New Firm Cheerful Over Tearful Doll : Toys: A Newport Beach company believes that its computerized product will ride a wave of renewed interest in traditional playthings for girls.
When a little girl cradles her new Cheerful Tearful doll, she had better be prepared for what comes next. It could be cries. It could be coos. The doll may laugh, wet its diapers or burp.
Talking dolls are nothing new. But Cheerful Tearful’s makers are hoping to cash in on renewed interest in girls’ baby dolls by taking an age-old idea and giving it a high-tech twist.
The new twist is a computer microchip embedded inside the doll that will allow it to digitally reproduce recorded sounds in a random sequence. Cheerful Tearful is billed by its creator, a 1-year-old Newport Beach company called Curiosity, as one of the most lifelike dolls ever created.
Cheerful Tearful can expect to face a bevy of competitors. After years of a preoccupation with such male-oriented toys as Nintendo and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, toy makers are rediscovering the girls’ market.
They are each trying to wed the simplicity of the basic baby doll with sophisticated technology to produce a mega-hit such as Cabbage Patch Kids.
Shipments of baby dolls rebounded to $135 million last year from $112 million in 1988, although they fell short of the $149 million in sales recorded in 1987 near the end of the Cabbage Patch craze, according to the Toy Manufacturers of America, a New York-based trade group.
Those figures have not been lost on Barbie manufacturer Mattel Inc. of Hawthorne, which has introduced a series of new dolls starting with Li’l Miss Makeup, which sprouts what appears to be facial makeup when the doll is dabbed with warm water.
The re-emergence of the baby doll caught the attention of the group of investors and veteran toy industry executives who founded Curiosity in Newport Beach. Curiosity Chairman Joseph V. Delaney said the baby doll market has been growing twice as fast as the overall toy market, making it a prime target for the fledgling company’s first product. The firm’s board of directors reads like a who’s who of the toy industry. It includes Elliot Handler, founder of Mattel; Arthur Taylor, former president of CBS Inc. and Creative Playthings, and Howard Moore, former executive vice president of Toys R Us. Other directors include Roger Johnson, chairman of Western Digital Corp. in Irvine, and Daniel May, retired chairman of Republic Airlines.
The company got off to a fast start last February when Cheerful Tearful made a big splash at the American International Toy Fair in New York.
