Rebooting Ruxpin Action Figures

     It's now been more than ten years since I suggested a reboot of Teddy Ruxpin and started on this little on-again/off-again fan art indulgence of mine. In my first post, I mentioned how I never owned the famous Teddy Ruxpin doll on which the whole franchise was based, but I did own the action figures... and played with them a lot! I, therefore, thought it'd be fun to conceptualize what the new action figures would look like if my reboot were actually a thing. 

     While I loved playing with the figures, they were severely lacking in terms of accessories, and since this whole thing is about creating the Teddy Ruxpin that I, personally, would want to see, I figured the toys should follow suit. 

In other words... a Grundo-load of accessories!

     This is just the first wave... which would be sold separately, of course, from Teddy and his friends' airship, The Patchwork.

Rebooting Ruxpin... again.

     One thing I love coming back to, and will probably continue to come back to until someone else does it in a more official capacity, is conceptualizing a reboot of Teddy Ruxpin! You can scroll down here and see how long I've been goofing around with this thing, and I decided it was time to goof around some more. So here again is another pass at the main lineup from my Teddy Ruxpin reboot!

     Maybe someone will actually do this someday and I'll lose all interest, but for now, I'm wide-eyed and full of hope.

Teddy Ruxpin

Grubby

Leota the Woodsprite

Newton Gimmick

Princess Erin

Tweeg

L.B.

Rebooting Ruxpin: The Wooly Whats-It

     It's been a while since I've visited my rebooted world of Grundo, but I'm back! One of the most difficult characters in this series of redesigns has been Teddy's big furry friend, the Wooly Whats-It, or... as he's more affectionately known... Wooly.

     This guy has always been one of my favorites, so maybe that's why I had such a hard time coming up with a new look that I'm happy with. As you can see below, I've given the task several attempts.

     Then one day, I thought I'd finally found a winner! I scanned him in, cleaned him up, and even used some artistic techniques that I hadn't ever really tried before. As I looked at the finished product however... it just didn't look like Wooly to me. It was close though.

     I decided to take a break from Wooly after that. I was definitely overthinking it. He needed to be simpler. Fast forward a couple of years and simpler is exactly the direction I went. I just started doodling crude shapes and putting eyes on them in hopes that I would find my Wooly Whats-It.

And BINGO! I've got it!

     He's big. He's purple. He's fluffy. His hands and feet don't have those nasty spots on them like they did in the animated series, AND he's lovable! I love him at least.

...

Well hold on...

...

Now I'm not so sure.

Happy VILLAINtines Day!

     Here's yet another take on the Teddy Ruxpin characters for my make-believe fan reboot of the series. Specifically, wannabe bad guys Tweeg and L.B.

     Someone once asked who I would cast as the voices for this reboot that I've concocted. Thinking about that sort of thing is always fun for me, so here's who I've come up with for these two.

Jack W. Tweeg - Corey Burton (Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, Adventures of the Gummi Bears)

L.B. - John DiMaggio (Futurama, Batman: The Brave and the Bold)

     Of course there's nothing saying that these choices are right and other choices would be wrong... well... except for me. I'm saying that.

These choices are right.

Rebooting Ruxpin - Princess Eruzia

     Originally, The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin featured the brother-sister duo of Prince Aaron and Princess Aruzia. For my take, I decided to gender bend Aaron into Princess Erin. Therefore, I'm changing Aruzia's name to Eruzia, just so the siblings still have first names that start with the same letter. Here she is:

     As opposed to her older sister, Eruzia is carefree and imaginative. A romantic at heart, she has no qualms whatsoever in embracing the fairytale aspects of her royal heritage.

     Oh. And in case anyone is wondering, Eruzia's stuffed animal also has a name. It's Her Ladyship, the Grand Duchess Ingbriella.

Rebooting Ruxpin - The Fobs

     I figured this was as good of a time as any to reboot more Teddy Ruxpin characters. This go around, I'm putting a new spin on the Fobs, the cute rainbow-colored bird things that inhabit the forests of Grundo.

     I always thought it was odd how both the Fobs and the Bounders are able to survive in the wild hopping around without any arms. With the Bounders, I decided to give them stronger legs like a kangaroo, but with the Fobs I took more of an "Angry Birds" approach to their design, basically making them nothing more than a bunch of bouncing heads with feet. It's still odd but, hey! What's wrong with odd? After all, we're talking about airship-flying bears here!

Rebooting Ruxpin - L.B. and the Bounders

     L.B. was the horrible little sidekick of Jack W. Tweeg. My version is a little more adorable than horrible. I think L.B. originally stood for Lead Bounder. I'd like this version to be a little more creative than that, but I can't decide. It could stand for something random... like Leonard Bernstein. Or maybe its a little more ambiguous, always standing for something different... like 'Let's Boogie' or 'Lazy Basta'...

Let's go with Leonard Bernstein!

     L.B. is part of a species known as bounders, which are basically little heads with legs. I went through several versions of L.B. before finally settling on the one you see above. I liked all my other tries so much that I decided to use them as the rest of the little guy's gang. I realize they all look pretty different from one another for being part of the same species, but there's no rule that says bounders can't be diverse in appearance.

The more I look at these guys, the more I'd rather see the little spinoff adventures of their own.

Rebooting Ruxpin - Jack W. Tweeg

     My "reboot" of Teddy Ruxpin continues with a little St. Patty's Day bloggin' of the green! Next in the lineup is the land of Grundo's resident green meanie, and my personal favorite, Jacqueline Willimena Tweeg!

     Jacqueline Willimena is, of course, my small change. Guys with girl names crack me up, I guess. Other than that, I can't really think of ways to change Tweeg much. I kind of like him the way he is... or was. 

     Tweeg is a sort of wannabe sorcerer who believes he can magically turn buttermilk into gold. His attempts to do so always fail, however, producing instead... buttermilk donuts. Hilarious, right?!? I thought Tweeg, or maybe his henchman L.B., could capitalize off of this misfortune and sell the donuts to help finance further experiments. Magic has to cost money, after all! You can't just get something from nothing! Equivalent exchange and all that jazz!

Rebooting Ruxpin - The Patchwork

     Reboots seem to be all the rage right now! Sometimes I think this is good, other times... not so much. Disney recently announced that they're officially rebooting DuckTales for the 30th anniversary of the series! This, to me, is an example of the good! 

     But anyways, a while back, just for fun, I started a little reboot of my own with the characters from the late Ken Forsse's The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin! I thought I'd keep it going, but FIRST... a recap of the ones I've done so far.

     Of course, there's Teddy, a spunky young illiop who travels to the land of Grundo in search of adventure. An illiop being sort of like a bear... only with clothes, I guess.

     Grubby is an octopede, and the clumsy yet loyal companion to our hero, Teddy. Grubby doesn't share Teddy's enthusiasm for adventure, but follows him to Grundo anyway, partly because he can pretty much be talked into anything and also because he just didn't have anything else to do.

     Next up is Newton Gimmick, a burly old inventor that used to serve as engineer on a royal airship before retiring. Gimmick now runs a junk yard in the small town of Bounder Pass, where he hires Teddy and Grubby as garbage... men.

     Leota the Woodsprite is a guardian, of sorts, of the forest. She's about two inches tall and doesn't have much in the way of magic, but what she does have IN SPADES is smarts! Leota can outwit the brightest of the bright and makes a pretty formidable foe for anyone daring to bring her forest any harm.

     Princess Erin is the headstrong heir to the throne of Grundo. She meets up with the rest of the gang on her quest to rescue her younger sister Eruzia from treacherous kidnappers. Epic stuff.

     The newest character I have to introduce isn't technically a character at all, but it is still a vital part of Teddy and his friends' adventure. It's the rickety but reliable airship that I'm dubbing, the A.S. Patchwork!

     It's like the old saying goes, you can take the grizzled old engineer out of the airship, but you can't stop him from just building another one out of spare parts found in a junkyard! ...okay. That's not a saying... It's not even that catchy... but it is what happened.

     Gimmick's ship, as you can see, is made from all sorts of different objects and was a ton of fun to draw! Who knows how Gimmick is able to get this heap of junk off the ground with just a big balloon, but in a world of talking teddy bears and 5 foot insects, a little suspension of disbelief is required, to say the least!

Rebooting Ruxpin - Princess Erin

     This is probably the biggest tweak I've given to any of the characters of my ongoing Teddy Ruxpin reboot! So Teddy Ruxpin purists BEWARE! ...Are there Teddy Ruxpin purists?

     Prince Arin was, in my opinion, a little bland. Plus, much like my adolescence, I've always felt that the series was tremendously lacking in female presence. So I've rebooted said prince into a spunky warrior PRINCESS! Sort of a two birds, one stone situation.

     Again, my apologies to all the die-hard Prince Arin fans out there. Take solace (while I lament) that  I have absolutely NO official clout on the subject of ANYTHING fandom.

...but seriously! Is there a Teddy Ruxpin fandom?!?

Rebooting Ruxpin - Leota the Woodsprite

     Now that I've finished drawing penguins for a while, I thought I'd go back to my ongoing attempt at redesigning the characters from the Teddy Ruxpin series. Next in line... Leota the Woodsprite!

     This one differs the most from the original version than any of the others I've done so far. Originally, Leota was just a tiny blonde girl with pink butterfly wings. I wanted her to have more of a fantasy element to her design, so I gave her leafy green skin and elf ears. Plus, she has some Red Fraggle-esque pigtails to add a little more feistiness to her appearance.

Rebooting Ruxpin - Newton Gimmick

     Time for me to go back and give some more of the Teddy Ruxpin characters a reboot! So far, I've done Teddy and Grubby. Here's the third in the bunch... Newton Gimmick!

     I decided that instead of the absent-minded inventor, I would re-imagine Gimmick as more of a gruff old mechanic. Maybe he used to serve on an airship in the Royal Fleet and now he spends his retirement years tottering away in his junk yard. Oh sure, he's still all about the inventions! There's just a lot less, "Eee, Err, Ehh" and a lot more "Just rub some dirt in it, ya buncha Panzies!"

Rebooting Ruxpin - Grubby

     Last week, I started my little fan art project of putting a different spin on the characters of Ken Forsse's Teddy Ruxpin series. Next up is Teddy's best friend, Grubby.

     Grubby is an octopede, an insect like creature with eight hands. Don't confuse him with an arachnid. Those have eight LEGS.

     The original grubby walked on six of his hands and only used two of them to serve as actual hands. I thought it would be more fun, as well as more of a challenge, to have him use two pairs of hands to walk on and two pairs of hands for his finer motor skills. After all, what's the point of having a bunch of hands if you're only going to use just as many as any other Tom, Dick & Harriet? That would be like only using one tong on a fork!

Rebooting Ruxpin

     Growing up, I was a fan of Ken Forsse's Teddy Ruxpin. I never had the famous talking doll or any of the storybooks, but I did have several of the Teddy Ruxpin toys, which my brothers and I played with quite a bit. The adventures we created with those things were probably way better than anything that was ever officially produced. I'm talking 'Shakespeare' good!

Like the time Grubby and Michelangelo had to rescue Boba Fett 

with Bill and Ted's time-traveling phone booth!

     As with most things from my childhood, Teddy Ruxpin has always kind of stuck around in the back of my mind. A while back, I tried re-imagining the characters as gritty sci-fi heroes, but I eventually tired of that and gave it up. It seems like everything's gritty these days.

For example, here's a screen grab from the new Shirt Tales reboot.
What's up with that?!?

     There's been a ton of cartoon reboots lately: Thundercats, My Little Pony, Scooby-Doo, Ninja Turtles... The list goes on and on. Some are good. Some are bad. The point is, the stars of my childhood are getting a second chance! And I say it's about time the spotlight shines back on everyone's favorite illiop! Yeah, that's right. Teddy's not even a bear! He's called an illiop! How nutty is that?

     So if you'll indulge me while I do some wishful thinking, I thought it'd be fun to give Teddy and his friends my own new spin. Here's the first in this 'on-again off-again' lineup of mine: Teddy Ruxpin himself!

     The original Teddy Ruxpin was too much of a "goody-goody" for my tastes. I wanted this version to show a little more mischievous spunk, but still have that same passion for adventure.  Hopefully, all of you like it. 

     Your comments are well appreciated, and stay tuned as I post my further revamps of the Teddy Ruxpin characters. I might even come up with some new friends and foes for the beloved bear.

...oops! I mean, illiop. I swear! That gets me every time!