‘Is that a Furby?’: Return of the ’90s with a dancing toy chorus

On the ground floor of the Emporium shopping centre, a glass display case is filled with rows of tiny furry toys with pointy ears, lidded plastic eyes and yellow beaks.

A shopper wanders past and peers at the display: “Is that what I think it is?” she asks. “Is that a Furby?”

The beloved ’90s toy is back as part of Furby Chorus and Friends, an installation of Furbies for Rising Festival.

The Furbies have been programmed to perform a choreographed dance piece, moving and twitching to music every 15 minutes.

“It’s obviously nostalgic for some age groups, but it’s also just got this sort of uncanny valley fascination about it too,” Hannah Fox, director of Rising, says.

The original Furby was released in 1998 and became wildly popular: a small furry robot toy that could blink its eyes, spoke an imaginary language called Furbish and could not be turned off.

At the peak of the Furby hype, they were banned from flights because of concerns of potential interference with planes’ computer systems and by the National Security Agency in the United States to prevent the toys, which could record and repeat audio, from capturing confidential information.

Furbies are riding a wave of ‘90s nostalgia, typified by the popular meme ‘Mum, what were you like in the 90s?’, reflecting on a time of slap bracelets, Saturday morning cartoons and boy bands.

Jemimah Widdicombe, senior curator at the National Communications Museum, which created the Furby Chorus, says there is a 30-year cycle for nostalgia: in the ’90s people looked back to the ’60s, just as we look to the ’90s now.

“What we hear in the museum is people feel nostalgic for things that they can touch and interact with in a physical way,” she says. “As our world becomes more and more complex and we’re dealing with a lot of screen-based things and AI, there’s this nostalgia for a time lost.”

The installation features Furbies from the ’90s, but Furbies are now reaching a new generation after toy giant Hasbro re-released the Furby three years ago to mark the 25th anniversary of the toy.

The new Furbies have had a glow up, with technicolour fur, glowing ears and an expanded range of interactions.

Cameron Holman is the studio technician at NCM who led the creation of the Furby Chorus and says the museum deliberately chose to focus on original Furbies, putting a call-out on social media to find them.

“It’s a question of what people can relate to but also internally the old school 1998 Furbies are just a beautiful mechanism,” he says. “They’re all driven off one motor, which is quite elegant in design rather than the new digital ones, but it also makes them really fun and really easy to hack and control.”

Holman and his team took apart the donated Furbies and hacked them so they could operate the toys in a synchronised way.

Holman has experience in the field – when he was five years old he received a green Furby with a blue mohawk as a gift. It “went to God” when Holman ripped it apart to discover how it operated.

“I wasn’t as good at putting them back together then,” he says.

Inspiration also came from the UK’s Eurovision entry this year, Look Mum No Computer, which also features Furbies.

Electronic musician Sam Battle created and played a Furby Organ made by gutting dozens of Furbies and wiring their individual sound-making circuit boards into a multi-tiered synthesizer.

Many of the Furbies used in Melbourne’s Furby Chorus were donated by Freddy Weir, 31, who got their first Furby when the toy came out in 1998 and has been “enamoured with them ever since”.

Weir, who is non-binary, started collecting Furbies again during Melbourne’s COVID lockdowns and says they are “queer icons” of indeterminate gender.

“Furbies are generally something a little bit other,” they say. “They’re not really a cuddly toy, they’re not really a robot, they’re something in between”.

Weir also loves the 1990s nostalgia of the Furbies for what they say was “simpler times”, a sentiment that marketer Kate Forrester has been tapping into on social media with her posts on ’90s culture in Melbourne, an era of wearing Sass & Bide black rats leggings to Seven nightclub.

“Adidas and Nike have just signed on major people from that time as well because nostalgia is this huge new movement,” she says. “It is ultimately connection based on something that we identify with.”

Dr Lauren Rosewarne, associate professor at Melbourne University, says the nostalgia for the ’90s has been going for a while, from the Oasis reunion to sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld continuing to perform well in streaming services.

“Partly this is about middle-age folk idealising their youth – which is something that has happened throughout history – and partly it’s about selling this era to young people as an idealised decade filled with cool music and toys,” she says.

However, ’90s nostalgia only goes so far. Hasbro has ensured the new generation of Furbies come with an off switch.

Furby Chorus and Friends is at Emporium Melbourne, May 27 to June 21, as part of Rising Festival.

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