Poo-Chi

~ the obit ~

Poo-Chi reached shops on 1 April 2000, a gray plastic dog about the size of a shoe, with colored ears and a pair of red LED grids where its eyes should have been. It could sit or stand on four jointed legs, and it could tell roughly how much light was falling on its nose. Sega Toys built it. Tiger Electronics, by then part of Hasbro, sold it everywhere except Japan and Korea, where Sega handled it directly.

The timing was not an accident. Sony had put AIBO in front of the public the year before, a robot dog with real behavior and a price of up to 250,000 yen, which is somewhere near $2,400 of the money of the time. Poo-Chi was $24.99. It did not learn anything and it did not need to, because the gap between the two products was not capability, it was whether a parent could say yes in a shop without a conversation first.

It worked immediately and it worked enormously. By the Business Wire release of 12 December 2000 the figure was more than 10 million sold worldwide in eight months. Hasbro needed exactly that: Furby had been sliding since 1998 and Star Wars merchandise was coming off its peak, and the quarter before Christmas that year the company's earnings had fallen by 80 percent.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the beeps ~

Everything Poo-Chi said came out as high beeps. The hardware could not manage a convincing bark, so it did not try, and the result was a toy that sounded like a cheap keyboard impersonating an animal. It could play six tunes if you pressed the sensor on its head, the number of presses picking the song, and the list ran from the Wedding March to Beethoven's Ninth.

The detail everyone who owned one remembers is what happened when it was happy. Poo-Chi would beep out the Ode to Joy, and if another Robo-Chi pet was within earshot, that one would start singing it too. A room with two of them in it turned into a small malfunctioning choir.

~ the shelf next door ~

Sega and Hasbro spent the next two years widening the family rather than deepening it. A bigger Super Poo-Chi arrived, and after it a robot cat and a robot bird, all built so they would notice each other and respond. Miniature versions went into McDonald's Happy Meals in February 2001, which is the clearest signal a toy has stopped being a product and become a season.

That was also the ceiling. AIBO went on getting smarter for six more years and cost what it cost. Poo-Chi went on getting cheaper and more numerous until there was nothing left to take out of it, and in 2002 Hasbro moved the money to FurReal Friends, which had fur on it and therefore had somewhere left to go.

~ the christmas one ~

The collectible is the Christmas Special Edition, red and white with snowflakes across the body, loaded with carols instead of the standard songs. It was sold in a handful of countries for two or three months, and because of that it is now the rarest thing in the line by a distance.

I was sixteen in 2000, which put me at the exact age where a robot dog is something you look at in a shop window and keep walking. Turkey got these the way it got most Western toys that year, imported in small numbers at prices that had crossed a customs desk, so the $24.99 that made Poo-Chi an impulse buy in an American aisle was not the number anyone here was looking at. Sega Toys brought the name back once, in 2011, as an accessory to a Nintendo DS game called Wappy Dog. That one did not sell ten million of anything.

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