Transformers and Cabbage Patch Dolls Top Santa’s List

This year’s hottest-selling Christmas toys are the ubiquitous Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and Transformers, which are mostly plastic robots that, with an artful twist here and a pull there, become such esoterica as radios that don’t work, microscopes that do work and animals that look like minuscule dinosaurs and gigantic weird insects.

Cabbage Patch Kids and Transformers are tied for first place for unit sales among the top-selling toys this season, according to the toy industry journal Toy & Hobby World. Like half the items on the list, the two toy lines were available last Christmas.

To find this season’s most interesting new toy requires reading down the list to No. 9, where one discovers a little fellow warbling, “I’m nice to you. You’re nice to me,” carefully mouthing his words. His eyes open wide and close tightly at appropriate moments as he speaks.

Meet Teddy Ruxpin, one of the season’s few hot new toys.

Toy industry observers say the animated, 20-inch teddy bear is a surprise success and the only unprecedented toy among this Christmas’ Top 10.

“It really jumped out of nowhere,” said Rick Anguilla, editor of Toy & Hobby World.

It’s not surprising that the little brown bear is only in ninth place. What is surprising is that he even made the Top 10, given his $60 to $80 price tag and the fact that he wasn’t shown to distributors and retailers until September. Traditionally, Christmas toys debut in February at the giant Toy Fair in New York, where the toy industry introduces new products. But Worlds of Wonder Inc., the Fremont toy company whose first product is Teddy Ruxpin, didn’t exist until March.

Teddy Ruxpin’s mouth and eye movements synchronize with his words as he sings and tells adventure stories from his taped repertoire. One tape comes with the bear; 12 more are available for $10 to $13 each. The stories, which last 14 to 22 minutes, are carefully written to be engrossing and wholesome.

The yarns tend to be moralistic without being preachy. One of them, “The Missing Princess,” includes safety tips to children, such as reporting to a parent or teacher if someone takes your picture, and not leaving your yard without telling a parent.

That story was written with help from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to which Worlds of Wonder Inc. gives 50 cents for every Teddy Ruxpin sold.

Each story cassette comes with a picture book outlining the plot, so children as young as 3 can enjoy following along as the bear “talks.” Girls through the age of 12, and boys as old as 9 enjoy the toy, said Mark Bradlee, Worlds of Wonder’s executive vice president.

Hiking, sleeping, workout, rain and flying clothing are available for the doll. This week, Worlds of Wonder began shipping Fobs, plush hand puppets equipped with a device that allows children to move the puppets’ beaks and “talk” with Teddy Ruxpin. In about a week and a half the company expects to start distributing “Grubby,” an animated, eight-legged fantasy doll that plugs into Teddy Ruxpin with a two-foot cord. Tapes in the bear allow Teddy Ruxpin and Grubby to sing duets and engage in animated conversation.

With Cabbage Patch Kids crowding store shelves this year, Teddy Ruxpin promises to be the toy on most customer waiting lists.

“I would say the demand would be at least three times what we can produce at this point,” said Bradlee, adding that his company expects to ship 600,000 to 750,000 bears to retailers before Christmas.

Bigger Sales Staff

Bradlee’s comments notwithstanding, most retailers agree that toy sales this Christmas will be brisk, but without the frenzied rush that concentrated on a few items last year.

“We are tripling our sales staff for Christmas, which is exactly what we did last year” said Linda Decker, training director for Karls Toys Hobbies, a chain of 24 shopping center toy stores between San Francisco and San Diego. “But the difference this Christmas is that we’re selling a broader merchandise mix with less concentration on individual items like the Cabbage Patch Kids and trivia games that dominated the market last year.”

Art Boyan, area manager for R + T Sales of San Diego, with 10 stores in Orange and San Diego counties, said, “Last year there seemed to be a lot of hot items that people were coming in and asking for. This year there doesn’t seem to be the same excitement as last year.”

The toy journal Playthings, in an article scheduled for its December issue, said this year’s toy sale trends indicate “the blending of plush and electronic technology; the dominance of licensed goods; consumer acceptance of higher price tags; and the continued popularity of robots, adoptable dolls and plush action figures.”

Toy retailers generally concur that the Toy & Hobby World’s Top 10 list for December toys accurately projects Christmas sales. “It’s typical of the country. I think the die is pretty much cast at this point,” said Ken Cunniff, advertising director for Kay Bee Toy Stores, which has 580 stores in the continental United States, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, including 72 in California.

Playthings also publishes a list of Top 10 toys, and its December ratings are almost identical to Toy & Hobby World’s survey. However, Playthings does not rank its Top 10 in order. “I think they’re really too close to call,” said senior associate editor Donna Leccese.

The highest-ranking toy on Toy & Hobby World’s list that wasn’t around last Christmas is Pound Puppies, which is fourth and sells for $18 to $30. This cuddly little doll, roughly the size and shape of a small dachshund, comes in 80 variations with different colors, eye and nose designs and head, ear and mouth shapes.

Pound Puppies’ charm stems from their cute appearance and the way they are stuffed with polyester fiber. Elaine Swanger, a toy designer at Tonka Corp., which makes the dolls, said that “stuffed toys are generally packed very firmly. What we wanted was a feeling of floppiness. So we stuffed Pound Puppies less hard. There might be about 60% as much stuffing in them as in the standard plush toy, and the fabric is a polyester fiber that stretches more and has a shorter fiber than most dolls. When you pet a real puppy’s face, its skin is sort of loose and it has those little short hairs, and that’s the kind of feel we wanted to get.”

‘Cuddly’ and ‘Squishy’

The result is that Pound Puppies are softer and more resilient than many dolls. “To use the terms used by children we’ve done research with, they are ‘soft,’ ‘cuddly’ and ‘squishy,’ ” said Cyndee Graves, girls’ toys product manager for Tonka.

No. 6 on the list is a set of transformable robots collectively called Voltron, made by Matchbox Toys (USA). Other companies make similar toys with the Voltron name, but only the Matchbox brand can claim a place among the top ten sellers.

Voltron, which was not available last Christmas, offers three robots about 16-inches tall with body parts of smaller, transformable robots. The larger Voltrons cost about $70 each, or they can be bought piece by piece, with the smaller, component robots starting at about $13.

The “deluxe lion set” Voltron transforms from a robot to five lions with three distinct body types. Two of the felines have spring-loaded projectile heads that pop off at the touch of a button. The “deluxe warrior set” Voltron transforms into 15 different space vehicles that, in turn, combine to become three attack vehicles. And the “deluxe gladiator set” transforms into three 8-inch tall mini-gladiators.

MASK toys, No. 7 on the list, also weren’t around last December. MASKs (for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand), made by Kenner Products, are transformable vehicles like Jackhammer, an 8-inch-long, four-wheel-drive “Bronco” truck that, with a few strategic manipulations, become an assault vehicle complete with rotating anti-aircraft turret. MASK vehicles--there are seven of them ranging in price from about $5.50 to $28--come with 3-inch tall action figures that fit in appropriate seats and cockpits on the toys.

The last “new” toy on the list ranks tenth, and is a line parallel to the highly successful Masters of the Universe action figures that Mattel Toys began marketing in 1982. The difference is that the eight Princess of Power characters are female.

She-Ra, “the most powerful woman in the universe,” leads the Princess of Power retinue. Her entourage includes 5 1/2-inch tall characters like Castaspella, the “enchantress who hypnotizes” and Catra the “jealous beauty” who sports a cat mask. When wanderlust strikes, She-Ra mounts Swift Wind, her personal “magical flying unicorn.”

She-Ra and her associates, who sell for about $6 to $8 each, are not exclusively the domain of girls, said Candace Irving, a Mattel marketing manager. “We have found that girls buy about 10% of the boy-oriented Masters of the Universe toys, and we expect boys will account for a significant percentage of Princess of Power sales, though we don’t expect it to reach 10%.”

The No. 3 toys on the list are Masters of the Universe, the 5 1/2-inch tall boy-oriented relatives of She-Ra. These articulated little characters retail for about $5 to $6, and include 29 different figures. New on the market this year are the villain Stinkor, who smells mildly foul and peppery, and Moss Man, a pine-scented hero who appears to have just emerged from a swamp and brought half of it with him.

Toy store shelves carry an array of Masters of the Universe paraphernalia such as Bashasaurus, a “heroic combat vehicle” with a built-in plastic “basher ball” that swings to destroy evil warriors like Jitsu, “evil master of martial arts.” For those interested in establishing bases of operation, there is a castle complete with “jawbridge” and armory, and Fright Zone, a “trap filled stronghold of terror” whose foliage includes a tree with branches that grab warriors.

Fifth on the list is that old fighting standby, GI Joe, who began life in 1964 as a relatively massive soldier 11 1/2 inches tall. In 1982, Hasbro Inc. shrunk him to a 3 3/4-inch action figure because “the price of plastic made large GI Joe figures and their accessories very expensive to manufacture, and therefore too expensive for the consumer,” said Al Carosi, Hasbro’s vice president for marketing.

Today, the GI Joe forces, both friend and foe, total more than 50 characters who sell for about $4 each. Most of the fighters rely on traditionally violent means of battle, but among the most popular newcomers are Tomax and Xomat, mirror-image twins (note their names) whose collective specialty is “infiltration, espionage, sabotage, propaganda and corporate law.” These little tough guys, according to information on the back of their package, “chase you with paper, wound you with your own laws and kill you with the money you loaned them.” If such corporate tactics fail, the brothers can blast you with more traditional weapons: the two tiny machine pistols that come in every Tomax/Xomat package.

An army’s worth of equipment is available to back up GI Joe characters, including a hovercraft, a combat jet, tanks, armored vehicles, a “flying submarine,” and an entire command center equipped with everything from a helipad to a stockade.

The eighth toy on the best-seller list is My Little Pony, which Hasbro first marketed in March, 1983. This year brings some 34 new versions of the plastic pony with brightly colored, combable mane and tale. Among the newcomers are Baby Pony, a 3-inch high equine for about $7, and Megan and Sundance. Megan is a plastic doll with combable tresses who is scaled to ride Sundance, a 5-inch tall member of the My Little Pony family. Together, the two sell for about about $15. Hasbro offers a selection of extras ranging from pony clothing to pony nursery.

Coleco Industries’ tied-for-first-place Cabbage Patch Kids, which were rare as summer snow last Christmas, not only are plentiful this year, but also have new family members: twins that retail for $80 to $100 a set, and World Travelers, which come dressed in Spanish, Chinese, Dutch, Scottish, or Russian garb for about $45 to $70. There’s also a new Cabbage Patch Show Pony, which arrives saddled and ready to ride into the sunset for about $35.

Transformers, the changeable robots that share top billing with the Kids, also have new additions to their year-old line. Besides the already mentioned robot/radio (about $18), robot/microscope (about $14), robot/dinosaurs (about $13) and robot/insects (about $5), Hasbro Inc. this year added six “Constructicons,” for about $6 apiece.

Form a Devastator

Each Constructicon transforms from a robot to a different construction vehicle, such as a tractor or cement mixer, and together they form a foot-high Devastator robot. Also new are two “Triple Changers” that have three identities (tank, airplane, robot, for example) for about $11, and Jumpstarters which, for about $6, give you a spaceship that automatically “springs” into its robot mode when rolling across the floor.

The December Toy Hit Parade 1. Cabbage Patch Kids and Transformers (tie) 3. Masters of the Universe 4. Pound Puppies 5. GI Joe 6. Voltron by Matchbox Toys (USA) 7. MASK 8. My Little Pony 9. Teddy Ruxpin 10. Princess of Power

The Toy Hit Parade is a monthly list of top-selling toys published by the toy industry journal Toy & Hobby World. It reflects sales of more than 3,000 retail outlets. The above list is scheduled for the magazine’s December issue.