Post by Illiop on May 11, 2012 13:29:15 GMT -5
When I was little in the late 80s, I had a tape player that I later found out was called Talk 'N' Play. It wasn't a plushie or anything, just a four-track tape player with special tapes. I had Alvin and the Chipmonks, Sessame Street, and Grover. I can't remember if I had any others. The tapes told stories and you could interact with them. There were four buttons of different colors that you could press to change what happened in the story or talk to different characters by pressing the buttons.
Mine started doing something weird that creeped me out. For some reason it got to where it would play everything backwards. I remember one car ride when someone, probably my mom, put a tape in for me and that thing played backwards the whole cotton picking trip.
I had a major phobia of backwards audio. I still do, but a lot of tape players I had could play backwards because I'm blind and they send us special 4-track tape players with audio on all four sides. One mode would play tapes the regular way. The other mode would play the tape backwards. If you had a special 4 track tape there was additional audio recorded there so they could get long books on the tape without using so many cassettes. However, if you put a regular tape in and had that mode selected, it would start talking backwards, which was and still is the creepiest sound on the face of the earth to me.
After that trip where we couldn't get Talk 'N' Play to do anything but backwards, Mom got rid of the tape player because she thought it was messed up. I found out later that the reason it played backwards was because it was on the wrong side. Apparently you couldn't play these tapes on the B side or that's what you'd get. I remember 2-XL being the same way.
Mine started doing something weird that creeped me out. For some reason it got to where it would play everything backwards. I remember one car ride when someone, probably my mom, put a tape in for me and that thing played backwards the whole cotton picking trip.
I had a major phobia of backwards audio. I still do, but a lot of tape players I had could play backwards because I'm blind and they send us special 4-track tape players with audio on all four sides. One mode would play tapes the regular way. The other mode would play the tape backwards. If you had a special 4 track tape there was additional audio recorded there so they could get long books on the tape without using so many cassettes. However, if you put a regular tape in and had that mode selected, it would start talking backwards, which was and still is the creepiest sound on the face of the earth to me.
After that trip where we couldn't get Talk 'N' Play to do anything but backwards, Mom got rid of the tape player because she thought it was messed up. I found out later that the reason it played backwards was because it was on the wrong side. Apparently you couldn't play these tapes on the B side or that's what you'd get. I remember 2-XL being the same way.
