Shoving Custom Teddy Ruxpin Innards Into a Figment the Dragon Stuffy

Teddy Ruxpin was a massive hit when it exploded onto the market for 1985's holiday season. It was one of history's quintessential "fad" toys—the kind that caused stampedes in toy stores and back alley scalping. But that consumer fervor died down within a few years and was replaced by enthusiasm for other trendy toys. In 2017, Wicked Cool Toys released a new version of Teddy Ruxpin — probably to cash in on the nostalgia of new parents that were kids when the original was popular. Erin St Blaine customized a revamped Teddy Ruxpin, then shoved its innards into a Figment dragon stuffed animal for her nieces.

The OG Teddy Ruxpin was an animatronic stuffed animal that read stories from cassette tapes while moving its mouth along with the words. The cassette tapes were actually quite clever, because one of the stereo tracks contained mono audio recordings while the other track contained movement commands for the mouth. By utilizing the stereo tracks in that way, they ensured that the movements and audio were always in sync. And, of course, cassette tapes were very affordable. The Wicked Cool Toys version of Teddy Ruxpin ditched all of that in favor of simple digital files — a far more economical solution today.

Wicked Cool Toys didn't do much to secure that digital storage, beyond requiring payment to unlock some of the story files. Use a USB cable to plug the Teddy Ruxpin electronics into a PC, and you can access the file storage. As St Blaine demonstrates, creating a new story is pretty straightforward. Record the audio and a corresponding plain text JSON file with mouth movement commands. Those commands are very simple and only require a start time, an end time, and the mouth position. There are three available positions: fully open, fully closed, and halfway between the two. Wrap those up in a bin file using the earpatch script and you're good to go.

But St Blaine wasn't satisfied with adding new custom stories. She wanted to put those in a package tailored to her nieces. She found that the Teddy Ruxpin electronics can easily fit into other stuffed animals of roughly the same size. So she cut up the Figment stuffy and crammed Teddy Ruxpin's digital organs inside. That only required minor modification of the dragon stuffed animal to cut the eye holes out. With a bit of sewing and glue, she had a custom animatronic dragon for her nieces to enjoy.