Greg Hyman, an electronics wizard and toy inventor who was a creator of Tickle Me Elmo, the giggling red plush Muppet that crushed sales records when it appeared in 1996 and became a touchstone of runaway toy success, died on May 1 at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 78.
His partner, Deborah Nelson, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.
In the early 1990s, Mr. Hyman was a veteran toy inventor whose longtime business partner, Larry Greenberg, had recently died. The pair had been known for their electronic innovations, including a talking robot named Alphie. On his own, Mr. Hyman had made a talking Barney, a toy version of the goofy purple dinosaur from the children’s TV series “Barney and Friends.”
A fledgling inventor named Ron Dubren, who knew Mr. Hyman’s reputation for being clever with sounds, proposed that they collaborate on an idea he had for a giggling toy. Could they make a toy whose laughter escalated in a kind of jag? Together, they came up with a giggling monkey called Tickles the Chimp and began to shop it around.
An executive at Tyco was intrigued, but not with the laughing chimp. He thought the tickle technology would be a nice fit for a toy version of Elmo, the red baby monster with a squeaky voice and a habit of referring to himself in the third person — one of the most popular Muppets on the public television show “Sesame Street.”
But while Tyco was licensed to produce plastic toys of “Sesame Street” characters, it didn’t have the license to produce plush toys; that belonged to Hasbro. Hasbro’s license was expiring soon, though, and Tyco was eager to scoop it up. Elmo could be the lure.
In the meantime, Mr. Hyman and Mr. Dubren began working on a toy called Tickle Me Taz, a giggling version of the Looney Tunes cartoon character the Tasmanian Devil — a plush license the company did have. But before Tickle Me Taz left the drawing board, Tyco won the plush license for “Sesame Street,” and Mr. Hyman and Mr. Dubren pivoted to Elmo.
He was adorable, a cuddly bundle of red fluff and googly Muppet eyes. He not only giggled and spoke — “That tickles!” — but also vibrated when tickled three times.
What followed was retail mayhem. The first Tickle Me Elmos arrived in toy stores during the summer of 1996. Tyco initially produced 400,000, all of which were sold out by the day after Thanksgiving. As the company scrambled to make more, deploying Boeing 747s to deliver them, there were reports of frantic parents ambushing toy store employees and each other.
A clerk at a Wal-Mart in Canada was trampled by a scrum of shoppers as he unpacked a late-night shipment, suffering a broken rib and a concussion. (There were also weird, unauthorized spinoffs, like Tickle Me Elmo marijuana pipes, which did not amuse the people at the Children’s Television Workshop, the production company behind “Sesame Street.”)
A black market quickly emerged, with reports of Elmos — which had a retail price of $29.99 — being scalped for as much as $7,000 each. Entrepreneurs took to the internet, selling Elmos to the highest bidders, some of whom offered not just bundles of cash but dubious sob stories of children ill with cancer. John Gotti Jr., the son of the notorious mob boss, was rumored to have acquired a case of Elmos from a store in Queens, although that turned out to be an urban fable.
Tickle Me Elmo had made retail history. How did Mr. Hyman and Mr. Dubren fare? Did riches flow to them?
“It depends on how you define ‘rich,’” Mr. Dubren said in an interview. “I can do whatever I want to do creatively. I don’t have to worry about money. I’m sure Greg was in the same boat.”
Greg Eaton Hyman was born on June 25, 1947, in New Rochelle, N.Y., to Catherine (Eaton) Hyman and Julian Hyman, a lawyer. The marriage was a short one, and Greg was raised by his father and stepmother, Jean (Miller) Hyman, a music teacher.
From a young age, he was singularly focused: At 11, he offered inventing lessons involving electricity to his classmates (the first three were free) and sold “rocket ship” rides on a craft he built from an old washing machine, with a baby-carriage cockpit.
At 16, he had a business installing burglar alarms. He studied electrical engineering at Cornell, but dropped out during his freshman year so he could return to his family’s basement, where he had a workshop for his inventions. He fixed CB radios and built a sort of bumper car that hovered over the ground. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, he invented a device to thwart would-be thieves from siphoning gas out of car tanks.
He was mentored by a family friend, Larry Greenberg, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, who set him up with an uncle, Ron Greenberg, a producer of TV game shows. The elder Mr. Greenberg commissioned Mr. Hyman to create the aural and visual accompaniments to the genre: the lights, buzzers and chimes that signaled failure or a win.
Mr. Hyman’s toy career began the year he combined his sound innovations in a birthday gift for Larry Greenberg: a box with touch-tone buttons. When Mr. Greenberg’s young son began playing with it as if it were a musical instrument, Mr. Greenberg asked Mr. Hyman to rework the gizmo so it would play proper notes.
The pair began to tinker with it, and the gizmo morphed into Major Morgan, a 16-note hand-held electronic organ in a frame that resembled a cartoon of a drum major. The toy manufacturer Playskool bought it and began selling it in 1979.
Over the next two decades, the men licensed some 40 toys together, including a series of dolls they worked on with Judith Blau, an artist known for painting bagels. Their hits included Baby All Gone, which used a spring technology to make the “milk” in a baby’s bottle seem to disappear when you tipped the bottle into the baby’s mouth, and Baby Check-Up, which came with a stethoscope that made the sound of a heartbeat when pressed to the baby’s heart.
Mr. Hyman’s four marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Nelson, his partner of 22 years, he is survived by a stepsister, Barbara Dickey, and a stepbrother, Fred Doob.
Mr. Hyman and Mr. Dubren didn’t collaborate much after Tickle Me Elmo. They kicked around a few ideas, including another Elmo toy with some new features. They didn’t find any takers.
Mr. Dubren declined to share the concept or the toy’s name. He’s still hoping to sell somebody on it.
