The Rise & Fall of the Talkboy Tape Recorder

The Talkboy tape recorder came into existence in 1992 during the making of the second installment in the hit Home Alone movie franchise , Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. This device originated as a prop but technological inventors capitalized off of the overwhelming popularity of the movie to create a real Talkboy toy that could be advertised and sold to the youth in the 1990s. This product lasted for seven years on the market but had a later resurgence when made into an application decades later. The Talkboy is a prime example of how culture and technology are not independent of each other and rather work together to influence the leisure, business, and social lives of Americans.  This project explores the cultural, economic, and social patterns in the 1990s that impacted the collapse of the Talkboy and the social grids that brought the product back into popularity in the 2000s.

You may remember begging your parent for the Talkboy or purchasing the toy for your child as this product was in high demand upon release. However, if you are new to the wonders of the device, the Talkboy was a recorder that used a cassette tape to record sounds and had a microphone that users could speak into. The recorded voice could be slowed down by pushing a button on the Talkboy and it would make the voice sound deeper, which was what Macaulay Culkin did in the movie to disguise his voice and trick the adults. The Talkboy was an electronic device made of metal and plastic parts and it ran on 4 AA batteries.

Tiger Electronics obtained permission from 20th Century Fox and the producer of Home Alone to create and market a real version of the Talkboy that it could sell to the thousands of young people. The Talkboy was on the market from 1992-1999, during those seven years, more than 11 versions of the Talkboy were released including the Talkboy and Talkgirl Jr, the Talkboy watch, a Talkboy walkie talkie, and an incredibly popular Talkboy f/x pen that could record for up to 12 seconds (Brown, 2021). The price of the Talkboy in the 1990's was $25.00. While the Talkboy products remained popular through the decade, the appeal began to decline over time, which was inevitable with drastic shifts in technology which demands that older products yield to newer, more advanced ones that will have new societal and cultural ripple effects.

The 1990s was a time when technological inventors were making constant breakthroughs. Technology was starting to advance more rapidly as live broadcasting was made possible on television, predecessors to smartphones were being developed, DVDs came into existence, and Google was created as an internet search platform. The acceleration of these more advanced concepts and technological devices began to overshadow the once beloved Talkboy. The batteries required for the Talkboy became burdensome, as the gravitation towards consolidating more applications onto one device and furtherance of existing devices projected into the 2000s. Croteau and Hoynes (2014) demonstrate the acceleration of different mediums existing in United States households with a study that reports that in 1996, 99% of Americans owned a radio and television, yet just three years later, about half of American households had a computer, and a third of the population had internet access. As individuals become infatuated with keeping up with the latest invention, newest movies, products, and technology, individuals are inclined to bring in the new which inevitably buries the old. A competitive market and growing research in the technological field create an expanding technological world that is moving too fast for our eyes.

The downfall of the original Talkboy could be attributed to the pace in which technology was accelerating during the 1990s, but it's important we also consider the economic state of the decade. As the recession in the 1980s crossed into the 90s, 19.9% of children in the United States were living in poverty in 1990 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999). Economic segregation and concentrated poverty give unequal access to minorities. The Talkboy, if purchased, needed new batteries after three hours of recording and Reilly (2007), explains how she and her two siblings ran through 84 batteries a week and 336 batteries a month when this toy was at its peak popularity. Not all families at the time could afford to purchase or maintain the Talkboy, and not all households owned a television and had access to the prime advertisement of the Talkboy, Home Alone 2.

The structures in place for technology are deliberately crafted by humans in social realms and we must note how these structures play a direct role in our everyday lives and how "the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are differently situated and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness” (Winner, 2008, p.8). The Talkboy is like all other technology, intertwined with culture and structures in society that affects an individual's work, social life, spending, and other decisions made consciously or unconsciously.

Technology influences the way we behave and socialize, and in turn, constant modernization of these technologies will continue to shift and disrupt our social world. “These disruptions fundamentally reshape our social relations, as technologies provide the “socio spatial grids foundational to communicative practice…” (Swartz et. al, 2019, p. 2). A made-up technological device created as a movie prop wound up being one of the most popular toys enjoyed by children for almost a decade. It influenced the way children interacted and played for years, but eventually and inevitably, it was discontinued as more advanced technological toys emerged on the market and captured the imagination of society.

While Talkboys are now mostly viewed as a quaint old commodity, the Talkboy didn’t really end when Tiger Electronics sold the device. Jackson (2019) demonstrates this when talking about the new ios & android app, called Talkboy, which allows users to record and play it back at their desired speed by using a slider on the screen. Just 30 years after the release of the original tape recorder, the product has become an application. The once-treasured tape recorder is now available on mobile devices. The Talkboy gave children opportunities to play and interact together in a novel way, a way that revolved around a new, exciting and fun technology. Today, children who grew up in the 1990s reminisce over their treasured memories fueled by the Talkboy and may even download the mobile app to feel a brief moment of nostalgia.

It is crucial we realize that culture and technology are not two separate things, but rather exist and work off of each other to structure the world we live in. "Human culture has always existed in relation to what we understand to be technologies: from voice, stone, and fire, to clock, computer, and nanotechnology" (Slack & Wise, 2005). The Talkboy, congruent to all other technologies, will evolve and shift in direct relation to the way society is situated in social, economic, political, and cultural contexts. The rapid pace of innovative technology kicked the Talkboy off of the shelves but remained a part of the culture that could eventually renew and polish this device to take the form of an application.