Bonz has added something new to their existing line with their latest components: music! The Bonz Band kit comes in a bucket (which doubles as a drum of course), a lid with bells to stick in the sides to make a tambourine, two claw-shaped maracas, two head-shaped whistles, a beehive- or bug-body-shaped washboard, some drumsticks (feel free to add eyes) and a variety of hinged arms, connector balls, and eyeballs.


Put them all together and you've got whistling crabs, musical dragons, and washboard thingamaboppers. Of course, you can combine them with the other Bonz sets you have for more variation and variety and for impromptu singing dinosaurs.


The musical Bonz are a great addition to a Bonz building set. The whistles work great and aren't too high pitched (mama likes that) but are easy to blow (Z likes that). Our main complaint with the Bonz Band is that the bells are extremely difficult to remove from the tambourine so once you get them in the tambourine, it limits your ability to reuse the bells for another building project without spending a lot of time and effort to remove them first. This could easily be solved by including enough bells with the kit to both make the tamborine permanently (the slots won't work with any of the other building pieces anyway) and to have extras for say, a whistling monster with 4 eyes and a bell arm. The set comes with an underwhelming CD of tunes.

Overall, this is a fun set that will have your whole family building and tapping their toes, but it will be the biggest hit with anyone who already has some Bonz in their life. At $26, it's priced slightly under other Bonz component kits, probably because it contains fewer total parts. You can pick up most Bonz sets on Amazon.com, but you'll need to head to the Bonz website or elsewhere to snag the new music kit.