When I started hearing news of the Scholastic Goosebump books that featured an "nasty" and sometimes "evil" dummy, I thought, "Oh, no - this will not be good for ventriloquism!" Boy, was I wrong! The Goosebump series of books featuring, Slappy, back in the 1990's only inspired youngsters to ask their parents for a dummy and stimulated their interest in learning ventriloquism. So much so that Goldberger decided to come out with a Slappy doll!Admittedly, most of that interest was from boys - maybe they just wanted to frighten their sisters - but whatever, this was the book that started the craze! Some day it just may be looked back upon and considered historical as well as "hysterical". (It's already both from MY perspective. :-) I have one copy, For eBay auction, here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=261017738817
Slappy was one of the main reasons why I became interested in ventriloquist figures. I was not scared of the figure, I was more interested on how it was able to talk and work. Though I'm not a ventriloquist, I consider myself to be more of a collector, I think Slappy had a more positive impact on ventriloquism than negative.
ReplyDeleteDavid Miranda