Tickle-Me-Elmo is a big seller for Tyco Preschool, but that doesn’t mean everyone harbors love in their hearts for the little red monster from “Sesame Street.”
Like Barney the purple dinosaur before him, Elmo is a preschool character that can drive adults absolutely mad, starting with his voice. From a 2012 piece in Vanity Fair:
Elmo’s high-pitched voice is a sonic desecration. It is the sound of a grown man twisting and straining his vocal chords to imitate a three-year-old for an audience of three-year-olds, who, even at that age, should feel patronized. Elmo’s is the most piercing, grating character voice in all of children’s television—a genre defined by its piercing, grating character voices. It’s what their offspring would sound like if the Gerber Baby were to somehow mate with a Skrillex song. It is the sound of vocal polyps being formed.
The crew at the high-octane YouTube channel PowerModz have taken Elmo issues to the extreme. In the opening edition of something called “Jet This!” a 2,500-horsepower jet engine is directed at an Elmo doll lashed to a pole.
The results aren’t pretty, but it’s still pretty cool (even though host “Carefree” Kevin McLeod keeps calling Elmo “Elmer,” which is, at minimum, grossly unfair to Elmer Fudd).
The destruction of Elmo was posted in 2014, but more recently, Elmo returned in a video posted in October 2015. He is lashed to a Suzuki quad-runner — driven by a man wearing a horse mask — for a race against a Ski-Doo snowmobile with a Santa Claus strapped to the back of it.
Then, worse things happen.
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