What a great cast Teddy Ruxpin had, both in the Tv series and with the storybook series. I particularly am fond of Phil Baron and Will Ryan as Teddy and Grubby, respectively. The chemistry they had as the characters was probably enhanced by the real-life working relationship they had for several years before Teddy even began- as Willio and Phillio, with a radio show in the Midwest and a record deal with Disney. Will Ryan also voiced Tweeg in the “Adventure Series” but was replaced in the TV series by Canadian John Koensgen. Koensgen and Robert Bockstael as LB got it ‘just right’ with Tweeg and LB.
Also great were Les Lye as Quellor and Abby Hagyard as Eleanor Tweeg… they had a lot of experience working together on other projects as well, most notably the long-running live action series “You Can’t Do That on Television”.
I would love to get in contact with some of these talented folks for input on the site or just to say hello. Phil Baron’s gracious interview with the site in 2007 was very informative and hearing Phil say hello to me on the phone as Teddy several years ago was one of the highlites of my extended childhood. 
If anyone has any contact info for any of these folks, please send them my way!
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I hope 2009 is a great year for us all, and that our personal and national problems begin to take a back seat during this trip around the sun. One thing to be thankful for right now is the continuing presence of Teddy.. it doesn’t look like he’s going away this time. At the tail end of this month, MillCreek Entertainment will release the full Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin series on DVD, at a bargain MSRP of $24 and change. Teddy the toy has recently been picked up by giant retailer Costco, and continues to be sold at online retailers and at Target. There are always rumors of new things happening and hopefully some will come to fruition.
For those of you who are parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles or guardians of young children, now is the time to strike and give the gift of this wonderful character to the youngsters in your life.
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It’s been ten years this month since I started the website. When it began it was just two pages long and very, very simple. I started it on a lazy afternoon on summer vacation, fascinated by the internet (as I still am today) and worried that there wasn’t nearly enough fan support for TR yet on the web. Ten years later, that simple two page website with it’s hideously mismatched colors and sloppy HTML design has led me to so many wonderful experiences. I’ve had the pleasure to meet my personal hero, the creator of Teddy, on not one but three occasions. I’ve interacted with Phil Baron, Teddy’s voice, and two very nice guys and wonderful animators in Jeff Wilson and Brian LeMay…. and a great artist named Maggie Parr. I’ve cooresponded with, and this is a rough estimate, about 200 fans and formed some lasting friendships out of those contacts. It’s amazing what a few simple keystrokes ten summers ago helped usher into my life.
And ten years has also led Teddy himself on quite a journey. When I started the site, a toy company called Yes! Entertainment (Founded by Worlds of Wonder’s own Don Kingsborough) had the rights to Teddy and were manufacturing a new Teddy with a red shirt replacing his old tunic… Teddy met the same fate at Kingsborough’s second toy company as he met at the first… and before long the remaining units were being sold in bargain bins and at closeout stores. We had some brief hope in 1999 when a company called Blue Steel USA released “Teddy Ruxpin: The Movie” which was basically just parts of the first five episodes spliced together…. although the cover art was great! In the early 2000’s, Teen angst megastore “Hot Topic” released some Teddy merchandise, a couple hats and some clothing, which quickly fizzled. Myself, I never quite thought Teddy belonged there to begin with… but it kept his image out there. In 2003 I visited Ken and had the pleasure of being able to choose Princess Aruzia’s eyecolor while he was updating some artwork… a very cool moment I’ll always remember. Then, on a sunny day in 2005, I got a call saying our dreams had finally come true… Teddy was again making a comeback. A year later, I opened a huge box filled with blue styrafoam popcorn and a brand new Teddy… he was about the same size as the Yes! version but even at first glance it was obvious he was of much higher quality. The tunic was back, and the storylines and artwork of the first few books were remasterered. I was quite literally catching up with an old friend. A friend for life came back to life.
In 2008, Teddy fans managed to be pleasantly surprised yet again, when Mill Creek Entertainment released the entire Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin TV series on DVD. News is that in the final year of this 3rd decade of Teddy’s existance, we will see yet a couple of more new Teddy products from BackPack Toys.
Teddy Ruxpin continues to be my friend, and his continued presence in the world some 23 years after his initial release gives me hope that a new generation will have a chance to adopt this friend for life as well. I hope in another ten years there will be even more history to add to the brief timeline I’ve given of the last ten years. The kids of the world need hIm now more than ever.
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I just wanted to use this space to thank the people at Mill Creek Entertainment for doing such a fantastic job with the DVD releases. I know we are all a little disapointed that there were no special features (The Protect Yourself Segments would have only made sense to us old-school fans so I can’t blame them for leaving those off) but overall I’m very happy with them. The audio quality on some of the ending credits is sometimes noticably a little shaky, but this I’m sure is due to the masters they had to work with rather than something that resulted as any fault of their own. The packaging is colorful and appealing to smaller kids who may not have known about the series previously, and the fact they put 20 episodes on each release (25 on the final edition) rather than make us wait out a bunch of 5 episode releases really put the icing on the cake. I hope that Mill Creek will consider a special edition box-set with some special features in the future… (including the live-action segments with Teddy talking to the audience before the first few episodes would be a cool idea)
I would encourage you all to send a thank-you to Mill Creek and request said special edition… www.millcreekent.com is their homepage.
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Hey All,
Just wanted to take this opportunity to remind you all that as of today you can pick up the 3rd and final MillCreek Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin DVD release at your favorite online retailer. (I reccomend Amazon.com) I have ordered multiple copies of each volume just in case they don’t stay in print for a long time. MillCreek so far also has plans to release a box-set of all 3 releases in October. Stay tooned here and at www.teddyruxpinonline.org for continuing updates.
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Although it doesn’t mention Teddy Ruxpin at all, here is an interview I found with Will Ryan, the very talented voice of Grubby. I’m quite envious of the webmaster who was lucky enough to get to talk with Mr. Ryan as talking with him/meeting him has always been a dream of mine.
http://www.tollbooth.org/2006/features/wryan.html
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I’m very happy with The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin releases from MillCreek. While I would have loved some special features, the company obviously knew we were going to buy these up regardless so I can’t blame them for not spending the extra money. The DVD packaging is bright and luckily quite easy to distinguish between the MillCreek and FNP releases. The menu’s and theme music are also much better on these compared to FNP’s. Last but not least, it’s wonderful to have 20 episode blocks rather than waiting 2 or 3 months at a time to get 5 more episodes as we would have had with FNP.
It took a long time to get Teddy back on video. The Yes! people released a few episodes on VHS much in the way WoW had done in the late 80’s. Then we had the 1999 “Teddy Ruxpin: The Movie” a 90 plus minute release that skimmed parts of the first few episodes. Then FNP released the first 10 episodes on DVD and decided to drop future releases. While this series has been very hard to come by before MillCreek’s releases, I’d dare say the first 25% of the series’ episodes may have seen more releases than any other cartoon in history. I was beginning to think anyone who planned to release more than just the first quarter episodes were cursed.
In the late 1990’s, myself and a foreign webmaster began a petition & letter writing campaign to the major networks and to any & all video distributors to please do something with this series again… that there was a demand. FNP even mentioned the petition in an early press release. I think it’s now time to begin one to try to get “The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin” live action movie on DVD. I’ve got an old VHS copy and once in a long while one will pop up for sale on Ebay, but otherwise this is becoming an increasingly rare relic. I would have loved to have seen it included with the television series releases but that doesnt appear to be happening. Maybe MillCreek would entertain releasing it? Let me know what you all think about another petition.
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Next week, Mill Creek Entertainment will release the final 25 episodes of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin… and when they do, the final mysteries in the series that I missed on my original 1987 recordings will be unraveled. This is a day I’ve been waiting for- for a heck of a long time. One of the reasons I started my website, 10 years ago next month, was to make sure everyone knew Teddy was far from forgotten. With Teddy now returning not only in the TV series DVD releases but also of course the toy products, I hope that myself and others who have put their time into making sure Teddy was remembered played at least a small part in the process of bringing Teddy full-circle. It was the least I could do for a world of characters who brought wonder, adventure and friendship to my youth (and now my adult years). Nothing else in the fictional realm has even come half as close to touching me so profoundly as Teddy has.
At the same time, my old VHS tapes suddenly no longer being irreplacable will be quite a change and a little bittersweet. They are my Doc and DeLorean in a way… a link to a place back in time that was much more innocent and carefree. While the episodes themselves are of course most important, even the commercials bring back fond memories. (For those of you who record TV programming- don’t always skip the commercials, someday they will be a kick to watch and remember) for the final time in my life next week, I will watch an episode of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin for the first time, and even though the quality of the show will far supercede that of my old relic VHS recordings and I will finally be able to see the entire series from front to back and back again, a very small piece of the nostalgia, mystery and mystique of this series I have been waiting so long to see in it’s entirety will be complete and no more. I can’t help but think that just as Teddy has come full-circle, returning once again to our TV screens and toy store shelves, that my friendship with Teddy has also come full-circle, as next week, for one final time, I’ll be a wide-eyed kid watching a Teddy Ruxpin mystery I havent seen before unravel.
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