made sense in a so-called ‘caller’. Every character says random sentences from random episodes. I haven’t tried very hard, but maximum I’ve gotten are two sentences per character, and they are pretty stupid - Marinette’s mom telling her to wait for the clients in the shop, or Adrien saying that he’s gonna fetch some water... I would complain more, but I am too ashamed by the fact that I could place most of the sentences so that’s that.

Now the real reason I got this myself - how good is the Compact Caller as atrezzo?

The size is very good! Well, I’m tiny for an adult, but I love its weight and shape on my hand, practically the same as the real thing.

Still not perfect, since the back is smooth with the spots just painted:

And the front has a telephone symbol on the front, which is also a very well hidden light:

(Remember to turn it off or Adrien will keep calling to tell you about water!)

So I do recommend it as a toy for any young fan, while collectors would probably like something closer to the real thing.

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Let’s now move on to this little thing I found by chance. This one is not as easy to find as the Caller, but is cheaper and, in my opinion, more interesting: the Make Up YoYo.

This is one of those silly ‘toys’ that are actually just glorified containers of cheap make up.

Again, the packaging is cute and attractive and lets you see everything you are getting, while the back proclaims that with this you will be ‘like Ladybug or Marinette’ (do kids like Marinette better than Ladybug? Why is every of this toys so focused on her?), plus lots of info on the cheap make up that your kids are gonna spread everywhere including their faces:

Here we are all the contents:

As you can see, the lids open straight, and the one opening in an angle is actually loose and just packaged that way for display purposes. You need to shove it in place yourself.

There’s a see-through lid on the make up, but everything is flimsy plastic barely held down by a tiny piece of.. sticky something. Very easy to remove, barely any force needed.

The make up went straight to the garbage, but still I have to say that it is such a generic palette. They didn’t even try to get a Marinette-inspired palette or something. Oh well.

And how does this toy pass the atrezzo test?

With flying colours! I love it!

OK, it is a tad small:

But the back is much better than the Caller’s, wit the spots being raised and looking just like those in the front:

(the sticker can be removed, no probs)

And the best part, and a very pleasant surprise: it is a working yoyo! And a pretty decent one. I surprised myself yoyoing between takes, it is just so easy.

Even before I opened these toys, I had been working on a design to include as many functions of the original on a homemade one, but I doubted that the yoyo part was feasible - now I know that it is!

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