Star Awards 2007 Crazy Cluck Chicken - “The Cluck Cluck Polka”

This is the sixth one of these I’ve owned… well, technically. Long story incoming!
If you’ve never seen this chicken before, you should know there’s about a billion different variants out there made by different companies over the years. I believe the earliest versions date back to 2002-2004, but from what I can tell I got my very first one in 2005. I was too young to remember the specifics, but I’m sure it came out of a mail order catalog. I do know that it played the chicken dance though, the same recording Gemmy used back in the day for things like Cornelius the dancing chicken and Chick the dancing hamster. That’s what almost all of these chickens play, but I’ll come back to that. I was terrified of my first chicken, which is unsurprising because I was very little and these things are very loud. It wasn’t long before my parents threw it out. It also wasn’t long before I got another one from my great grandma for my birthday. This one I remember firsthand, so it had to be at least 2006 or 2007. It had the same recording as my previous chicken, and I hated the thing the instant I saw it 😂. I remember taking it out to our sandbox and filling it with sand through the leg holes… yeah, that one didn’t last long either. I think, somewhere, we still have a video of my dad shooting it with a gun 🤔. Anyway, a few years went by, and these chickens seemed to be EVERYWHERE. A friend of mine had one, and I must’ve seen a dozen or more at yard sales. I also remember seeing these advertised in all kinds of catalogs for YEARS, up until 2010 ish. I think that’s where I got the name “Choke-A Polka Chicken” from, because that’s what I always called these when I was little and I was definitely not clever enough to come up with that myself lol.
I got my third chicken from one of those catalogs, “The Lighter Side” I believe, for Christmas around 2009. I guess I’d changed my mind about my old chickens by then, because I actually asked for this one and was thrilled to get it. But to my surprise, this one played a completely different recording! Rather than Gemmy’s old chicken dance recording, it sounded just like the one in this video. I don’t think that chicken was branded Star Awards like this one though, I don’t remember it ever having a giant tag and there were a number of other minor differences. That chicken lasted the longest of all five I’ve owned, though the choking part stopped working after awhile, and eventually one of the legs snapped off. I still owned that one when I found another just like it at a yard sale while on vacation, same recording and everything. It was fully working too, so I convinced my mom to let me buy it if I got rid of my old one. She agreed, and then the speaker randomly went out on my new one like a week later and I had to throw it out 😂. The years went by and I kinda lost interest in these, but they always seemed to show up everywhere I looked. I finally got my fifth at a yard sale around 2015 in a big box of toys, but it never worked and I eventually scrapped it to make some dumb custom out of it. That was the last Crazy Cluck chicken, or whatever you want to call it, I ever saw for years. It’s like they all disappeared from the face of the Earth simultaneously.
It wasn’t until the past 2 years that I’ve been seeing more surface on eBay, but I held myself back from buying one in hopes that I’d come across one locally again at a thrift store or yard sale or something. They seemed so common around here back in the day, anyway. I’m still holding off on buying a normal “Chicken Dance” model, but I couldn’t help myself when I saw this one on eBay for only $10 total and instantly knew it was going to have the different recording. It came on June first, and I was right. Hearing this weird song again brought back so many memories. It didn’t move at all at first, due to a split gear in the mouth and a cracked lever in one of the legs that was jamming up the mech. The lever was un-glueable and would’ve been a pain to replace, but I was actually able to find the mechanism from one of my old chickens and stole the piece from it. Now, he’s good as new. This is definitely not something I’d care for if it wasn’t for my long history with them, but I am very glad to have another one with me after all this time. Now I just need to find the original model! What a long description for such a meh item 😂
Thanks for reading, and for checking out the video! Hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think in the comments, and I hope to see you again soon!