Living Doll: “My Name is Talky Tina and You Better Be Nice To Me” – The Twilight Zone Review & Trivia

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By William Kozy

Let’s crack the Top 10 for you: In my “Twilight Zone” poll, asking Facebook TZ fan pages as well as horror/sci-fi writers, “What is your favorite episode of the original ‘Twilight Zone’ series?” 6,756 fans have responded. And in 10th place so far with 174 votes is “LIVING DOLL” (which I would wager more people called “Talky Tina” than “Living Doll”).

At the start, a mother Annabelle Streator gets out of a car with her daughter Christie (played by Tracy Stratford) who holds a big present. We feel like something’s not all that nice-nice as the mother gives a few nervous glances toward the house (the same house by the way that was used for the Twilight Zone 1963 episode: Ring-A-Ding Girl) and instructs Christie to run upstairs with her present.

Christie asks if she can show it to Daddy, but Annabelle (played by Mary LaRoche, Ann-Margret’s mother in the film version of “Bye Bye Birdie”) tells Christie, “Not right away.” Indeed when they enter the house we see the imposing figure of the father, Erich Streator, looming in the foreground, back to camera. He immediately asks “Whadya buy?” in his inimitable Telly Savalas tough guy accent. Mary offers for Christie to go ahead and show Daddy the doll. Christie is excited about it, even eager to show Daddy, which makes his dissatisfaction all the more heartbreaking, no doubt stacking the deck for us to not feel too bad about what soon befalls him. Erich tells Mary that he thought they agreed not to spend extravagantly. She counters that Christie had her eye on the doll for months.

Unboxing her doll excitedly and holding it up proudly for him to see Christie chimes, “She’s alive Daddy! And her name is Talky Tina!” When Erich gets a look at it he surmises that it must have been expensive. Mary tells him that it’s okay because she “put it on the account.” Christie winds the doll and she says, “My name is Talky Tina, and I love you very much!” Erich keeps pressing Mary to tell him how much it cost. She eventually tells him, “I don’t think it’s the price of the doll that’s upsetting you.” Erich makes fun of the “Freudian gibberish” that Mary’s “getting from a doctor.” After Talky Tina continues her mantra a few more times, Erich bursts out with a “Will you shut that thing off!” Tina drops the doll down on the couch and runs tearfully away upstairs. [Hey! “Christie Streator” is an anagram of “Cries To Stir Heart!”]

Anyway, Mary chastises Erich, “How could you?” and she runs upstairs to console Christie.

Left lying on the couch, the doll’s arms keep swaying in their automated doll-like fashion, and Erich goes over to it and looks down at it. First creepy moment: Talky Tina stops the arm movement and opens her eyes looking up at Erich. He picks up the doll, and winds it up. Talky Tina speaks again, but this time she says, “My name is Talky Tina, and I don’t think I like you.” Erich furrows his brow, looking at the doll.

Opening Narration:

“Talky Tina, a doll that does everything, a lifelike creation of plastic and springs and painted smile. To Erich Streator, she is the most unwelcome addition to his household—but without her, he’d never enter the Twilight Zone.”

Erich winds the key again and Talky Tina says: “My name is Talky Tina, and I think I could even hate you”. At that, Erich flings the doll against the wall. She tells him, “My name is Talky Tina, and you’ll be sorry…” Annabelle comes downstairs and sees the doll on the floor. Erich tells her he doesn’t like what it says. He winds it again to demonstrate but Talky Tina just reiterates her normal loving sentence.

“Yeah, well that’s not what it said a minute ago” Erich says. Annabelle tells Erich that she just can’t have him treating Christie this way. We learn that Erich is actually Christie’s stepfather, not her father. He chides Annabelle saying “But I don’t love her.” And he snidely tells Annabelle that she feels badly about him “because we can’t have children of our own.” She assures him that’s not true. She gives him a pep talk telling him that she knows he could love Christie if he’d just give himself half a chance. His only response is a sarcastic affirmation that he’s glad he’s not half the ogre Mommy and Christie think he is. I like the way Savalas bites hard on the word “faith” when he says, “I appreciate all the FAITH you have in me.” You get the feeling this marriage has consisted of a lot of Annabelle’s putting up with this ass’s snide commentary….

[Hey! “Annabelle Streator” is an anagram of “Enables Anal Retort!”]

But then Annabelle says something peculiar. She says, we’ll do anything to make you happy, but the weird part was her saying “I know you got more than what you bargained for–two for the price of one…” So…did he NOT know she had a daughter when he married her?

Anyway, hope for redemption for this man emerges when Christie comes downstairs and apologizes to Daddy for making him mad. Erich tenderly holds her chin telling her that it’s all right, “it was all daddy’s fault.” Christie collects her doll and heads back upstairs. Erich watches her leave but then remembers the oddity of the doll’s utterances, and his expression changes.

At the dinner table that evening, Christie plays at spoon feeding her doll and Erich scolds her to eat her own supper. We see a shot of the doll and she winks at Erich. “I didn’t know your doll could wink” but Christie informs Erich, “Tina can’t wink.” Mary says Tina will make for a nice playmate for Christie, which Erich reflexively takes as a jab: “Lacking a brother or sister is that what you mean?”, and then, “That’s why you bought the doll isn’t it? As a reminder?” She negates this assertion but now with an air of getting fed up with him instead of pleading. When Christie leaves the table for a moment and Annabelle takes some dishes into the kitchen, Erich catches Tina winking at him again and she (oops I mean, “it”!) says, “My name is Talky Tina and I’m beginning to hate you.” Erich gets up from the table, wipes food off Tina’s mouth and replies, “My name is Erich Streator, and I’m going to get rid of you.” Tina exclaims “You wouldn’t dare! Annabelle would hate you, Christie would hate you, and I would hate you.” Erich puts the doll up on the table and lights a cigarette. He holds the match close to Tina’s face and she gasps. Aha! “Then you have feelings” he discovers to which Tina says “Doesn’t everything?”

Well, I’m not sure why Tina gasps at the mere nearness of a lit match but then doesn’t so much as utter a peep at the tortures perpetrated on her later in the story. “Then I can hurt you” Erich deduces. “Not really” says Tina, “But I can hurt you.” Erich laughs at her, “Oh really? Threats from a doll.”

Then the episode does something welcome. There are those that would be watching this episode wondering, “Why in the world isn’t he completely freaked out by this? Erich is taking this so casually! What poor writing!” So it’s a pretty gutsy move to hold out on us but the story then explains Erich’s mindset. Mary enters the room and asks “Who are you talking to?” Erich takes Tina and flips it to Mary saying, “The game’s over.”

“Game?” she asks.

“Ah, come on Annabelle, get off it. How dense do you think I am.”

“I wish I knew what you were talking about” she says confused.

“Oh I admit I don’t know much about modern times, like putting walkie talkies in dolls.”

Mary denies the trickery, and then Christie comes back to get Tina. “Isn’t she sweet Daddy?”

The two parents continue their conversation, and Erich’s paranoia becomes startling. “I know there’s a microphone around here somewhere” and “Then how come the doll doesn’t talk to me when you’re in the room?” In a huff, he gets up and leaves the dining room with a “You’ll be sorry.”

He walks into the garage and sees Tina sitting there on a box, swinging her automated arms. Erich walks over to her, picks her up and holds her over the trash bin. “You are going to be sorry” Tina says. He tosses her in and puts the lid on.

Next we see Erich sitting on the couch cracking nuts over a big bowl. (Broken nuts, get it?) Christie comes downstairs wondering where Tina is. Erich says to ask her mother but Annabelle says she doesn’t know. She offers to help Christie search and they wander off as the phone rings. Still smirking, Erich answers it. It’s her. “My name is Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you.” Erich goes back to the trash bin and Tina’s not there. Back in the house, he accuses Annabelle of carrying the joke too far. “You! And Christie! Will the two of you stop it!” As he sits and discusses what’s been going on with Annabelle, we see that his mind does begin to see some of the impossibilities of it being Annabelle behind the prank, what with making the phone ring and all. He thinks maybe then that Christie could be behind it and he marches up to her room. And there is Tina lying in bed next to a sleeping Christie. Erich approaches tentatively and Tina opens her eyes, and says, “I told you you’d be sorry.” Tina gets Christie to wake up by calling her name. Indeed she wakes up as Erich confiscates the doll pushing Christie back down as he explains to Annabelle who has entered the room, “She’s the one who’s been doing it.” Christie cries “Daddy! Daddy Please!”

“I’m not your Daddy!” he sharply yells.

Erich takes the doll to the garage and puts its head in a vise. “Die” he softly tells it. Tina chuckles and says “You’ll die.” Erich turns and turns the lever on the vise (shades of Scorsese’s “Casino” eye-popping murder scene). “I thought you said you had feelings” he says to Tina, puzzled over why she seems unharmed. “I can stand it if you can” she explains to him. Then he takes a blow torch and wields it toward her face. But the torch goes out whenever the flame gets close to Tina. Actually if you look carefully, you’ll see Savalas taking his finger off the trigger to make the flame go out. Now that’s a pretty low-tech special effect! So Erich retires the torch….Hey! “Erich Streator” is an anagram of “Retires a Torch!”

Anyway, next he takes Tina over to the circular electric table saw and tries to decapitate her. Sparks fly, but the saw is unable to penetrate the doll’s neck! Just then Annabelle walks in and tries to stop him. And this is one of those moments in TV shows and movies when the viewer wishes the character would demonstrate to another character; we long for Erich to say “Here! Look at this! See?! I’m not crazy! There isn’t even a scratch on the doll’s neck!” But alas, Annabelle runs back inside after Erich pushes her roughly aside. Lastly, Erich puts Tina in a sack and ties it up. He drops it in a trash can but we hear her tittering, seemingly unconcerned. For good measure Erich piles some small cinder blocks on top of the lid.

He goes upstairs to find Annabelle packing to leave him. She accuses him of perpetrating his bizarre actions with the doll to punish them: “You had to show your hatred for me and for Christie!”

Erich tries to explain his actions, but he just winds up sounding loony: “That doll talked to me. That doll said things no doll should say. I had to get rid of it!”

Annabelle can only respond, “You’ve become a stranger to me Erich. A sick, neurotic stranger. You’re filled with blind unreasonable hate. You better see a good psychiatrist.” She continues to pack.

Erich falls into a stupor as he mulls over everything. He sits ever so slowly onto the bed as his mind turns it over and over–he murmurs softly “I couldn’t have imagined it” but we know he must be considering that possibility however remote it is. Annabelle snaps at him as she packs, “Tell him [the psychiatrist] you tried to kill a doll.”

He continues questioning his own state of mind until coming up with, “I’ll give it back to her. Will that solve things?”

“I don’t know Erich” she says forlornly, and he gets up and goes down to the garage. He frees Talky Tina from her sack and she ungratefully chides, “I’m Talky Tina and I don’t forgive you.” Savalas’s reaction is a good one–frustration and fear and rage are all etched on his face. He utters something that isn’t quite a word–as though he wants to say “Shut up” but it almost sounds like he partly whispers “Shit” in anger. It’s as though saying anything to Tina would validate her “livingness.”

He trudges slowly up the stairs and silently hands over Tina to Christie who is sitting on the bed being comforted by Annabelle. Erich quietly leaves the two of them.

In bed that evening, Erich lies with his eyes open, unable to sleep. Then he hears a sound like the spring-wound mechanism of a moving doll. He bolts up. Annabelle, also awake, sits up and asks him “what is it?” (Hey they’re still sleeping in the same bed!) “I heard something” he tells her. She says “I don’t hear anything” but he gets up out of bed, protectively telling her to stay there. It’s little touches like that, that make the episode good and not so simplistic. If Erich was depicted as a total monster it wouldn’t make sense in the first place that Annabelle would ever marry him. Plus it also better serves as a warning to us all–that retribution wherever on the spectrum of deserved/undeserved justice it may fall, can come to anyone, anyone who is human with all our saintliness and foibles rolled into one entity.

So Erich goes out into the hallway and the sound starts up again. He goes to Christie’s door and checks in on her. She’s sound asleep but Tina is not in bed with her. Uh oh. He looks all about the room, but no Tina. One last glance at Christie’s bedroom wall and the drawings she has pinned up. He leaves the room. He’s looking all around as he starts down the steps. But he steps on a step that we see Tina is sitting on! He trips and falls all the way down to the bottom. (Look closely at the scene and when playing it over again, you can observe a massive continuity error in terms of where Tina is during the flight down the steps. You first see her in the air alongside Erich as they fall, but then we cut to a close up of his face as he lands. Tina rolls down the steps and lands next to him almost four seconds later.) Erich stares like a dead fish, not necessarily at Tina it seems, but then his eyes close and his head droops down–the TV acting version of signaling that “Okay now I have died.”

Annabelle at the top of the stairs screams out “Erich!” She runs down to him. She moves the doll aside as she says his name again. Still holding the doll we hear Tina say, “My name is Talky Tina…” Annabelle looks at it. Tina opens her eyes and says, “…and you better be nice to me!” With a look of subdued horror Annabelle drops the doll to the floor, realization seeping into her.

Closing Narration:

“Of course, we all know dolls can’t really talk, and they certainly can’t commit murder. But to a child caught in the middle of turmoil and conflict, a doll can become many things: friend, defender, guardian. Especially a doll like Talky Tina, who did talk and did commit murder—in the misty region of the Twilight Zone.”

I do find it very interesting that the doll would issue a vague threat to the mother. It’s pretty cool in a way and lends a whole provocative overview to the whole episode and what it could signify. It’s been pointed out already how the daughter’s name Christie and the doll’s name Tina are both variants of one name: Christina. So, some may interpret this to mean Tina is a delegate for Christie, able to vent anger at Erich. But why the warning issued to Mom? We might see this in a broader perspective of the doll or perhaps all toys in general as protectors of children against all things adult and non-innocent. Dolls and toys are children’s security blankets to hold when things get nasty or threatening or boring in a world where kids must interact with icky adults.

And Hey! “Living Doll’s Talky Tina” is an anagram of “Villain Talks Dotingly!”

I rate this episode an 8 out of 10.

Trivia:

This episode debuted on November 1, 1963. It was written by Jerry Sohl who said, “You really sympathize with the guy. If that goddamn doll kept saying those things, I’d feel the same way myself: throw it in the damn trash can!” Actually, the episode was based on an idea by Charles Beaumont but it was written in one day by Jerry Sohl, according to “The Twilight Zone Companion.” Beaumont however, is given sole credit. Produced by William Froug, Directed by Richard C. Saraflan. Director of Photography: Robert W. Pittack. Music by Bernard Herrmann, consisting of a solo bass clarinet, harps and celesta.

The doll used to depict Talky Tina was one made by the Vogue doll company, and its name was Brikette; it was a non-talking doll. Now then, most sources cite her as Talky Tina, but most survey voters on the Fan Pages refer to her as Talking Tina as did I for a while. So I had to listen very closely with my ear right to the speaker and I have to admit, it does sound more like “Talky” than “Talking.” It does make more sense that it’s Talky Tina anyway, because it is a sort of take-off on Mattel’s Chatty Cathy doll. And the additional connection there is the voice of both the real Chatty Cathy doll and this fictional Talky Tina doll. Both voices are supplied by actress June Foray, who died in 2017 at the age of 99. Ms. Foray was also the voice of the cartoon character Rocket J. “Rocky” Squirrel.

Mary LaRoche who played the mother Annabelle Streator was in another Twilight Zone episode, playing Mary(!) in “A World of His Own”, and Tracy Stratford as the daughter was also in another episode playing Tina(!!) in “Little Girl Lost.”

Telly Savalas playing the doll-hating Erich Streator, actually became a doll himself later in his career. Made by Excel by KulturePop, there are probably still some vintage Kojak dolls out there somewhere. Here are some links to pictures of them:

https://www.pinterest.com.au/pin/247557310743415349/

http://collectorgene.com/2012/04/kojack/

Watch “Living Doll” here for FREE.

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