Doll-A-Day 2023 #224: Teddy Ruxpin

  Today we are looking at an old favourite...not of mine. I was way too old by the time this guy came around, and even Unsentimental Niece was already more than eight years old. I was aware of him at the time though, especially since I worked at a retail store. He's Teddy Ruxpin.

  Teddy Ruxpin has been the favourite of a lot of people though, since he premiered in 1985. At the time, the technology that allowed him to move his eyes and mouth in sync with the tapes that were played in the slot in his back, and essentially 'tell' stories, was considered to be pretty amazing. 

This particular Teddy Ruxpin is a later model, made by Backpack Toys, made in 2005. Like the other Teds, his battery compartment and controls are on his back, under his shirt.

Instead of cassettes, like the original Teddy, he uses digital Rom Cartirdges.

The cartridge goes in where the yellow thing is, but I tried, and it doesn't pull out. I haven't delved into the question any further, in spite of having his original instructions.

Teddy always came with books, so kids could read along while Teddy told the story.

The Treasure Series belongs to this Teddy. The other books go to a Worlds of Wonder Teddy Ruxpin. Unfortunately, we have no cassettes for the WoW books, and I'm not sure what's in his back is a ROM cartridge. I tried to pull it out and it wouldn't budge. I have no idea if this Teddy works.

  Teddy Ruxpin was the best selling toy of 1985 and 1986. He was named the official spokesbear for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children not long after his appearance in the toy world. He had his own TV show in 1986 and '87. He spawned a friend, Grubby the caterpillar, who could be connected to the WoW Teddy with a cable and the two could have conversations. Teddy also had a 'sequel' of sorts, Worlds of Wonder's Talking Mother Goose, who, like Teddy, came with a book, was activated by a cassette, (under her wing), and had moving eyes and mouth. There were WoW clothing sets available for Teddy and Grubby.

Like this nightgown and cap set. Pretty sure only the WoW Teddys had clothes available. 

  

  Worlds of Wonder, or WoW were the makers of Teddy Ruxpin, and also Laser Tag, another popular toy of the day.  WoW then came up with Nintendo. As popular as Nintendo became, it's hard to imagine that WoW had trouble selling it. But retailers were wary of video games, after video game sales died off following oversaturation of the market around 1983. In order to get Nintendo sales off the ground, WoW did a little Columbia/Three Stooges move. (In my post on the Three Stooges I explained that, while telling the Stooges that they couldn't give them a raise because their short subjects were barely making money, their studio, Columbia, was using the Stooges shorts to sell their B-movies. If theatres wanted the very popular Stooges shorts, they had to also take Columbia's lesser quality feature films.) Retailers were told that if they wanted Teddy Ruxpin and Laser Tag, they had to also take Nintendo. It worked, and Nintendo went on to massive sales. Oddly, it was Nintendo, and the company's confidence in Teddy Ruxpin, that helped kill Worlds of Wonder. In 1987 WoW invested too much in Teddy Ruxpin production, ignoring the fact that Teddy's sales had declined, while sales of Nintendo were soaring. To make a long story short, WoW overinvested in Teddy, ended up in debt, and went out of business. Since then Teddy has been made in various forms by various companies.

  My tastes run more to T.J. Bearytales. Now he is cute. This Teddy is looking for a home. If anybody want him, since he's untested and they thing in his back may or may not be a cartridge, you can have him and his instructions and book, in it's case, for $15 and postage. Just eave me a comment with your contact information.

  See you tomorrow.

Doll-A-Day 2023 # 167: Bindi's Talking Doll Adventures Doll

   Today's doll is this little girl. Recognize her?

She is, of course, Bindi Irwin, daughter of the Crocodile Hunter himself, the late Steve Irwin.

Bindi was made as a series of three talking dolls in 2009. The series was called Bindi's Talking Doll Adventures, and featured Bindi in her Australia Zoo uniform, a surfing set, and this doll dressed in casual clothes.

She also originally came with a baby tiger, a camera, a stethoscope, a bottle to feed the tiger cub, and a  pretend field notebook.

  This doll presents Bindi wearing an 'Extinct Stinks' t-shirt, and a pair of Australia Zoo cargo pants. 

The pockets are fake, and don' really have an opening.

She also has shoes and real socks, not just the above the shoe cuffs that act as fake socks on some Barbie dolls.

It makes the shoes a little harder to get back on, but only slightly.

  The dolls were made by K&M toys in Canada, under the brand Wild Republic.

The doll isn't a terrible likeness of Bindi.

Her hair should be in two ponytails, but her elastics disintegrated.

  Bindi is 10 inches tall.

  Being a talking doll, she has a button in her belly that operates her talk mechanism.

And a speaker and battery compartment in her back.

  She says ten phrases, and some of them are pretty long. They're all about protecting or taking care of animals and the Earth. That's much better than talking about make-up and clothes all the time. The longest phrase is, "If you start now the world will become a much better place, It's easy! All you have to do is treat animals and nature just the way you liked to be treated."

 Bindi's voice is actually the one used for the dolls.

  Although she only has 5 basic points of articulation, (neck, shoulders, and hips), and bendable knees that barely bend, she makes the most of her articulation by having an expressive head that can tilt and look up and down.

  These days Bindi is a grown lady with a little girl of her own. She has had a one of a kind Barbie doll made in her likeness in 2018, for International Women's Day. As well as these talking dolls, there have also been small figures from when she was a child. Bindi still works at and for Australia Zoo, and, along with her mother Terri and her brother Bob, carries on her father's legacy of caring for animals and the planet, and encouraging others to do the same.

  That's the doll for today. See you again tomorrow for another one.

Doll-A-Day 2023 #142: Dora Dora Dora the Explorer(s)

    Today's doll is three: three versions of Dora the Explorer.

    The first is Dress Up Adventure Dora.

This doll was produced in 2003.  She's all vinyl, with jointing at the neck, shoulders, and hips. She has rooted hair, and removable clothes. There were six other outfits made for this doll too. They were sold separately. This doll came with a Backpack just her size, a dog, a hairbrush, and a book called, "My Special Adventure".

 

The hair barrettes are Dora's, but I'm not sure if they came with this doll, or one of the other outfits.

  She's 15 inches tall.

  She originally also had a bracelet.  

The next doll is Dora Knows Your Name, from 2004. 

She's supposedly rare. She's a pretty technical kid. Mattel describes her this way,  

  

"Dora Knows Your Name is a 12” cuddly plush character that incorporates your child’s name and favorite things into their friendly character phrases and songs. Plush comes with a USB cable, as well as a CD Rom for Mom to download the child’s name and favorite things into the doll. The plush also has an internal clock so that the content of what it says will change depending on the time of day (morning, noon and night). The character will sing several songs and tell stories that incorporate the personalized information downloaded into the plush."

  Sounds pretty cool. This girl doesn't have any of her stuff though, so who knows what she'd say if she had batteries in her!

  The final doll is Storybook Adventures Little Red Riding Hood Dora. 

She was made in 2005. She came with a hairbrush, but no basket of goodies for her Abuela. Gee Dora! 

  There were two other storybook Dora dolls produced, Rapunzel and Cinderella. They are 6 inches tall, vinyl dolls with removable clothing, painted on shoes and stockings, and the usual five points of articulation. 

  When Ivy was little she loved Dora. She was even Dora for Halloween one year. (This is before she specialized in being Vera Ellen for three years in a row.) Luckily I had saved Emma's old clothes to hand down to Ivy, because she had a hot pink t-shirt, a pair of orange shorts, and Ivy had a pair of yellow socks with fluted tops, and a pair of white tennis shoes. All she needed was brown hair and a Dora bracelet. The bracelet was easily obtained in a pack of birthday party favours. The wig was a little more difficult. I ended up making her a 'wig' from brown felt. It was the right shape at least, as Dora had that huge block of hair.

  Anyway, these dolls weren't Ivy's. They just ended up at our house in some Ebay stuff. They were rescued from The Room of Water, and are fine now. But they need to go away. Sorry Dora.

  That's today group of dolls. See you again tomorrow.

Doll-A-Day 2023 #129: Teen Talk Barbie

   We were pretty busy today. Ken and I went to the house, and while he shop vac-ed up a bunch of crap out of the floor of the fire room, I sorted out the back of the car. It's been having junk from the house loaded into it, and things were getting out of hand. I tidied up a lot of stuff back there, and looked for my phone, which has been lost for weeks now. I was hoping it would turn up back there, but so far, no luck. I didn't get to finish straightening and sorting the crap in the back of the car, because I got so far, and then switched to loading rescued Lego, and other bits from the fire room, out of the melted drawer units they were in, and into empty cat litter buckets. I got sunburned, but at least this time I wasn't going through the bags of room stuff and getting my arm all scratched up and black stuff up my nose, like last time.

  Then we went to get some dinner, and afterward to the storage unit, where I had to find some things. I was sad to see that some stuff had been put away wet, (and none of it was even a horse!), and had ruined. Some may be rescuable, and some has been tossed for trash already. I rescued World Doll Clark Gable as Rhett Butler just in the nick of time. He was in with the wet, musty smelling mildewed trash, but he was in a plastic bag and survived with only a musty smell. I'm hoping he'll air out and be all right.

  I was pleased about some things though. I found that all my vintage Christmas elves and decorations survived the Room of Water, and were perfectly fine. My Starship Swinetrek set wasn't as bad as I had been lead to believe...I  think. Hard to tell really, until I can take the plastic box front out. There was another thing that didn't survive as well as I had been lead to believe. We'll cover that another day. 

  Anyway, we were there until nearly dark. I finished my digging just in time to grab what I needed and Ken closed the door just before dark.

  So, since it was such a busy day, here's a quick post. I know you've been getting a lot of those lately, and I'm sorry. Hopefully I'll manage to get some done up ahead soon. But we do have a burned and soggy house to clear up, so we can go back home someday , so try to cut me some slack. As I said to Ken again tonight, this was the worst year to have committed to daily posts.

  Today's doll is Teen Talk Barbie, introduced in 1991, the same year as Emma.

This is the doll who got into so much trouble for saying "Math is tough.", and supposedly perpetuating the  idea that girls can't do math. (For the record, Math was my best subject in school...even though I hated it.)

Of course, not all the dols said the  same phrases. Each doll said four phrases, but you didn't know which phrases your doll was going to say.

The 'Math is tough." controversy caused the dolls to stop being made with that phrase. Since nobody knew which doll said that phrase until they bought it, put the batteries in, and tried it out, it made the 'Math is tough' doll, worth some money, with some people paying big dollars for one.

  The Canadian dolls had the batteries already in, and a hole in the back of the box so you could try the dolls out. They also had another difference: they spoke French! We had some of those, and sold. We bought them in Canada and sold them at doll shows here.

  The Teen Talk dolls offered a lot of variety. They came in Caucasian, with blonde, red, or brown hair, in curly or crimped styles. The African American dolls, like you see here, came with black or brown hair, in a curly or crimped style. All the Canadian ones we saw were blonde.

 This doll has black hair and a head full of luscious curls.

  The outfits were all like this one, only in various colours.

The outfit included the hat, short jacket, short top...

...a filmy skirt, stretchy leggings, a cloth purse, a pair of tennis shoes and a pair of heels.

The colour combinations were all over the place, and the patterns were loud. It was 1991, and the 80's still loomed large.

  I think I had a blonde crimped doll. Emma finally laid claim to our open Canadian example doll we put out at shows. She was blonde and crimped too, but while mine had an outfit that was primarily bright red and black, the Canadian doll was all pastel pink and green. The make-up fitted the colour scheme too, so my doll had bright red lips, and the Canadian doll had pink lips.

  That's the doll for today. She was rescued from the Room of Water, completely dry and secure in her plastic tub. She is available and no, she is not $10, as her very old sticker says! See you tomorrow.