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No. No. Just close your eyes, and maybe this will go away.
Just when parents were getting over the 1998 nightmare, it's back. Tiger Electronics, a wing of megalith toy maker Hasbro Inc. (HAS), has leaked a single, foreboding photograph of the successor to one of the most popular (and terrible) toys of all time. Take a deep breath. The Furby is back, according to the Daily Mail.
Oh, do you not remember? The time, long ago, when lines of consumers didn't snake around Apple (AAPL) stores in anticipation of the next iPad, but toy stores waiting for the next cheap, plastic plaything. The chaos -- the utter hysteria -- that engulfed America when Furby hit the shelves is sure to still gives some parents nightmares.
"We've never had Furby in our stores for more than 15 minutes," the CEO of KB Toys -- a now-defunct subsidiary of Big Lots, Inc. (BIG) -- told the New York Times when the craze hit.
And what exactly did it do, again?
It blinked its calculating, robotic eyes and talked. Actually, it didn't stop talking in its incredibly annoying native tongue, furbish, before 'learning' English through conversation. Do you know what wee-tah-kah-loo-loo means? It means tell me a joke. And what's the biggest joke of all? How much money a computer chip set in hard-cast plastic and multicolored fur made.
The first Furby sold forty million units over three years before disappearing into consumer obscurity. $35 at release, the price of a single Furby was hiked up to $100 by retailers around Christmas time. In auctions and on sites like eBay (EBAY) a Furby could fetch up to $300.
The news has set toy-enthusiastic abuzz wondering what new features are in store.
"The image suggests that the moving facial parts have been entirely replaced by an LCD screen," say toy expert Peter Jenkins of toyology.com. "This will prompt lots of talk, not all of it intelligible, on Furby forums."
So, either drop out of society or get in line because your kid (cousin, niece, grandson) is going to probably going to want one come holiday season.
