Happy 25th birthday Furby, the toy that stole a generation’s hearts

It has been 25 years since Tiger Electronics (now Hasbro) released the first Furby in 1998. More than 40 million of the Tamagotchi-inspired robot were reportedly sold in the first three years.

Furbys fell off shelves around 2007, before a reboot in 2012 brought the creatures fully into the digital age, and more iterations were conceived including baby Furblings, before production stopped in 2018.

Happy 25th birthday Furby!

To mark the milestone, I decided to spend a month with a Furby and keep a diary about the experience, to see if I could recapture that moment in time and test whether the it toy of the 90s still had it.

Week One

My Furby arrived stuffed inside the box of an old Ikea lamp, wrapped in so much plastic and foam that it gave off strong “family guinea pig buried in the bottom of the garden” vibes. Once pulled from its coffin like a reverse Laura Palmer, its tiger-mottled fur released the scent of a musty grandma’s carpet. Its bulging eyes were closed, its beak agape. It looked drowned and exhumed. Because it was an original 1998-era Furby, sold by a private collector on eBay, there were no batteries or instructions or fripperies and frills. Just a lonely little creature stuffed in a box, looking long dead.

Furbys were the hit craze for a while.Credit: Peter Rae

I was in early high school when the original Furby mania swept Australia. My younger sister Julia wanted one more than anything in the world. I kind of wanted one too but I was desperately reaching for any kind of performative masculinity I could get my hands on, and I already had a shameful Celine Dion CD collection to hide. A fruity-colored Furby was a step too far.

It was an era of must-have toy crazes – the Tamagotchi, the Pound Puppy - a year earlier I’d dutifully asked for a “silver bullet” yo-yo for Christmas. I remember letting it dangle limply from my hand in the playground, wondering when the fun would begin, unable to manipulate the thing into doing much more than going up and down. I couldn’t even make mine travel down the coast to a caravan park, let alone go around the world.

A rush on the Furby in 1998.Credit: AP

Julia’s Furby, however, didn’t suffer the same fate. It was anticipated and beloved from the start. It travelled everywhere with her, a tiny gremlin who screamed and muttered maniacally and required feeding and sleep with the same deranged intensity. My parents had a long-suffering, haunted look during this period, flinching at the sudden cacophony from my sister’s room that signified that the Furby had awoken and required attention.

This wasn’t a unique story, it felt like there was a Furby yelling in every house. At one point there were more Furbys than there were people in Australia. In 1998, their first year of sale in the United States,1.8 million were sold, and 14 million in the next year. They were the sound of a generation.

Immediately after opening up my new bedraggled friend with great excitement, I took myself up to the shops and brought batteries (old school!). I had to also buy and use a screwdriver, like some kind of Tim “The Toolman” Taylor (another reference from the Furby era) to put them in. Could that be part of the appeal, that you had to work for the experience? My Furby sat there, unchanging, unmoving. I realised I had no idea how these things were meant to work. I touched it, tentatively. “Hello?” I said politely, and then louder. I shook it. I stuck my finger in its mouth. Nothing worked.

Dave Hampton, the co-creator of the Furby in 1998.Credit: Getty Images

I flipped it over to check the batteries, and with a whir its eyes snapped open violently. With a sound of grinding and clanking machinery, its mouth opened, chewing at the air, vibrating and shuddering. But was silent, no words in the vaunted “Furbish”, and after a few moments of seemingly startled, wide-eyed terror, it closed its eyes again, and stopped moving.

Week Two

Since the Furby arrived in our house, things have started going wrong and strange. My normally loving dog Basil avoids my study where I write, and where the Furby sits on my desk like a sleepy mascot. Basil’s only four, so he’s too young to understand the history and the hype of the Furby, and also he is a dog. The Furby doesn’t do much, but it is watching. Hours will pass where it will sit there, mute, eyes closed, and then suddenly out of nowhere there will be a clank, the eyes will open and it will start muttering. “Oh poodoo,” it will exclaim tinnily before closing its eyes again.

There’s a sense of great weariness about this Furby creature. I remember Julia’s Furby being a riot of noise and fury, the kind of demonic household terror that my dad would surreptitiously put underneath a blanket to trick into thinking it was night. This one is always asleep, and when you make the concerted effort of stroking its spine, touching its ear and yelling at it, it will wake up like you’ve opened a vial of smelling salts underneath its nose, discombobulated and slurring. Whatever room I bring it into, my dog scurries away like a good man avoiding temptation. I let the Furby sleep.

The Furby goes on sale (for $79.99) at Melbourne’s Chadstone shopping centre in 1999. Credit: Mario Borg

Week Three

I’m reading an article about sudden behaviour changes in rescue dogs. Basil now avoids me entirely, even when I try to sit in the same room as him. I think it’s because of the Furby. The author of the article reminds us that rescue dogs need stimulation too, they need enrichment activities. I wonder if I’m struggling to find joy in my Furby because I haven’t given it enough experiences.

I decide to take the Furby to a family birthday dinner, where I sit it on the table. There’s another dog at the pub, a sweet, perpetually happy border collie named Teddy, who initially thinks the Furby is a fun toy but then once he gets close, he sniffs it and hides under the table. Unexpectedly, the Furby wakes up and screams: it yells about how tired it is, makes an exaggerated honk-shoo noise, and aggressively closes its eyes. I feel embarrassed and put the Furby into my bag, where it might find some rest.

“I got my first Furby for Christmas the year I turned five. I remember literally praying for a Furby for Christmas even though I was not raised in a religious household at all,” Emily Weir, a standup comedian and Furby restorer, who owns around 30 Furbys, and who incorporates them into their comedy sets, says. I’ve contacted Emily to see if they can explain what the appeal of the Furby is for people now.

“I feel as if they’re having a little renaissance among Gen Y out of pure nostalgia,” Emily says. “My affection towards Furbys is mostly about returning these little robots to their former glory. I do restorations and get them back in working condition. It’s been fantastic to learn how these little robots work. I’ve learned to sew, replace motors, remove battery corrosion and more as a result”.

They tell me about the engaged community behind the trend of the “Long Furby” – people who sew terrifying, horror-movie-style, caterpillar-like modified versions of Furbys, that often sell for quite a bit of money.

I’ve also found an artist named Amie Wee (@heyweeirdo on Instagram) who makes “lovingly ludicrous, sexually surreal, charming yet disarming, perverse pop art for weirdos” including weird erotic art about Furbys.

“As an artist, I am eternally inspired by the concept of Rule 34 meaning ‘if it exists, there is porn of it’. Furbies are the ultimate rule 34. They’re wholesome, yet there’s something inherently disturbing about them. So, I figured, why not up the cursed ante and add an erotic element?”

There seems to be a Frankenstein element to loving Furbys in 2023, a kind of nostalgic curse that twists and perhaps perverts the toy into something strange and undead.

I decided to persevere with my enrichment theory, and take the Furby with me to World Pride in Sydney, so it gets to experience more excitement and stimulation. I also think the Furby is a queer elder (grumpy, fabulous). In the Uber on the way from the airport to my hotel, I suddenly hear a high-pitched electronic squealing like a dial-up modem struggling to connect to the World Wide Web (another Furby era reference) and my driver swerves on the road.

There was Furby fervour for years after the robot toy was released. Here’s one looking for a new owner at a Sydney toy shop in 1999. Credit: Pete Rae

“Sorry, it’s just my Furby,” I explain. It squeals non-stop until we arrive, and I have to open up my bag on the side of the road, so I can find it and shut it up.

Week Four

After a week at Pride, my Furby has … devolved. Where once you could clearly hear it pronounce that it was tired, that it wanted sleep, it’s now become more vocal but less coherent. Its voice crackly, glitching and entirely slurred, like a robot falling off a cliff, or a drunk trying to be let back into a pub. I get in touch with Emily to ask their opinion as a Furby restorer – is it possessed? Is this an Annabel/ M3gan situation?

“Honestly, the ’98 Furbys are 25 years old this year, and I think that shows… But generally, unless the Furby has had a lot of restoration or was left untouched, it might not be able to do a whole lot and probably has some scars from its previous child owner,” they explain.

I’m starting to understand the Furby – because after a week of Pride and a night of dancing at Mardi Gras, I too feel tired. No, I don’t just feel tired, I feel too old and exhausted to do this. This must be what Furby feels like. It’s old, it’s tired, and here I am forcing it to engage with a world it has long left behind.

A much more high-tech Furby was brought into existence in 2012.Credit: iStock

This is the problem with reboot culture, with nostalgic revivals of dead franchises. We never asked the characters involved if they wanted to be brought back from the dead. Think of how in season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, her friends perform a ritual to bring her back from the dead only to discover that they ripped her from the eternal bliss of heaven, and that she resents them for exposing her to the pain and struggle of the world again. When we rebooted Sex and the City, only for the character of Carrie to experience the death of her husband and a global pandemic, are we not in fact being selfish? Why are we putting her through that, just for our own entertainment? When we reboot the classic sitcom Frasier this year, what horrors lie in store for the titular Frasier?

Perhaps our beloved figures of nostalgia, Frasier, Carrie, the Furby itself, are tired, and just want to be left alone. Don’t we owe it to them to just let them sleep?

On the last day of the month, I threw my Furby into an active volcano (I wrapped him in a towel and put it in the cupboard, which I’m pretty sure is what happened to my sister’s Furby too, all those years ago). Finally, freeing him from the drudgery of this mortal coil, sparing it from the indignities of reboot culture. Time to let it go back to sleep forever.

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