Video drones killed the remote-control star.

Boy, Sphero’s rolling high right now, huh? Riding that wave of BB-8 mania onto everybody’s Christmas list. All it took was a tie-in with the biggest megablockbuster of the decade to finally give Sphero’s rolling app-controlled toys the mainstream acceptance we’d always thought they deserved. Good for them or whatever.

But in those quiet moments when they’re not hobnobbing with the Hollywood elite, we wonder if Sphero can hear a faint sound in the distance, a sound they can’t quite identify but that haunts them with a creeping sense of doom. It’s the sound of drones. And it’s coming for them.

Yes, just as air travel shunted aside passenger rail, and aerial bombardment marginalized combat artillery, flying drones are steadily claiming the over-$100 fancy toy category as their own.

The magic of flight is a killer app that way. The dream of soaring beyond the shackles of gravity will always touch something deep in humanity’s imagination. The twists, the dips, the grace of 360-degree ballet - and a video record of it to watch afterward. Hard to compete with that when you can barely clear a bump in the rug.

Ollie can do much more than that. But no matter how playable, how maneuverable, how fast, how fun Ollie is, he can’t fly. Those thrilling 14 MPH races and high-speed crashes, those rip-roaring ramp rides, those all-terrain rumbles and rambles: it’s enough to make Ollie our favorite rolling toy, including his brothers Sphero and BB-8. It’s just not quite enough to beat quadcopters, when you can get a quadcopter for $100.

It’s not Ollie’s fault he came along just when his whole reason for being has been eclipsed. He’s not like the failed product we sold yesterday: a bad idea, executed badly, marketed as something nobody wanted rather than the best shower speaker ever.

Ollie is awesome. Ollie can survive. He just needs to be cheaper.

Much cheaper. Like, the price-we’re-charging-today cheaper. Under fifty bucks. Half the list price. Nobody but aviophobes would ever take Greyhound if it cost the same as a plane ticket.

“The most fun you can have without leaving the ground” is a pretty strong angle. But “the most fun you can have for less than fifty bucks” is even better. If Sphero wants to keep the caviar and champagne flowing, they better recognize what’s going on over their heads. Come up with a drone of your own and/or drop the price on your non-Star Wars rolling toys.

Alternatively, Sphero could bet on another one of the most beloved movie franchises in the world making a hotly anticipated comeback featuring a robot that looks exactly like Ollie. Miracles happen. But how often does the same miracle happen twice?