After you get past all the safety latches on the elmo live encore you will be amazed at how life like they have made elmo in comparison to some of the other versions(rock n roll elmo and limbo elmo come to mind). One thing that I consider negative is that his speaking/singing/instrumental voice is loud. For a toy that doesn’t travel, and is meant to be watched, and poked it doesn’t seem an appropriate volume. I would hate for someone to scream a short story at me. Second, his body is kind of hard plastic so he is not snuggable, I would have thought that they would have fixed that from the first version, but I guess they didn’t have enough time to add some stuffing. A suggestion would be to add some clothes to him, maybe an infant coat, if you want to snuggle with him. Although his jokes aren’t funny, the fact that he has crickets chirping and then laughs at himself is definitely funny. This toy is just entertaining, and it doesn’t need to be anything else. I can’t see anyone learning anything from it, maybe if he had interactive question answer that would be more helpful, but when they create that it probably wont be worth the price they want to charge. The mechanism is quieter than the first version, or else they just raised the volume on the speaker, but either way it is less noticeable. All in all I think it is a great toy if you can get it at a discount, not worth the original price. We purchased it for forty nine ninety nine, and I can live with that.