Cricket is a talking doll that was first unveiled in February 1986 at the American International Toy Fair in New York. It was the first major product sold by Playmates Toys, a Hong Kong-based company that until that time had mostly imported toys from overseas and distributed them for the U.S. market.[1]
Cricket was designed by Larry Jones at California R&D Center. Similar talking animal toys such as Worlds of Wonder's Teddy Ruxpin and Mother Goose had previously been released but Playmates' concept was to create a humanistic doll that simulated speech capability. The scripts and songs were written by Robin Frederick and Jay Tverdak. Cricket's catchphrases, including "Are we having fun or what?" and "I'll be talkin' to ya!" were written by Jones. Cricket was voiced by nine-year-old Laura Mooney.
The Cricket dolls operated in similar fashion to that of Teddy Ruxpin, but had two-sided cassette tapes with sound and movement data on separate tracks rather than on separate sides of the tape. The doll required four "C" batteries for the player and one nine-volt battery for the mouth movement. As Cricket's mouth moved, her eyes also looked around in different directions.
Cricket was available in models with black and white skin colors. The black Cricket doll was released with two different hairstyles, one with hair identical to that of the white version with two curly pigtails tied with pink yarn and the other version had short curly hair with no ribbons.
Cricket was sold wearing a pink sweater, yellow underpants, pleated mint green skirt, yellow socks and pink high-top sneakers with monogrammed laces. Her sweater came in two variations, one knitted and the other velour and has a small logo of a cricket on the right side of both sweaters. Cricket also came with her "health plan" and two tapes, one labeled "Operating & Caring for Cricket" and the other, which was unlabeled, featured songs, jokes and stories.
The Cricket line was discontinued before all of the planned products could be released. These included the book and tape set “Cricket Visits Australia” and a planned device named the “Chatterbox” which would enable Cricket and Corky to interact in much the same manner as the Grubby accessory for Teddy Ruxpin. Despite this, the products continued to be included in lists and advertised in pamphlets packaged with the doll.