How The Furby Flies

  • Your kid won't stop begging for a Furby, right? She says they squawk in kiddie gibberish and make gurgling noises and sing songs. And you've driven to every mall in the state and still can't find it. Your next-door neighbor traded his car for a dozen on a black-market website, but he's hoarding them until just before Christmas, prime time for scalping. You're stuck with a K Mart waiting list and cheerful lies from salespeople: "We'll call you soon." Makes you wanna gouge those adorable Furby eyes right out of their electronic sockets. So who's to blame? How did a little fuzzy doll become crucial to your eight-year-old's survival?

    As with most major problems of the late 20th century, it's the media's fault. Each February, a cabal of toy hawkers and toy reporters huddle at Toy Fair in (where else?) New York City. The hawkers try to coax the reporters into naming their toy the "hottest." Virtually every newspaper and TV station runs some version of this hot-new-toy story, which entices visually and appeals to journalism's need to find what's next. This has happened before (more about Cabbage Patch Kids in a minute), but the creation of the Furby--more important, the invention of a Furby craze--has set a new standard for an absurd game. Unlike even Tickle Me Elmo, the Furby became a must-have item this Christmas before almost any kid had made it say "kah a-tay."

    Skip ahead if you know what that means. Painfully cute, the Furby stands 5 in. tall and has an O-shaped mouth and bulging eyes. It looks a lot like creatures from the movie Gremlins. ("I do have a sense of deja vu when I look at those things," says film director Joe Dante. Warner Bros., which made Gremlins, has voiced concern to Hasbro, the corporate parent of Furby manufacturer Tiger Electronics, about the similarity.)

    The Furby also responds to touch, sound and light and apparently "develops" as a human playmate gets to know it. Indeed, California inventor David Hampton was inspired by the nurture-intensive electronic Tamagotchis he saw at the Toy Fair last year. One Furby advantage over the Tamagotchi: it doesn't die. Instead, the Furby "learns" to speak English, and it can teach a child Furbish, concocted by Hampton from Japanese, Thai, Hebrew and Mandarin Chinese. (Lesson One: "kah a-tay" means "I'm hungry.") Hampton sees his Furbies as the Adams and Eves of a grander world of interactive electronics. All for about $35.

    Much Furby hype originated with the geek-chic set. The magazine you're reading is partly responsible. After Toy Fair '98, TIME ran a Techwatch item mentioning them. USA Today also noticed, and after an electronics fair in May, CBS This Morning did a segment. That ginned up interest last summer, even though Furby's complicated innards meant it wouldn't be ready for stores until fall.

    Eager shoppers began hunting for Furbies over the summer--and were further inspired when Wired magazine ran a huge Furby feature in September, breeding even more TV stories. "It was incredible, all these reporters calling up and saying, 'Why is this so hot? You can't find this thing anywhere,'" says Jim Silver, publisher of Toy Book, a trade publication. "But the company hadn't even shipped any--of course they couldn't find it. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy."

    When Tiger finished the Furby--on schedule, in October--many more parents than usual knew about the new toy. Initial shipments sold out almost immediately. Now Furbies vanish from Target stores within a few hours of arriving from China. The Web's eToys.com has so few left it will hold a Furby giveaway sweepstakes after Thanksgiving. "If we got 30,000 tomorrow, we could sell 30,000 tomorrow," says eToys exec Phil Polishook. They have only about 300.

    Though some toymakers have reportedly tightened initial supplies to heighten interest (think Beanie Babies), Tiger had no such conspiratorial plans. "People need to realize that when we make toys, we make as many as we have orders for," says an exasperated Marc Rosenberg, Tiger's publicist. Before September, retailers had ordered 1 million, and a confident Tiger produced 1.3 million. But after all the publicity, perhaps 5 million could sell.

    The toy market has never been entirely responsive to its final consumers, since parents are required middlemen. But kids have probably never been so far removed from the creation of a toy fad as with Furbies.

    Consider the first toy mania, the one surrounding teddy bears early this century. Their ascendance stemmed partly from adult interest, says Gary Cross, a historian and author of Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Yes, the bears were cuddly, but parents liked the story that inspired them: Theodore Roosevelt's saving a baby bear on a 1902 hunting trip. Nevertheless, it was kids who ultimately made teddy bears more than a fad. It took at least four years for teddy bears to sell well, only after kids across the country started seeing them.

    Fast forward to the early '80s. Now defunct Coleco, an electronic-toy company, noticed that unique, arty dolls made in Georgia and first sold at fairs had developed celeb cache. Amy Carter and Burt Reynolds were seen with them. Real People did a segment (bonus points if you remember host Sarah Purcell). Coleco began aggressively pushing the Cabbage Patch dolls--it sent them directly to reporters, a relatively new technique. Of course the Cabbage Patch Kids eventually sold well (more than $700 million) because kids liked them. But the adult hook--reporters thought the dolls looked "traditional," like the ones Granny might have made on the farm--started the buzz. And the buzz led to scarcity, which in turn created more buzz.

    More recently, Tickle Me Elmo tested fairly well in the slew of kid-judged contests held every year (Family Fun magazine, Duracell batteries, and CBS all sponsor such tests, involving thousands of children across the nation). But Tyco, the Mattel-owned manufacturer, didn't expect it to become a giant seller. Then Rosie O'Donnell tickled Elmo on her show, and demand exploded. Once again, scarcity inspired collectors, reporters discovered a "hot" story, and your kid bawled his eyes out two years ago because Santa couldn't find Elmo before Christmas morn.

    These past toy trends began with at least some kid's interest--be it Amy Carter's or Parker O'Donnell's. In fact, Tyco had sold some 400,000 Tickle Me Elmos before Rosie flacked them. (It has sold 10 million since.) But it remains to be seen whether kids will like all the Furbies their parents are trying so hard to find. Furby appeared too late to join in toy contests, and most kids won't have them in hand until late December.

    "These days the frenzy often has nothing to do with the toys themselves," says Julie Creighton, who helped run the Duracell tests this year. "Sometimes the hot toy is not such a good toy." In other words, there's a chance that the Furby could still fail with America's picky young consumers. Furbies are loud and demanding: even the preternaturally friendly Katie Couric asked Tiger's Rosenberg on the Today show, "Can you get them to shut up now?"

    Not all fad toys are media creations, of course. This year the yo-yo has sold better than it has in any year since the '60s, and it has appeared on the hot lists. High-tech, easier-to-use yo-yos explain some of the new interest--as do new marketing efforts in schools and colleges--but classic toys, polished and updated, always have a way of coming back in waves of nostalgia and inherent playfulness. Barbie, for example, is a multibillion-dollar juggernaut, even after 39 years. "The yo-yo has an established folklore," says historian Cross. "My kids play with it. So will yours." We'll have to wait and see about the Furby.