Furby
The charming or creepy (you pick) love child of a mogwai and Winnie the Pooh’s Owl, Furby arrived on the heels of the Tickle Me Elmo “must have” toy fad. Introduced to the world by toy manufacturer Tiger Electronics in 1998, Furbys babbled a whimsical language dubbed “Furbish” and harbored robotic parts linked to sensors that reacted to changes in light, sound or touch. Their waggish utterances gradually shifted to only marginally more recognizable English exclamations over time in what must have seemed either miraculous or terrifying—both?—to the tens of millions of children who owned one.
