Shit from the 90's #1: Talkboy!

Welcome to a new feature here at Dr. P’s, Shit from the 90’s! In this column, we take a look at, yes, shit from the 90’s. That sounds like a broad criterion, so let’s narrow it down. It helps if the product, event or personality took the world by storm for a few fleeting weeks (or days) and was quickly forgotten, only to be brought up in drunken conversations or unfunny Family Guy references. Good candidates for this column also include things that were shamelessly promoted (like this column’s entry, the Talkboy) in films or were otherwise pushed down our unwilling throats.

With that said, Shit from the 90’s is happy to accept suggestions. Leave a comment. I think you either need to click “Anonymous” (if you’re a pussy) or “Name/URL”.

The Talkboy was devised by the fine minds that put together Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). You see, Macaulay Culkin, the film’s protagonist, becomes lost in New York City. Culkin’s character is only eight years old, so he needs to devise various witty and clever ways to gain shelter and trick/confuse adults who wish to do him harm. Culkin slides around on hotel floors, sets up a death maze in his uncle’s abandoned Manhattan apartment, befriends homeless people and ingeniously pauses and unpauses an old film-noir to make this happen. He also uses his trusty Talkboy, which, I don’t mind telling you, gets him out of a lot of jams!

Talkboy is a recording device, but it ain’t your run of the mill tape recorder. For one, the shit’s portable, so Culkin can take it anywhere. Secondly, it slows down or speeds up your voice, so you can totally disguise yourself (or, in Culkin’s case, pretend to be an adult so he can use a credit card to get a hotel room). Never mind that the slowed down voice sounds like some sort of mutant pedophile; every adult in the film, including perennial effeminate villain Tim Curry, fall for the gag. And, if movies have taught us anything, it’s that what works on the screen works in real life.

So a bunch of brain dead children, probably helped by their parents, wrote various electronic companies demanding a real Talkboy that they could play with so they could be just like Mac. A bidding war ensued, and Tiger Electronics, best known as the maker of those god-awful handheld games that are also a candidate for this column, won out. Tiger released the real-life Talkboy to coincide with the VHS release of Home Alone 2.

Perhaps the Talkboy is best known for adding the phrase, “Hi kids, we’re home early” to the American lexicon. A television commercial that aired ad-nauseum for the next several years showed a young boy being babysat by his older sister. Of course, he’s armed with a Talkboy, and hilarity ensues. The sister is fooling around with her boyfriend, and the little brat uses the Talkboy to foil their good times. In a stroke of pure genius, he says the aforementioned phrase into the Talkboy, slows down the volume, and plays it right when the sister and her boyfriend are about to start necking! They both freak out and it’s all crazy and so on and so forth. He later bangs her in the backseat of his car.

Home Alone 2 didn’t stay fresh forever, and people soon stopped caring about the Talkboy. New products were soon introduced, including a pink Talkgirl (because the original is so masculine) and a Talkpen that was basically a Talkboy fit into an ordinary writing pen. No one cared. The Talkboy and its spawn were banished to a lifetime of “hey, remember that?” references and columns like this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoz0vbm3Vss: Talkboy commercial from the early 90s mentioned above.

John Lacey