Cover to Cover: Intellivision Spring 1986 Catalog (pp. 12-13)

Pages 12 and 13 of the Triton Products Intellivision catalog for spring 1986 bring us more Intellivision titles at clearance prices, plus some miscellaneous electronics Triton apparently got a good deal on.

Page 12 has absolutely nothing to do with the Intellivision, but I'll include it here for completeness' sake:

I like the degree of detail the description goes into about Sing-Sing The Original Talking Panda's measly five voice-recognition questions and answers -- the fact that this stuffed toy possesses "random access memory" gets a lot of play here (and that's probably inaccurate, as the questions and answers would most likely have been stored in Read-Only Memory.)  And Sing-Sing can tell any story or sing any song -- as long as you supply the audio cassette containing the material.  I'm sure The Original Talking Panda was educational, in that even pre-verbal infants would have been motivated to learn how to say "Stop!" and turn him off.

The Emerson Portable Audio/Video Entertainment Center would have been more generally useful, though it's not clear whether it has an antenna terminal for connecting the Intellivision's UHF switch, so it's a little out of place here too.

Page 13 brings back an old friend at incredibly low prices:

The Intellivoice was not really a speech synthesizer in the traditional phoneme-based sense -- it was an audio chip capable of playing back compressed audio samples contained in Intellivision game cartridges.  Some members of the Firesign Theatre comedy troupe were reportedly engaged to provide the character voices, which may explain why the system's phrasing of "Beeeee-SEV-en-TEEEEN BOOOOOOOOOOMBer!" is so chock-full of cornpone pleasure.  You could pick up the Intellivoice module and all four of the published games for $39.95, and there must have been a lot of these in the warehouse because the individual games were priced at $6.95.

Almost through this one... just a few more pages to go, next weekend.