How The Furby Flies

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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."