Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio.
And how the tech are you?
So later this month, I'm going to be celebrating a birthday. Well I say I'm celebrating, but really I'll just be taking a few days off to go to a quiet cabin in the North Georgia Mountains and not do anything. Anyway, it got me to thinking about stuff I used to want back when I was a kid, you know, the kind of things that I was hoping for for birthdays and holidays. And back in those days, well, a lot of the stuff the kids wanted didn't exactly fall into
the category of tech. I mean, you had your Cabbage Patch kids, they were created not too far from where I grew up. Actually, you had your Gi Joe figures. Barbie was of course a big deal. And later on we get to slightly more techy stuff like the Transformers. By the way, I always felt that those toys were
incredibly creative. You know, you had designers who had to start with a mundane form factor like a truck, and then figure out how would they design joints and hinges and stuff so that a kid could turn that truck into a robot. Also quick rant before I finally get to the point of this episode. I don't care for the Michael Bay Transformer films at all for lots of reasons, but one of the big ones is that during the
transformation scenes, nothing makes visual sense on screen. It all just becomes like CGI angles flashing in front of your face until a car is suddenly a robot or vice versa. But you know, the toys had to move in specific ways for the transformations to work. It had to make sense because the designers were working in the real world, and I thought there was kind of a cop out to just have this flashy CGI come up on screen with no apparent logic showing how a robot went from
one form to another. I know those toy designers were really creative, all right. Ran over anyway. When I was ten years old the holiday season when I was ten, a toy came out that if I had been just a couple of years younger, I probably really would.
Have wanted one.
I thought it was cool, but I was a bit too old for the toy, and it was a toy that harkened back the animatronics at Disney theme parks, and that was already a big Disney World fanatic at this point.
And it looked like a Teddy Bear.
But this one could talk, and it could sing, and the mouth would move when it talked and sung, and it could also blink at Its name was Teddy Ruxbin. Now I would later learn that one this was not actually a Teddy Bear. I mean, it was, let's all be real. But in the lore of Teddy Ruxban, Teddy is not a bear at all. He's an illyop. And you might say, well, what's an illiop? Well, apparently it's a critter that looks a lot like Teddy Bear. Didn't start off that way, but that's what they are now,
and it sounds a bit silly to me. But then the creator of Teddy Ruxman built a sort of mythology around the character and the world that this character, you know, lived in, and I think it's pretty admirable. Actually, it's really impressive how extensive that mythology goes.
Two.
I learned that this creator, a guy named Ken Force, had previously worked as an imagineer at Disneyland. He in fact, worked on one of my favorite rides of all time, Disney's Haunted Mansion. To immortalize him. There's a word scramble of his name that appears on a tombstone in the
cemetery scene in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion ride. So if you have eagle eyes and you spotted tombstone that reads NA key sorf any k e E s O r F, that's actually supposed to be an anagram of Ken Force, even though the word scramble gave him one too many ease and left out one of the s's. So today I thought I would talk about Force, his work as an imagineer and beyond and the creation of Teddy Ruxbin, which really was an iconic toy in the mid nineteen eighties.
This is a crazy story like it spans multiple decades, all the pieces that would ultimately come together in the form of Teddy Ruxsman. But before I dive into it, I need to call out an incredibly thorough docu series that is available on YouTube, and by thorough, that's putting it mildly. It's by Billy Tuma and it's a nine part video series on the life and work of kin FORC and the shortest episode in this nine part series is forty five minutes long. The longest one is an
hour and twenty two minutes long. So I think you could call this work an exhaustive treatment of Force's life and work. The docu series is called Ken Forc. That's f O r s SE Come dream with me tonight. So if you want to learn more about Forc after this episode, I highly recommend you check out this docu series. Like I said, it is thorough. Also, it is very clearly made by people who deeply, deeply love the lore of Teddy Ruxsbin, as in like the fictional story that Teddy ruxspin inhabits.
Tuma clearly put.
A ton of work into the series. He deserves more views. I mean a lot of these episodes have right around one thousand views, and y'all, I mean this is like professional grade level work. It deserves to be seen by a wider audience. I get that, like the Teddy Ruxsbin community is relatively niche, but it's a fascinating work on its own, just detailing how this per person became who
he was. Because unfortunately, Ken Forcy passed away back in twenty fourteen, But how he became the man he was, and how he ended up bringing Teddy Ruxman to life. So Ken Forcy was a creative kid. He grew up in California. He wanted to pursue a career in art. He graduated high school and rather than going on to college, he sought employment. He was a very practical kid. He landed a gig working in the mail room for this little company called Walt Disney Animation Studios. The company was
already incredibly famous at this point. It had already put out numerous feature length animated films by the time that Ken joined, and of course he was in the mail room, so not really on the animation side of things. However, in a stroke of fortune for Ken, at least, the animation studios were in a bit of a jam. Production was running over schedule on the film Sleeping Beauty, and the company needed to bring on more artists to help
speed things up. So Force interviewed and he took an animation test to prove that he had the artistic chops to work for the most famous animation studio in the world, and he passed, so he was hired on That's pretty darn impressive because you know, Force was not a professional artist. He was fresh out of high school. He's just a very gifted student and a gifted artist, and so he was put to work and his job was to serve
as an in between her. So these are animators who are in charge of drawing the frames of animation that fall between the start and the end of like a short animated sequence. So you'll have a primary artist who's really designed, you know, in charge of the look and the feel of a specific character often and they will draw the character in two different poses or situations, one being at the start of the sequence, of one being
at the end. So let's say that you want to animate a sequence in which a character sees that a glass is about to fall off a table, and so they dive to catch the glass before it can hit the ground, and they safely catch it in their hands
and they land flat on the floor, and that's your sequence. Well, the animator who's in charge of the character will probably just draw one frame of the character seeing that the glass is about to fall, and then draw the final frame of the character on the ground safely holding the glass, and it's down to the end between ers to draw all the frames that come in between those two so that you have an actual animated sequence. And that's what Force worked as he worked as an in between her
on Sleeping Beauty. Most in between ers produced between thirty to fifty drawings per day. Thirty was kind of what you're shooting for. Now, keep in mind that film plays back at twenty four frames per second, so if you're doing one animated frame at a time and you're doing the twenty four frames per second, then you're really talking about per using maybe one to two seconds of animation each day. So it was a very huge amount of work.
And remember that's for one character in a sequence. That's not for everything else there, And it was just one step that was needed in the process of creating an animated film. But Ken reportedly really enjoyed working for Disney. I mean, you know, he was interested in art. He was working for the most famous animation company in the world.
Clearly he was in the right spot at the right time. However, once Sleeping Beauty was in the can, having gone well over budget and over time, Disney no longer really needed this inflated workforce of artists. They had more people than were required to do the rest of the work they had, so Ken and several other in betweeners found themselves out of a job. He would then study under the mentorship
of a special effects technician named Ellis Berman. So if you're a fan of classic Universal monster movies, kind of like the second wave of classic Universal Monster movies, you've probably seen some stuff that Berman worked on. So he's like a practical effects technician. So now Ken Forest was moving from creating two dimensional drawings for animation to working with three dimensional materials and to create things like costumes and props, and Forest learned lots of different skills in
this process. He learned about sculpting, and he learned about carpentry, and he learned about how to work with electrical circuits, and he worked with a lot of materials he had never worked with before, like plaster and rubber and fur and even makeup. So his skill set expanded, but he was having trouble finding like steady work. There were a few promising projects, including a possible film adaptation of Lord
of the Rings, which involved Forrest j Ackerman. People who are deep in the fandom culture know who Ackerman is or was, but yeah, he was possibly going to work on this Lord of the Rings project. In fact, he had been tapped to sculpt some models that would be part of the pitch to Tolkien. But while Tolkien was impressed with the effects work the models and stuff, he hated the story treatment that was generated for the Lord of the Rings film, so he nixed it. It didn't
go anywhere. So in nineteen fifty nine, Ken enlisted in the US Army, and he was in his early twenties at this point, so still a very young man, and he served until nineteen sixty two and then received an honorable discharge.
Reportedly, he was.
Very much not in favor of guns. It's kind of interesting that he went into the army voluntarily this way, but yeah, he won an award for marksmanship, but he did not like guns. He was mostly active in doing things like working on entertainment and stuff for troops, so he was still kind of pursuing his artistic interests wherever
he could within the army. After his service, Forcy would join a company called Universal Products and lead a product line called Artistry in Dimension and Forese was using his expertise and creating three dimensional objects out of stuff like fiberglass to make historic replicas, so you know, like stuff's
like suits of armor, that kind of thing. So let's say that your new money and you want your stately home to have some stuff that looks like antiques, but you don't want to have to go through the trouble of actually securing real antiques. You would go to a company like Universal Products. I'm sure you've been to stores where you've looked around you're like, oh, this looks like an antique globe, or this looks like an antique shield that you would hang on the wall, and in fact
it's made out of something else entirely. Well, that's the kind of thing for C was making. So it would be stuff for things like set dressing, but also you know, just consumer products. However, Forc was restless and he wasn't super happy with just working in the Universal Products company. So when he saw a job opening that was again at the Walt Disney Company, he jumped at it. Now this time it would not be in the animation department. Instead it was in WED Enterprises or WED Enterprises. In
this case, WED is not your typical acronym. It's actually Walt Disney's initials Walt Elias Disney. And this would be the imagineering department. This was the group of people who would be in charge of creating the materials and the props and the characters that would be seen in attractions at Disneysney parks, because those were just really becoming a thing.
Like Disneyland had opened in nineteen fifty five, so it had been open a few years earlier, but now Walt Disney was really exploring the possibility of creating animated like shows that would exist in the real world, this idea of bringing the audience into animation and having animation all around the audience. So Force landed a job there and he got to work on attraction that would be a real game changer for Disney, which we'll talk about as we come back from this quick break.
Okay, we're back.
So Ken Force gets a job at WD Enterprises and he's working as an imagineer, and his first gig is to work on the Enchanted Peaky Room. If you've never been to Disneyland or disney World or any place where they have the Channan Tiki Rum, I don't know if it's in the other parks, but I know it's in those two. Well, that it's a sit down theatrical experience where these various tropical birds sing songs and tell jokes
to you. And it's an audio animatronic show, and one of the more famous ones because it was the first big one, and I've done episodes on audio animatronics in the past. So the story goes that Walt Disney was on a holiday trip with his wife and they encountered a shop that had a little clockwork bird in it, and it sparked Disney's imagination and he wanted to create
an attraction. Originally, he wanted it to be a restaurant that would have mechanical creatures in it, specifically mechanical tropical birds, and they would follow a programmed routine and it would bring together elements of puppetry, storytelling, animation, clockwork mechanisms, and ultimately pneumatic systems. Over time, it would morph from a restaurant concept to a sit down theatrical tra Now, the early system for the Tiki Room was both ingenious and
by today's standards, very primitive. So to match the movement of birds beaks with the soundtrack, like how do you get it so that the birds appear to actually be singing the words and They're not just opening and closing their beaks randomly and you just hope that it lines
up with the music. Well, the imagineers created a system in which audio they had the audio of the show stored on magnetic tape, would then also cause these metal reeds to vibrate, and these vibrating metal reads would close a circuit that would control a pneumatic valve and that would allow air to pass through tubes going to the various birds in this attraction, and when they did, that would power the mechanical system inside the bird, so that
would open its beak and when the valve would shut off, the air would ventil the beak would close, it would go back to its resting position, which was closed. So by opening and closing this valve, you could cause the bird to open and close its beak, and those opening enclosings were in time with this metallic read vibrating, and that again was driven by the audio on the magnetic tape. As for what Foresty was doing, well that's not entirely clear. He wasn't an engineer, He wasn't one of the ones
designing the actual engineering system. Most likely he was working in the model shop. He was helping, you know, get the birds show ready, you know, doing things like installing feathers and that kind of stuff, painting that that sort of thing. He wasn't a lead on the project, right, He had just come in and started and was working at a lower level, but he was part of a larger team.
While Foresty was.
Working with Wed, he also had the opportunity to develop a puppet show outside of Disney, and it was intended to be a children's show, one that matched fantastical elements with tales of empathy and compassion.
So he's thinking about this idea. This is independent.
This was not unusual at Disney at the time. There were a lot of people who were considering themselves more like independent contractors rather than Disney employees. It would be a little bit before Disney would change into a company where you know, you were a Disney employee and you weren't just like work for hire who would then find themselves out of work once the project was over. So a lot of people at the time would pursue other work in addition to the work they did for Disney,
and Force was no different. So he came up with this idea and he started to create this kind of fantasy world that he wanted to bring to life. And you know, maybe he took some inspiration from works like Tolkien's Middle Earth series, but he was really wanting to gear this toward children and to give a message of compassion and empathy for kids. So he really saw it as a way of sending positive messages and sending messages of things like friendship and support and love and that
sort of thing. And the main character in his mythology was a little critter whose name was Simeon Greep, and he would feature a lot of the personality that you would later spot in Teddy Ruxsman. He was a very sweet, compassionate character who saw the good in people, even if they couldn't see it in themselves. There was another character, a supporting character, a mushroom like figure nicknamed Fearful, but his actual name was Dun Dun Dun Teddy Ruxsmin. See
Teddy Ruxsman wasn't originally a Teddy Bear at all. He was a timid, little fantasy critter that kind of looked like a mushroom. Totally makes sense, right, So anyway, the Adventures of Simeon Greep was this ambitious, this idea that Ken Forcy had, and it was one that was going to require a lot of money to actually get it to production. Like he wanted to make this fully realized
puppet show with really cool environments. He didn't want it to look like a little puppet theater that a lot of the other puppet shows at the time were using. He wanted the world of the television program to be the puppet theater. The TV itself would serve as the borders of this mystical world. So Fores would take on various projects in addition to his full time gig at Web Enterprises, and continue to develop this idea, all with
the goal of eventually producing this puppet show. He was doing some of the work a little bit reluctantly because while he was creative and an inventor, he didn't consider himself a writer. So originally he had these ideas, but he wanted to hire someone else to actually write the stories. Like he wanted to be able to kind of, you know, work a story, but have a writer actually put that into shape, you know, to frame it properly into actual words.
The problem was he couldn't find anyone to do that, so it was down to him, so he kind of became the chronicler of this world of his own creation. Meanwhile, back at Disney, Force was put onto projects like the It's a Small World ride, which was originally constructed for the nineteen sixty four World's Fair, So he assisted in painting and probably some sculpting some stuff like that, but again he wasn't a lead designer. He was part of
the team. He also actually traveled with the ride to New York in order to help the ride stay operating because originally it was a little finicky, so he was there to help fix when things broke down. He also was in charge of cleaning and repainting figures at the end of the day to make sure that it was ready for the next day. He'd this for a while until it was show ready, really and then left to go back home. He also reportedly got very very sick of the theme song It's a Small World after All,
which you know, same Force. He kept working on his Simian Greek project, even built out a set piece in order to show potential investors the work that he was envisioning. He had this villain called Twig, and the villain lived in a tower, so he ended up out of pocket, essentially paying to create this really large puppet set. It had to be big enough for puppeteers to move around in freely while still controlling the puppet of the villain, and the construction process did not go quite as planned.
For one thing, there was a bit of a fire that caused some costly damages, and it meant that Force ultimately kind of ran out of money to work on the like. He spent about as much as he was willing to spend and hit his limit, and so the whole project was figuratively put on the back burner after having been literally burned earlier. Force took a larger part in working on the Haunted Mansion attraction for Disneyland. That attraction has its own fascinating history. We've talked a little
bit about it on this show in the past. I talked about Pepper's Ghost, things like that. It's an attraction that changed many times over the course of its development. Originally was supposed to be a walkthrough attraction. Force worked on sets and characters and designs and effects, so he was more involved in this one than he had been in the previous ones, and he earned a spot in the cemetery scene, along with eight other designers who also
worked on the ride. So if you see those weird tombstones with odd names, those are anagrams or references to nine of the designers who worked on the original ride. After that, Fores went on to work for an attraction
for a Florida project with Disney. This is what would become Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and the project he worked on was the Country Bear Jamboree, an attraction that was so popular that the Disney Company later decided to build a version of it in it's California park too, so that one actually originated at disney World and then
was also built in Disneyland. Now, by this time, Walt Disney, the man he had passed away, and many people at the Walt Disney Company felt that things were changing and not necessarily for the better. That new management at the company was working in a totally different way from how Walt did things, and Forese would not be the only person to make this decision, but he decided that he was ready to leave and pursue other opportunities, So he
resigned from the Walt Disney Company and sought out other work. Now. One of the opportunities he would pursue was Force's own creation, the Siemion Greep project. So Forcy brainstormed ideas for nearly forty episodes, something like thirty eight or thirty nine episodes of this puppet show. This puppet show still didn't have any investors, it didn't have a home, it didn't even
have puppets. Really, he had a whole world built out conceptually with Simeon Greep as the protagonist, who had an insect like Buddy named Grubby, and then you had the villain in the form of Twig, and then Forcey's ideas would see these characters explore a fantasy world that when in some ways, like I said, mirror the complexity of Tolkien's Middle Earth, but maintained that childlike sensibility. So Middle
Earth is not really meant for little kids. This work that Forcy was thinking of would be, and to call it an ambitious undertaking is a huge understatement. But another opportunity that he would pursue that would actually earn him some money was with the creators Sid and Marty Groft Brothers, who made some truly bonkers entertainment, mostly for kids over the nineteen seventies, really in the late sixties and into
the seventies. So I'm talking about stuff like hr puff and Stuff, and that's actually a little bit before my time. I did not grow up with hr puffin stuff, And after watching clips of it, I guess I should be glad because I'm I don't know, maybe I wouldn't be terrified. It's hard to think about how I would feel from a modern lens, but it is so weird, Like it's amazing to me that they were able to get that, you know, on the air, and it's not bad, it's
just weird. And you know, if you were to pitch an idea like hr r puff and Stuff or hr puff and Stuff today to anyone, it would be a really tough sell, unless you were pitching it as like some sort of late night stoner comedy for adult swim or something.
Anyway.
Other stuff that sit In Marty Kroft produced includes Land of the Lost, which I absolutely loved when I.
Was a kid.
I watched the heck out of that show. Also Electra Woman and Dinah Girl, which got a cheeky reboot as kind of a web series many years later. Back in twenty sixteen, I think maybe twenty fourteen, somewhere around there. I remember that had Grace Helbig and Hannah Hart, two people known for their work on YouTube playing the main characters. And Force worked on at least three different sit in
Marty Croft series. So he worked on Land of the Lost, he worked on a show called Far Out Space Nuts, and he worked on The Lost Saucer, which is another like science fiction e show.
The Craft method was about as different from.
WD as you could get. You know, it was no Disney. The teams that fores had access to. They had very limited resources, So FORC and his team had to work with whatever they had at hand in order to make the stuff they needed to make, and they typically had very very short deadlines.
However, those kind.
Of challenges really gave FORC and others on his team the inspiration to create effective solutions while meeting deadlines. Like I often think that when you have a wide open sandbox where anything is possible, it can actually be harder to create stuff in that environment. Sometimes then it would be if you had lots of restrictions, because then you're thinking, well, how can I work within these restrictions to do whatever I need to do? And you can get some really
creative solutions. That's kind of what happened with Sid and Marti Kraft. It's not always the case, but that's typically how I find it. If the world is my oyster, it's much harder for me to really narrow down on getting stuff done. But if I've got some restrictions in place, it suddenly becomes easier to ide eight, at least for me, and I suspect FORC found the same thing to be true. Now, in the mid nineteen seventies, the Crofts got the chance to make their own theme park and indoor theme park
based in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. So when we come back, we're gonna talk about this theme park that would make a very brief splash and then fade away and how FORC was part of it. But first let's take another quick.
Break, all right.
So we're in Atlanta, Georgia. It's the mid nineteen seventies. Things are groovy. I'm a bibe and at the Omni Center, they said in Martykroft got the opportunity to make an indoor theme park. So today the Omni is home to the news network CNN. That's where CNN's headquarters are it's at the Omni. But in the nineteen seventies it was the home, very briefly, of a very weird theme park.
Now I'm not quite old enough to remember this park, because it didn't last long enough for me to really go as any sort of kid capable of forming memories. I do remember that the way to the theme park was an eight story tall freestanding escalator. I mean, this escalator is beyond huge. You take a look at and you're like, there's no reason anything needs to be that big.
But I would go to the Omni as a kid, you know, because science fiction conventions were held in the Omni, and my dad, being a science fiction author, would often attend.
And I would always.
Wonder, where does that escalator even go to? Well, back in the day, it went to the top level of a five story indoor theme park, and then you would work your way down, floor by floor through the park. Anyway, The park actually just opened and closed in nineteen seventy six. Within five months it was open and then closed. It was a spectacular failure. Now this wasn't because the attractions
weren't imaginative or creative. They were and four c was a big part of that, having brought his expertise from Web Enterprises to work on rides and sets and characters for the new theme park. But it was poorly attended and it was very expensive to run, and the money ran out, and the Crofts tried to get the creditors to hold off on demanding their money back so that they could get a good footing, because they believed that if they could get through the winter and into you
nineteen seventy seven, that they could turn the around. But they weren't given that chance, and so the whole park had to be shut down. Force received word from a former colleague from way back in the Universal Products days about a company that was producing a technology called micro phonographs. So this company was called Microsonics originally, and the technology was this small device.
It was like a small enough.
To be handheld. It looks like a little cassette player almost, but instead of blaining cassettes, it actually played micro phonograph discs. These discs were mounted on plastic plates and they would actually be stationary inside the device. You would put the plate inside the device and the stylus would be the part that would move, so instead of the disc rotating and the stylust just travels down the groove. The stylus would rotate and go down the groove that way, and
the disc would stay, you know, stationary. It's kind of crazy, but this whole technology spawned and another company called micro Sound, and this is one that can foresee, was interested in. So Microsound marketed this technology as a way to bring sound to storybooks, among other things. So you would buy a book and it would come with one of these sound plates, and you would have this device.
You would put the.
Soundplate in the device and it would play little bits that would you know, be incorporated into the book. Maybe you would have a section of the book where you were told to push play and it would play some audio that was you know, related to the book, or maybe it would actually read out part of the story. The disc plates could only hold about a minute's worth of sound each, but this would be fine for a
children's book. You might have a few to cover the entirety of the book, but you know, the kids could actually read along as they listened to the audio in this little separate device. And four c's buddy thought that the Simon Greep project might work well as a series of books. He wasn't able to get it done as a puppet show, but maybe he could make children's books and incorporate this micro sound technology. Well, by this stage,
Foresty had decided to do some name swapping. He decided Simeon Greek was not a good name for his protagonist, and so he ended up taking the name of a different character, that mushroom like character whose real name was Teddy Ruxspin, but he was called Fearful. Well, forest was like, teddy Ruxpin's a better name. I'm going to make that the name of my protagonist, and so Simeon Greep became
teddy Ruxspin. He still wasn't a teddy Bear. He was a little furry critter, but he didn't look particularly like a teddy bear. So the character design remained pretty much the same. It's just the name had changed. But there
were some business sheananigans going on in the background. Had nothing to do with forc Foresy was a stand up guy, but the business sheenanigans meant that an another company that was using the exact same micro phonograph technology was able to land a lucrative deal with Fisher Price and Microsound, a competing company really had nowhere to go, so that didn't end up going anywhere. However, in the process, Fores learned a lot about the publishing world and children's books,
which would come in handy later on. That's foreshadowing forc next joined up with a couple of creatives to form a company called Brown Squirrel Productions, which set out to try and get funding to produce several different projects, among them Force's long imagined puppet series, The Adventures Now of
Teddy Ruxman. They worked up some more designs, they were fined some characters, They even built out some of the stuff they would need to produce the show and pitch it to the networks, but again they came up driver for funding. They went to Quaker Roads and tried to get some money from them. Quaker Roats had previously bankrolled
the film Willy Wonkan, the chocolate factory. Quaker Roads was not interested, and so they didn't really have anyone who was willing to fund production so that they could shoot a pilot. So they decided to do it themselves. Would y'all, just so you know, don't do that. It almost never works out anyway. They get together in nineteen seventy nine to shoot the pilot for the Adventures of Teddy Ruckspin. The puppets they made were really sophisticated. They were operated
by controls mounted on bars far beneath the puppets. So like the bars fed cables down through them, and by pulling on cables you could manipulate parts of the puppet. So it's like a marionette, but in reverse right. A marionette is suspended by strings and by pulling the strings
you can make the puppet move. In this case, the puppet is mounted on essentially a pole, and various cables are fed down through the pole, and the cables attached to different features in the puppet, So pulling on the cables you can do things like make the puppet blink or make its mouth move. That's sort of stuff. But like so many other attempts with this particular story the
Adventures of Teddy Ruxman, their efforts were in vain. They produced a pilot and they showed it around, They sent it to the networks, they sent it to brand new cable companies like HBO and No One Bit and because they had self funded the project and even had to lean on you establishing credit to pay for some of it. They were left footing the bill and so their partnership ultimately dissolved and for C packed up his puppets. They then went on to work in effects and production as
sort of a freelancer. He contributed his talents to some big budget Las Vegas shows, including one that had a forty foot long model of the Titanic that would sync on command. He also did more work with sitt In marty Croft. He worked on a project called Pizza Productions. It was meant to be a way for pizza companies that wanted to compete with like Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza to go and get animatronic figures that could entertain in their restaurants.
So this was a.
Big thing in the eighties and the early to mid eighties were these pizza places that had these animatronic shows in them.
Showed His Pizza and Chuck E.
Cheese were the two that were best down and of course Chuck E Cheese is still a thing, but yeah, Sidy Marty Kroft tried to compete with Pizza Productions, looking more to be like, you know, we'll create the product, you just pay us and we'll install it in your place. It didn't really work out, though, by the time that you know, they were really ready to push it, that trend was already kind of on the decline, and so
he for he did work on animatronics. He helped design characters for the pizza production stuff, but it just didn't go anywhere. But around the time he was working on this, he was starting to think about making animatronics portable. At this stage, all animatronic figures were bolted to stages and stuff. You couldn't move them around, So he was thinking, what if you could incorporate animatronics into something that could freely move about his space. Now, initially he was not intending
this to be a toy. Instead, fos was thinking about fully costumed characters at places like theme parks. Like if you go to disney World or Disneyland and you see like Tigger, you know, Tiggers covered in head to toe, right, it's it's a costume that it fully envelops the performer inside. And they these performers are very expressive, but they are limited by the costumes.
Right.
The costumes can't do everything that someone could do if they were just appearing as a face character. You know, they can't speak. Some of them could do things like open and close their eyes and open and close their mouths, but they couldn't actually talk. So forest He started to think about an approach that would allow performers to use pre programmed sequences built into a system that could be housed inside a costume that would let them do all
sorts of performances. So the performer would still be inside the costume and still move the body, but a program would control mechanisms in the head and maybe also include a speaker built into the costume to project audio and create a more robust performance that could go anywhere and
not just be secured to a stage. So ken Foresty met another engineer named William Munn who was developing robots for film and TV productions, and together they started to work on this kind of idea, you know, simplifying animatronics a little, because one, you're going to have a human being in this costume, and two, by simplifying you keep complexity and cost down at a manageable level. So then
ken Foresty creates a company called Alchemy two. Meanwhile, his old employer two times over, the Walt Disney Company, is getting ready to launch the Disney Channel, which is going to have various programming on it sixteen hours a day. So fores petitions to be the builder of costumes for a live action Winnie the Pooh series, and he says he'll make sophisticated animatronic costumes that will have more expression in them than just a static costume that you might
see in the parks. So he offers to create a Winnie the Pooh costume to kind of show his technology to the Disney Channel, and the Disney Channel at that point was pretty skeptical that he would be able to pull this off, especially since at the time he was a one man operation. And then he says, if you like it, you can agree to pay me for it and to hire me on to create all the other characters.
So they move forward and then force hires on several people, some of whom he had worked with in the past is Imagineers, and they developed the prototype for the Winnie the Pooh costume. The Disney Channel executives love it. They see it, They're like, wow, this really is what we need.
And so Alchemy too lands a contract and gets to work in Earnest on the various characters from the Winnie the Pooh live action series, so you know, Typically these character heads had something like a bicycle helmet to serve as the foundation, and then mounted to this helmet would be this sort of aluminum frame, and the aluminum frame would hold the various servos and other components needed to
move different facial features. At Forest also used instructions stored on magnetic tape and sent wirelessly to micro controllers in the helmets, which would allow the operations to be in sync with audio. So the audio would be saved on several tracks of magnetic tape. The instructions to the helmets would be saved on a separate track in sync with the audio. So this meant all that puppeteering for the
mouths would be automatic. The character heads were kind of a more sophisticated version of the old audio animatronic idea that powered the Tiki Room decades earlier. There were no pneumatics or anything like that, but again, it was marrying audio with the operating instructions. It's just that Fource's version was a little more complicated than making a metal read vibrate to complete a circuit. The performers also had additional
controls for the head. Typically they would have a series of switches mounted on gloves.
You know.
The hands for these characters were these big mitten like things, so the performers could use their hands inside these mittens to operate little switches that were mounted on the palms of their hands on gloves inside the character, and pushing a switch would create a specific movement like maybe blinking an eye or moving ears or something along those lines. So they would just have to remember which switches controlled
specific motions and make that part of their performance. So some of the puppeteering was done by the performers themselves, some of the puppeteering was done through this pre programmed audio track. Four c's Alchemy two started to do some pretty decent business. They built animatronics for family destinations including like restaurants and mall installations and more.
Because again this was a bit of a trend at this.
Point in the in the eighties, like everyone was interested in getting these animatronics, some of which were more impressive than others, some of which were terrifying and and kind of the subject of of a wonderful YouTube video. So I would say that five Nights of Freddy's wouldn't even be a series without this era of creativity. Let's say
that's the kind way of putting it. Forest's team also worked on effects that were in a couple of movies, and Forese got to mentor his coworkers and found great joy in finding people and encouraging them and growing their talents. Everyone in the docuseries who talks about Ken Foresy makes it very clear that they loved him and his style of leadership. They said he was very modest and quiet, but very encouraging, and that he believed in his colleagues and that, you know, it was just a it feels
like it was just a really wholesome work environment. That's the best word I can use for it. He also kept coming up with ideas for various products, not just animatronics, and that included toys. So he kept a sketchbook where he would come up with an idea and he would sketch it out, and then often his team would take ideas from that sketchbook and try to figure out a way to actually make them into a real thing, like
a prototype. One idea was based off the technology Alchemy Too developed for those free roaming animatronic costumes, so Force wanted to create a toy that would essentially miniaturize the technology that was used for those costumes down to a plush animal form factor. This would give the toy the ability to move its facial features, and when paired with a cassette tape that would have both audio and operational commands recorded to it, it could give this plush animal
the ability to apparently speak and sing. The mouth would move in conjunction with the words. It would be like you would have your own personal animatronic figure. And so the very very long journey of the ideation of Teddy Rexman to the actual creation of the toy started to come together into something that kids of the eighties would recognize. But we're not there yet, because this story really is full of twists and turns. So we're gonna take one
more quick break. When we come back, we're gonna talk a little bit more about what went into the creation of Teddy Ruxxban the toy, and that character's impact on the nineteen eighties. But first, let's take this break to think our sponsors. All right, So, ken Voresy is looking at the possibility of creating a plush animal character that is able to use this sort of animatronic approach and to use cassette tapes to have the instructions on how to to you know, move the mouth at the right moment.
Like that's the genesis of the idea. Now, initially he was thinking about creating licensed characters, like, not not licensed characters from him, but to license characters from other companies and to secure retail deals with big outlets like Sears
at the time. So the idea was that, all right, I'm going to try and license, say, Winnie the Pooh from the Walt Disney Company, and I'm going to try and secure a deal with Sears to agree to a certain number of units, and that will give me the money to pay the licensing fee, to develop the technology and to create the product that ultimately will then be sold in Seers. Everyone will be happy and we'll all
become millionaires. So as initial write up of this idea mentions Walt Disney by name, like the Disney Company by name, and that the Winnie the Pooh property would be ideal for this because you could create a whole series of books, read along books for little kids, and Winnie the Pooh could read stories to the little kids. You have the cassette tapes, got the story on it. Whennie the Pooh reads it, the kid can follow along with the book.
Amazing idea, except Disney wasn't interested. The whole toy was going to need to be battery powered. Obviously you couldn't have like big cables going to it or anything. You aren't going to have industrial batteries at your disposal. So a lot of money was going to be needed to actually fund the development of this. The idea was sound, but to actually produce it was going to take some cash. And since Disney was like, no, I'm not interested, it
really meant there was nowhere to go from there. So then for Si and his team try to figure out ways to, you know, perhaps go a different route, because if Disney wasn't going to be interested, they had to
find somewhere else to get the money. They In the meantime, they were still working on this technology, ways to make it as lightweight as possible, because obviously you don't want your plush toy towaigh twenty pounds, and if it's going to have a tape deck in it, that's going to add a lot to the weight.
Just from that.
So you wanted to have lightweight materials.
You also didn't.
Want to have mechanical systems that would, you know, be dangerous. He didn't want a kid to stick their finger in Winnie the Pooh's mouth and Winnie the Pooh ends up mauling the kid and chewing the finger off.
That would be a bad thing.
Technically, Disney would probably frown on that. So their team was still working on the technology over at Alchemy too. But as I said, the Disney deal didn't move forward force. He decided to go with a Teddy Bear form factor at that point. He still did not move to Teddy Ruxsman yet. Teddy Ruxsman was a separate idea. It did not cross over here. But he was thinking about a Teddy Bear form factor because the teddy Bear is obviously a familiar and belo loved staple in children's toys. Right,
everyone knows what a teddy Bear is. And so Alchemy two ended up buying a Teddy Bear, gutting it, replacing it with mechanical parts, like the insides with mechanical parts, and they called this monstrosity Joey Bear. This was just sort of a work of proof of concept kind of thing. So Joey Bear would have the mechanics and the tape deck built into it, so you have a tape deck as part of the toys.
In it's back.
You'd place a tape in push play, and then that would drive the animations that you would see.
And they had.
A bunch of different ideas for what kind of stories the bear could tell, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears was an obvious one. And it would also have a speaker on the inside, so Joey Bear when he spoke, you could actually hear him tell the story and see his little mouth move and move his eyes and all that kind of stuff. One of Vorsi's colleagues, however, questioned
the concept of Joeybear. He argued that without something special about the bear itself, without some sort of personality hook, without something to set it apart from just being a teddy bear, there wouldn't be enough there for kids to really care about it. I mean, yes, it would appear to be able to sing and talk, which is huge, but if there's no other personality there, then it might be too generic and it might not be enough to
capture kids attention. And if you know, whatever they were going to sell this thing for it was going to be a lot more than your typical teddy Bear. So the toy needed to have something in its personality and approach that would really appeal to kids. And if it's just a teddy Bear, well there are a lot of other Teddy Bears out there that aren't going to cost
fifty dollars or more. So Force was kind of, you know, the wind was taken out of his sales a bit, but he also felt that the criticism was correct, and that's when his world's collided and he chose to bring into alignment this project to make an animatronic toy for children with his decades old concept of the Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, the thing that was supposed to be a puppet show and then was going to be a series
of children's books. So he changed the design of the character Teddy Ruxpin from just being this furry little fantasy creature into one that looked a lot more like a Teddy bear. And this is why Illiops Illiops being the species that Teddy Ruxpin is, that's why they look like teddy bears. It was a practical decision that had little to do with the name Teddy Ruxpin. It's so interesting to me that Teddy Ruxbin was independently arrived at from
it being a Teddy bear like creature. So for the first time, Force actually had a decent shot of getting this vision, this idea of this character and this fantasy world into an actual thing that other people could enjoy, not just the people he worked with or the people in his family, but the world at large. So over the years, Forc had gone from this concept of this puppet show with nearly forty episodes to there was a time where he was pushing it as a ninety minute special.
That was when he was trying to get networks or even HBO to sign on to it. That version condensed a lot of the story elements that had been broken out into those forty episode ideas into a single narrative, and now he was thinking about adapting the story for a series of story books that would have an accompanying
cassette tape, with each episode lasting about twenty minutes. So it's kind of like he was going back to the drawing board, back to the format of those early puppet shows, versus the ninety minute special he had worked on briefly
in the late seventies. So in many ways he would reapproach the story and divide it back up so that you would have these individual adventures that were connected by a larger narrative arc, but one where it's much more episodic, right, like each episode is its own individual thing, sort of
the way the puppet Show was meant to be. So Force had this huge wealth of lore to draw from because he had been developing the story idea for more than twenty years at that point, and he still went in and fleshed more things out, like he built in more details in the world that he had created. But the bones had been there for a very long time. So by the fall of nineteen eighty four, Alchemy two
had developed a working prototype of Teddy Ruxsman. It didn't look like the final Teddy Rucksman doll that would come out the next year, but it was a good working prototype. Now, at that time, Alchemy two was hitting a rough patch financially, like they were in a cash flow crisis. In fact, they were in danger of folding. They had gotten to a point where they weren't going to be able to make payroll. But four C's team believed in him and in the work of Alchemy two, and they agreed to
continue working. They were taking like essentially half pay so that the company could continue to operate, and they wouldn't you go without anything, but they rather than leave the company, they tried to keep on working while taking less money. Hasbro expressed interest, and that could have been a huge, huge thing. I mean, Hasbro being an enormous toy company. However, Hasbro thought that it was going.
To take like three years to bring.
The product to the market, and that would not work for Alchemy two. The company wouldn't be able to hold out that long. It would have been bankrupt.
Before three years were up.
So Forc kind of had to turn down that offer, even though that must have been a very difficult decision, because like, even though you know you can't make it, Hasbro being the company, it's hard to just walk away from that. So Forc then starts reaching out to other people, just trying to see if you can find sub investor who will pour some money into the project and allow it to get to a point where it can become
an actual thing. And he reaches out to a former executive who had retired at the ripe old age of thirty seven, a guy named Don Kingsborough. By the way, Kingsborough still working today in as an executive in the tech space. But yeah, he had originally retired at thirty
seven years old. So who is Kingsborough. Well, in the nineteen seventies and the early nineteen eighties, he was the president of a little company called Atari, and he stopped being president of Atari in nineteen eighty three, you know, the same year when video games home video games kind of stopped being a thing in the United States. There's
this big video game crash. But Kingsboro he got out and made a lot of money, so he was able to retire and kind of sidestep some of the worst drama that unfolded in the wake of the video game crash. Forese got in touch with him, and Don Kingsborough agreed somewhat reluctantly to hear Force's sales pitch. So Kingsborough flies back to California and he meets with Force, who hands him a prototype and this teddy bear starts to speak and sing to Don Kingsborough, and immediately he was enchanted
by it. So Foresy was hoping that he could get Don Kingsborough to invest in the project. Instead, Kingsborough says, no, I don't want to give you money. I want to actually make this a's according to the docu series I was talking about earlier in this episode. So by mid February nineteen eighty five, Alchemy two and Kingsboro enter into an agreement for the licensing rights to Teddy Ruxsman and AnimagiC, which is the technology that Alchemy two had named that
actually animated Teddy Ruxsman. Kingsboro goes on to contact some entrepreneurs to kind of form a partnership, and he demonstrates the prototype which consistently wows other business leaders, and they form a new company called Worlds of Wonder. So you have Alchemy two, which is actually doing the technology side of things, the development, and you have Worlds of Wonder that's going to be the company that produces the final
product and sells it. They go out as Worlds of Wonder and they seek funding for Teddy Ruxbin and it becomes a joint project between Worlds of Wonder at Alchemy two. By the way, the name Worlds of w Under was reportedly reverse engineered because Don Kingsborough had come up with the acronym. First, he wanted the acronym WOW because if it were on a stock listing, people would take notice, like if the stock is called Wow, that might be
enough to push the value. So very very salesperson kind of pitched to that, and then.
Once he figured out that he wanted.
Wow, he had to work backwards to say what does the WOW stand for. That's when they eventually got to Worlds of Wonder. So the Worlds of Wonder version of Teddy Rucksman would build from the foundation of this prototype. They made some changes in order to make it production ready. They wanted it to be as easy to produce, as cheap to produce as possible, so that you have a good profit margin on these things. You know, you've got some expensive components going in there, so you want to
try and control costs as best you can. So part of that was sourcing very cheap tape decks that could be used as the tape deck incorporated into a Teddy ruckspin. They used a technology that in the docu series they refer to as being servo like, so no an actual servo, but these would be the little electric motors that would drive the facial movements.
In the character.
I think originally they had three of these inside the heads of the characters, and then more recent versions have reduced that down to two. Worlds of Wonder got its funding received about fifteen million dollars in investments from the Abercrombie family. Alchemy two was able to keep going because now they had a fresh influx of cash they were
developing the technology. It reinvigorated the company and in fact they had to hire people on in order to meet the demand of now being responsible for creating a toy that was going to become an honest to goodness product. They had to bring more help on. So it was the reversal of fortune in the best way. So they start working on fleshing out the world of Teddy Ruxspan. They start working on writing the books, thirteen books for the first six months, which would also require recording the
cassette versions recording original music for these these books. Philip Baron gets hired on to become the voice of Teddy Ruxsbin and he would record the audio that was used on cassette tapes. So when you watch those classic commercials, it's Philip Baron's voice you hear on them to program the movements.
This was really cool.
So you know, you would lay down the audio track, so Philip Baron would go in and record his audio for a Teddy ruxsmin book. This would then be handed over to puppeteers who would take the audio track. They would play it back, and they would use digital controls similar to what you would find on a remote control car. They would use that to send direct commands to a
puppet head. It would just be the head. You didn't need the whole body of Teddy Ruckspin, but you have essentially like a Teddy Ruckspin head mounted on a pole with cables going to it, and using this little control panel, you could make the mouth open and closed, and you could do the same with like eyes. And so what they'd do is they'd run the audio track and then the puppeteer would move the digital controls in time with the audio track, and those inputs would be recorded onto
the magnetic tape on a separate track. So this is what would be then transferred to the cassettes and it would play back both the audio and the instructions that the puppeteer had made while matching the soundtrack to the character's movements. My sister is a professional puppeteer, so to me, this is just one of those really fascinating elements of the creation of Teddy Ruckspin. So Hasbro had said it would take three years to get Teddy Ruckspin to a
point where they could put it on the market. The Alchemy two in Worlds of Wonder did it in less than a year. In fact, in September nineteen eighty five, remember they had signed the agreement in mid February nineteen eighty five. September nineteen eighty five, Worlds of Wonder holds a debut of the Teddy Rouxsbin toy in Central Park in New York City, with Teddy Rouxsbin actually doing some of the presenting. It was very cute. You can actually
see this in the docu series. They had a very expensive toy on their hands because when Teddy Rrouxsbin would hit store shelves, it had the price tag of seventy dollars essentially, and each additional book with cassette would cost
twenty dollars. You would get one Teddy Ruxspin in the airship with the base toy, but if you wanted more than one, you had to pay twenty bucks a pop, which means, if we adjust for inflation, Teddy Ruxsbin would cost you about two hundred dollars today to buy, and then each book would cost around fifty six dollars to buy, which is pretty darn expensive. And even with that high price tag, Teddy Rucksman became something of a phenomenon. Although
only briefly, it was highly in demand. It became the most popular toy for the end of nineteen eighty five and maintained its position for nineteen eighty six. Like, this was a toy that was well marketed. Kids loved the idea of it.
It was fascinating.
Anyone who was into animatronics would automatically be really charmed by this toy. Like it used to be something that you would only see if you went to a theme park or a place like Chuck E Cheese, and now you could actually own one. It was really cool. A lot of people thought, oh, I could put my uh, you know, Black Sabbath cassette tape in here and have Teddy Ruxsban rocking out. Didn't work because the operational instructions
wouldn't be present on Black Sabbath. No one Black Sabbath didn't think to include a track that was just operational instructions for teddy Ruxpan, which is really a shame because that would have been amazing. But no, because that information wasn't there. You could play it like it would work as like a Teddy Bear shaped speaker, but it wouldn't. Teddy Ruxban wouldn't be singing along, so didn't quite get
to that level. Now, there was something else that was on the rise that would ultimately steal some of the thunder from Teddy Ruxsman, and that was the Nintendo Entertainment System. The video game crash from nineteen eighty three had really depressed the video game market to a point where a lot of people just figured it was never going to be a thing again, that it was just a fluke. There was something that happened in the late seventies early
eighties and would never come back around. Nintendo proved them wrong, right. Nintendo created a product that people actually wanted. But this also meant Teddy ruxbin Star was on the decline, and it had only been out for a little bit more
than a year. Worlds of Wonder overextended itself. They had incorrectly predicted there was going to be increased demand for Teddy Ruxsban in nineteen eighty seven, and as a result, they overextended themselves financially, and they ultimately spent too much and didn't generate enough revenue, and by nineteen eighty eight they were going into bankruptcy, and then by nineteen ninety
one they ceased to be. Hasbro swooped in and acquired the rights to Ruxman, which is again it's funny because Hasbro had the chance of doing that earlier, but Force wasn't able to take that opportunity, so Hasbro came in got the licensing rights. Around nineteen ninety six, they stopped producing Teddy Ruxsban. There just wasn't enough demand. In nineteen ninety eight, a company called Yes Entertainment secured licensing rights,
but only briefly. Something happened that made that fall apart, and I'm sure it might even be covered in the docuse, but I wasn't able to watch all ten hours of it in preparation for this episode, so I don't know yet. I do plan to watch the rest of it, by the way, because it is quite good. Teddy Ruxbin would resurface again in two thousand and five, then it faded away again and now it's back. It came back in
twenty seventeen. It's a different toy now. Instead of using cassette tapes, it actually pairs with an app, because of course it does, but that means that, you know, you can use the app to play with the toy and to have it read out stories and you're not limited to whatever happens to be in stock. Right, Because it's an app, it's way easier to get access to the
material you want. So yeah, that's the story of Teddy Ruxsman's origins, which again pretty intense, like so much had to come together for that toy to become a thing, and it really was an iconic toy in the mid nineteen eighties. Like I said, if I had just been a little bit younger, I probably would have wanted one myself, but at that stage I was wanting other stuff. I couldn't tell you what I wanted at age ten, I can't.
Maybe I don't.
Know Ghostbusters stuff. Maybe I don't know, but yeah, it was. It was really one of those that made a huge splash, Like this technology looked like it was next generation stuff when it came out, and when you start to learn the full story about what went into the creation of that toy and the work of ken Force and sort of his very gentle approach toward work and creativity, you get a new appreciation for it.
I hope you enjoyed this.
I know is a long episode, again a fraction of the length of the docu series, which goes into much, much, much more detail about ken Force's life, his work, and especially the lore of Teddy Ruxxman. There are entire sections that are dedicated just to fleshing out what that's how
that story coalesced. I highly recommend checking that out. Again, it's on YouTube and you can find that by doing a quick search about Teddy Ruxman and ken Foresy And yeah, you should check it out if you're at all interested in this topic. That's it for this epic episode. I hope you are all well and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production.
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