Mom Approved: Imaginext® DC Super Friends™ Batcave

11/21/2013

Written By Charise Jewell, crunchcompass.com

My boys are superhero-obsessed.  SpiderMan was their first love, then SuperMan, IronMan, and now Batman.  The thing I love about Batman is that he doesn’t fly solo.  There aren’t any fights or tears about who gets to be Batman because of his sidekick: Robin.  They go together sort of exactly like a big bro and a little bro.

So when Karen offered me the chance to review this Imaginext Batcave, I knew they’d flip. I was not mistaken.  The first words out of my seven year-old’s mouth were “Holy Batman!” echoed a second later by his four year-old sidekick.  I was diaper-wrestling their sister, so told them I’d help open it when we were done.  Crickets.  I figured they’d moved on, but when I returned, they’d torn the box apart, cut the strings and ties, and were happily playing away.  Kudos to Imaginext for making the packaging super kid-friendly!

There were delighted cries of ‘Cool!’, ‘Awesome!’, and ‘Look at this!’ as my boys went to town with Batman and Robin.  They quickly discovered that locking Batman into his “swivel-pad” and turning it pops open two walkways and doors hiding his computer, another swivel-pad unlocks the door below, and the movable ladder allows Robin to slide firefighter-style.  But the excitement amped up when they discovered the shootable missiles. Crazytown. They insisted on facetiming their Dad for a demo. He was equally impressed.

The only thing that wasn’t intuitive was the Batwing swivel-pad.  We thought that turning Robin would flip the Batwing down, but when that didn’t work we figured it was broken.  We tried to MacGyver it (trust a couple of ex-engineers) but no luck.  I finally Googled it and discovered the wing should be locked upside-down and then the swivel flips it up. Eureka – our four year-old went nuts.

I thought it might be a short-lived romance but it’s been over a week and they’re still playing with it every second they can, along with the rest of the fam. And I haven’t even told them about the iPhone app yet 😉