Cricket Dolls

Cricket Dolls

Cricket is a talking doll that was first unveiled in February 1986 at Toy Fair in New York. It was the first major offering by Playmates (Toy Company), which until that time had mostly imported toys from overseas and distributed them for the U.S. market.

Cricket was designed by Larry Jones at California R & D Center. The idea was to create a talking doll, as opposed to a teddy bear or other animal such as Worlds of Wonder's Teddy Ruxpin and Mother Goose dolls. Scripts and songs were written for the doll by Robin Frederick and Jay Tverdak. Her catchphrases, including "Are we having fun or what?" and "I'll be talkin' to ya!" were written by Larry Jones. Cricket was voiced by nine-year-old Laura Mooney.

The Cricket dolls operated in similar fashion to Teddy Ruxpin, but with two-sided tapes instead of ones with sound data on one track and movement data on the other track. The doll required four "C" batteries for the player and 1 9-volt battery for the mouth movement.

Cricket was available in an African-American version as well. The African-American Cricket doll was released with two different hair styles. One featured hair identical to the Caucasian version with two curly pigtails tied with pink yarn. The other version had short curly hair with no ribbons.

Cricket arrived in a pink sweater, yellow underpants, pleated mint green skirt, yellow socks, & pink hi-top sneakers with monogrammed laces. Her sweater came in two variations, one version was knitted, the other was made of velour. Cricket also came with her 'health plan' and two tapes, one labeled Operating & Caring for Cricket, the other was unlabeled and featured songs, jokes & stories.