I found this guy sitting on a shelf with all the other plushes, he was $35. I wasn't sold at first, but sent the photo of him to a few of my friends who knew 80's plushes. They had nothing, no one had ever seen him before. It was a little more than I'd spend on a whim, but my curiosity was absolutely hooked and I needed him. Thosee dials on the front are for a radio, and I absolutely had to know if he still worked.

He did, in fact, still work. Opening up the zipper at the bottom I could see the simple battery terminal that wired to the radio housed in a black box inside. It's a fairly shitty AM radio, but it really does work! He's very stiff, like most electronic dolls at the time he's stuffed with a dense foam instead of polyfil. The face is hard vinyl, the antenna (?) are satin, and the radio dial is a harder plastic. THe fur is nice and soft, very good quality, and slightly matted on the back and bottom where he must of been resting, but overall in very good condition.

Now was wheen the real search began. I reached out to the Lost Media Wiki discord server, knowing there must be other fans of LSuperSonicQ about (a lost media content creator who, unlike most others, spends time looking for merchandise like plushes as well) or at least others interested. I got a few people hooked! A couple of whom had some tricks up their sleeve and experience in this sort of thing. We moved into our own server and started a google doc.

Known information:

• AM radio
• plush manufactured by MTY International Co LTD
• Tag reads “REG. PA638”
• Plush was made in Taiwan
• Sticker on the radio box inside:
  
  M85 RAD
  (TA-001)
  8836
  

It was time to start crossing off leads.

Things the mysterious radio plush is not:

• Carebears vs Goodtime Gang lawsuit
• Care Bears
• Popples (“it’s not a fucking Popple”)
• Rainbow Brite
• The Pondles
• Wuzzles
• RadioShack Pettable Portables Lineup
• Anything else in RadioShack catalogs 1978-1990
• Monchichi
• Galaxy High School
• Kodak Kolorkins
• The Shoe People
• Country Bears

The "Goodtime Gang lawsuit" above refers to a series of "Goodtime Bears" created by DANDEE INT, which bear (ha)a very obvious resemblance to Care Bears, and it is not surprising at all that they were sued for it. The plushes even had radios in them, leading us to look more into DANDEE INT and discover the lawsuit. The lawsuit isn't related to the purple radio plush. but DANDEE INT is. We discovered that the REG. NO. PA### number on the tag, which generally refers to the registration number of a toy manufacturer, matches one seen on other DANDEE products, PA638. But soon, we'd get even more confirmation.

This dog plush was the second discovered. It was found labeled "Ultra RARE Vintage MTY DAN DEE DANDEE Plush Brown Puppy Dog Transistor Radio" and is obviously the same shape and radio design as the original purple plush. This one is labelled as coming from DANDEE, though there is no confirmation on the plush itself. At $45, members of the search considered getting the plush, but held off and decided to contact the seller to see if they knew anything. This was their response:

we had already looked into Radio Shack plushes, though at the time hadn't completely ruled them out. Regardless, it seemed the seller wasn't going to be of any help.

Plus there was still one big question: why did the purple radio plush have a vinyl face, while the dog plush did not?

International Market

With the plush being manufactured in Taiwan (not meaning anything on its own of course, most mass-produced toys are manufactured in South-East Asia) and not seemingt o be based on any piece of American pop culture, the theory arose that it may be created for a South-East Asian market. This theory was quickly debunked given the specs of the radio, the English on the tag, and the discovery of other plushes of the same line. But I mention it because the information about the radio specs themselves are interesting:

• ranges 88 to 108 mHz, as stated on another similar plush
• 88 to 108 mHz is the legal FM band in the americas except for Brazil
• I want to note this because even though most countries allow for signals on 87.5-108, the USA specifically outlaws any signals on the 87mHz band

Custom/Modiffied

Now the main theory that we had been getting from pretty much everyone was that he is a custom. Maybe the original plush was a different purple radio, closer to the dog we had seen, and the face and possibly antenna were added by a modder. But as someone who has held it in my own hands, I can confidently say it is not.

First off, there would be no easy way to do this. The inside pocket that holds the radio is firmly attacched to the front panel of stuffing via the rainbow piece, there is no getting it off. The plush like I said is stuffed with foam, this stuff is incredibly messy and hard to work with. But I've seen more difficult mods people have pulled off, and you could always jsut remove the head to deal with in individually.

Second, if it were a mod, the body and face plate would have to have already existed. Knowing how rare the plush itself is I wouldn't say these don't exist if we can't find them, but we can still go through the logic here. I discussed it with my friend Gavin/Crayfurbs, a Furby enthusiast who has taken many deep dives into the manufacturing of toys from the 80's-90's and who has even made toys himself. They described to me the process of making these sorts of vinyl faces, which involved heavy machinery and many different castings of a sculpted mold. These weren't simple procedures, certainly not somethign that could be done by a modder, so in that case the face would have to be from an existing doll or plush, and one simply couldn't be found.

Third, the quality is simply too high. I know that customizers can sew up a plush to be almost invisible, but getting them perfect along the edges of the vinyl face would be very difficult, not to mention that a normal sewing machine (and especailly not someone working by hand) would have no way of getting through the tough material. The holes would have had to be already there, or custom punched by a different mechanism. Either way, a very long and difficult proccess that would be unlikely to yield the absolitely perfect seams he has.

Protoype

This was the other main theory, after the idea that it was just a rare plush with a limited release.

In Gavin's opinion, the vinyl face still would have been very costly to produce, so in this case they may have used another face that was leftover from a scrapped or unfinished project, leading to the strange design.

This theory was supported by comments recieved on TikTok by a user named candiphoenixsart. However, them being TikTok comments, I take them of course with a huge grain of salt, as they did not respond to my reaching out to them for further confirmation.