Inappropriate Speak and Spell

• Main
• Laconic
• All Subpages
• Create New

Young children get many toys designed to help them learn to speak words and spell them out. These skills are very important to a maturing child, so the toys are helpful. In the hands of a teenager or adult, however, the proper limits of the toy are pushed almost immediately, to the point of near improbably ad infinitum.

This trope deals with the toys that can be bent to swear or say otherwise inappropriate things.

When the batteries run down, see Electronic Speech Impediment.

Examples of Inappropriate Speak and Spell include:

• The original Teddy Ruxpin talking teddy bear used animatronics which told the story on the audio cassette put into his back. Teddy would play any tape you put into him, but his mouth and eyes would move only when you used one of his approved story tapes, and then only when he speaks.
  • A similar talking doll, Cricket, had no such limitations.
• The Leapfrog Alphabet Pal Catterpillar has 26 feet, each with a letter of the alphabet on it, and one of its settings is to make the letter sound of the foot you press. You can use this to sound out almost any word you want... except Leapfrog had swear words in mind when they designed it. If you want to make it sound out the word "shit" for example (or most swear words) it will decide you are tickling it halfway through and then go on to say the next sound, so it's like this:

[Pressing S]: Sh [Pressing H]: Huh [Pressing I]: Ih [Pressing T]: *giggle* That tickles! T.

• • You can still make it say "I see you pee", "You be in pee" and "I see a titty."
• Several years ago, one could find G.I. Joe action figures with voice chips that said things like "Yo Joe!", "ATTAAACK!", and "Vengeance is mine!", and Barbie action figures dolls with voice chips that said things like "Let's go shopping!", "Math is Hard!", and "Will we ever have enough clothes?" Inevitably, the Barbie Liberation Front went to Toys R Us, bought a bunch of each, and swapped the voice chips between the Joes and the Barbies. And then returned them all to the store. One may logically presume that Hilarity Ensued.
  • Referenced in an episode of The Simpsons: Lisa asks her friends if there isn't something wrong with what their talking Malibu Stacy dolls say. One girl responds "There's something wrong with what my Stacy says"; when she pulls the string, we hear "My spidey sense is tingling -- anybody call for a web-slinger?"
• In the Childs Play movies, Chucky the doll [a battery-powered, talking "Good Guy" doll] is possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. One can only imagine the inappropriate things he was saying to Andy, but onscreen we see and hear him going berserk when Andy's mom threatens to throw him into the fireplace if he didn't talk (thereby proving her suspicion that the doll was sentient).
• The Tickle Me Elmo doll is a talking doll that shakes and giggles when you touch it in several ways. Just ripe for abuse.
  • One variant I have seen is an Elmo in shackles and ball-gag. When it is activated, it appears to struggle with it's bonds and mumble behind the gag. Yes, that sounds horrible, but a muppet in bondage gear is just funny squared.
    • And then there's this.
  • Someone decided to see what would happen if they set an Elmo on fire. The results are very, very unsettling. Watch at the risk of sleeping tonight.
  • In 2006, a talking Elmo book was somehow programmed to say "Who wants to die?"
    • He's actually saying "Who has to go [to the bathroom]?" but it doesn't sound like it.
      • It was a chip manufacturing defect. However, many sound books do go berserk when their battery is run down, either starting to sound demonic, or cut off the speech halfway through. The latter can cause the book to say some pretty shocking things. Oh, by the way, said Elmo book was from the same publisher as the infamous Lion King sound book. You know, the one with the defect that may cause the book to say something that sounded like "Squashed bananas up your ass" if you time your button presses right.
• Mike Motzart, that toy review guy from YouTube, LOVES this trope and exploits it in many of his videos. Some of the exploits demonstrated have been fixed by toy manufacturers in subsequent revisions. His Leapfrog table exploit only worked on older models featuring the character "Lily" which had a compartment flap that came off very easily, said exploit involved removing the flap and toggling a switch rapidly to result in something that sounded like a Cluster F-Bomb. Newer models featuring the character "Dot" are unaffected as said flap is now molded in and is impossible to remove without breaking it off by force.
• The demonic Furby
• At the end of his book Masters of Doom, David Kushner told of how his local Chuck E. Cheese had computers that spoke, but were programmed to reject swear words. He then set it up to say "phuk the manager" on a loop.
• Played for laughs on an episode of The Simpsons:

Krusty's Speak & Say: "S is for Shiksa! S, H, I...uh, think there's a T in there somewhere..."