Talkboy

~ the eulogy ~

The Talkboy started as a problem on a film set. Twentieth Century Fox needed a handheld tape recorder for Home Alone 2 that a child could hold one-handed and that could slow a voice down to a growl, and a licensing deal with Mattel had fallen through. Fox's Nancy Overfield-Delmar took the job to Tiger Electronics, and Tiger's co-founder Roger Shiffman had a prototype in about three weeks, with a handle that slid onto the hand and a microphone that telescoped out of the top.

Tiger previewed a consumer version at the February 1992 Toy Fair and sold it for that holiday season. It ran on four AA batteries and shipped without the voice changer, the one feature anybody actually wanted. A Tiger spokeswoman later said sales were poor because the toy could not do what the film had shown it doing.

The Deluxe Talkboy arrived in April 1993 at $29.99 with the variable-speed motor in it, and that is the object people remember. The Home Alone 2 videocassette came out on 27 July 1993 with a Life cereal promotion running alongside it. By December the thing was unbuyable.

Then it kept selling, quietly, for years. The Chicago Tribune still had it in a 1997 summer toy piece. Tiger was bought by Hasbro in 1998, and the trademark on the name, USPTO serial 74230645, lapsed in 1999.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rain check ~

Retailers had ordered against the first model's numbers, and the second model's demand turned out to be of a different size entirely. Tiger shipped hundreds of thousands against demand estimated at about two million units. The Seattle Times, writing on 16 December 1993, found stores sold out and Tiger fielding around three hundred consumer calls a day.

The number that holds up best is the Target rain check: more than twenty thousand requests before the chain stopped issuing them. One store is reported to have moved 288 units in half a day. Tiger pulled its television advertising after Thanksgiving. No toy company stops advertising in the first week of December unless the advertising has started working against it.

Tiger answered the hit with a product line instead of a sequel. The Talkgirl, a pink Deluxe, came in 1995; Shiffman said later that the name Talkboy may have limited who felt invited to buy the original. Then F/X+ pens in 1995, a Talkboy Jr, an F/X+ Phone and an F/X Drummer in 1997, and a Tic Talker watch in 1998. The pens are reported to have sold a million units in 45 days.

~ a shortage in one country ~

I was nine in the winter of 1993 and the Talkboy shortage was a story happening in American shops. The scarcity is the whole legend, and the scarcity was a retail event measured in rain checks at a chain that did not trade here. Films crossed over on their own. A plastic tie-in object needed a distributor, and the Deluxe went out through eleven retailers in the American market.

~ what the trademark lapse ended ~

No source gives a day or a month for the ending, and there is no announcement to find, because the trademark was simply not renewed. By 1995 Tiger had moved to solid-state digital recorders anyway, so the cassette mechanism that made the Talkboy work was already the old way of doing it inside the company's own catalog. A lapsed registration is the only dated event in the whole ending, and a year is as close as anyone can put it.

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