Word: toying
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...