October 16, 2024 • 42 mins
In late 1998, a furry, nonsense-babbling creature arrived on the toy scene. The Furby could squeal, snore, sneeze, and … learn to speak English? Immediately upon release, thousands were backordered. Fights broke out in stores. The early internet lit up with conspiracy theories. And Furby was actually banned from the National Security Agency for its alleged potential for espionage. For today’s episode, we partnered with Celia Aniskovich’s Dial Tone Films to tell the ultimate toy story.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Okay, So like it's a little triangular, cone shaped creepy
animal with two little feet sticking out the bottom that
are don't do anything.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It's kind of a cross between like a bird and
a little bear.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Maybe had a soft fur and a very sweet, expressive face,
and it was sort of like it looked like a
lot of things, so it was generally compared to.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
Like a Grumlin.
Speaker 6 (00:38):
It looks a little bit like Gizmo. Is these cute
little eyes and bats, its eyelashes.
Speaker 7 (00:43):
Buzzy tail like a rabbit, and long ears for some reason,
are they are the ears of Yeah, there's been years.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
I guess I guess they're ears.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah, they're cute but a little creepy at the same time.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
It's a couple of weeks before Christmas nineteen ninety eight.
Crowds across the US are out in droves doing their
holiday shopping. But if you happen to be buying a
gift for a kid, you're looking for one thing, and
one thing only, the must have toy that's both cute
(01:14):
and a little creepy Ferbie, and godspeed to you, because
nineteen ninety eight hottest toy is also nearly impossible to
find for the past two months. Ever since this six
inch furry animatronic creature appeared, crowds have been lining up
(01:35):
outside toy stores in the early morning hours. But even
that level of preparation doesn't guarantee protection from the shall
we say tenacity of other American consumers. Despite being first
in line at a Walmart in Des Moines, one grandmother
(01:55):
was shoved hard against a door by the matting crowd.
She walked away with an armful of bruises, not toys.
In other cities, there were reports of fights, cursing stampedes.
By the end of the year, the world was split
into two groups, the have ferbies and the have nots,
(02:19):
But just a month later, in early nineteen ninety nine,
it wasn't clear who the winners actually were. Parents reported
their Ferbies wouldn't shut up. They were talking in a
language people couldn't understand except for what sounds like swear words.
(02:40):
But as we'd later find out, the biggest issue with
ferbies wasn't that they were scarce or that they were swearing.
The biggest issue they might be spying on us. Welcome
to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host,
(03:00):
Dana Schwartz, and this is the Ferbie Files.
Speaker 8 (03:10):
Welcome to season two. I'm Jason English. I'm here with
Danish Wartz and Zaron Burnett. As always, put up Jason, Dana. Hey, Hey,
big day.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
For us, Very exciting.
Speaker 8 (03:21):
Good to be back here, Good to be back in.
Just before we started recording, I got an email. I
got word that the Very Special Episode's podcast has been
nominated for a Signal Award.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Oh my god, look at us.
Speaker 8 (03:34):
This is legit, dude. The Signal Awards are the Webby
Awards podcast awards. If that's confusing, it's kind of like
the Grammys of podcasting, the MTV Video Music Awards and podcasting.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
The Oscars of podcasts.
Speaker 8 (03:49):
Yeah, the JD Power and Associates. We're in the Best
Commute Podcast category. Very cool category. Yes, congratulations, gratulations Josh
producer Josh here as well the whole team.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
This is very exciting. I'm very proud of us, and
I feel like there's no better way to kick off
season two than with this specific episode.
Speaker 9 (04:13):
This is a fun one. Oh my god, so perfect
for a commute I mean, like, lend us your ears,
We'll give you entertainment.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
When you think of Ferbees today, if you think of
Ferbe's today, you might think of one of the first
successful electronic toys of its kind. They must have toy
of the nineties an absolute worldwide phenomenon, But of course
it wasn't always that way. Every legend has its origin story,
(04:42):
and every multimillion dollar toy brand has its humble beginnings.
In the case of Ferby, it was a forty somethingter
former naval electronics expert who was living off the grid
in rural California.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
The guy who really deserves most of the credit, I'd
say ninety nine percent out of the state.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Amped After leaving the Navy, Dave had turned to toy
to He spent much of his career developing new products
for large companies like Mattel, but by the nineteen nineties
he decided to go the independent route because what Dave
really wanted to do was build something of his own,
(05:24):
and in February nineteen ninety seven, he found himself in
New York City looking for inspiration at the industry's annual
trade show, Toy Fair.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Just for the year or two prior to Ferby, there
was a very popular electronic character or thing called Tamagatchi.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
That's Stuart Simms. He met Dave when he was senior
vice president of Product development and Marketing for Tiger Electronics, and.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
These were sort of little characters that were on in
LCD screen. The display was about the size of a pendant,
and the idea was that you more you interacted with it,
the healthier it became, and the more fun you had
with it. Theoretically, you were raising a pet.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
So Dave Hampton is wandering around Toy Fair hoping something
will catch his eye. On his last day there, he
sees the Tamagachi. At this point, it's already big in Japan,
but it hasn't been released in the US yet. Dave
likes how interactive it is, but in his opinion, there's
(06:32):
one very clear problem. You can't pet it.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Stave's that we can do a lot better than that.
We can make something that's real or appears to be real.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
So Dave goes back to California and, alongside fellow toy
designer Caleb Chung, starts feverishly working on this idea, a
Tamagatchi that you can pet. After some tinkering, the toy
starts coming together. It has large expressive eyes, big ears,
(07:05):
a little beak, and a round, fuzzy body. With the
help of a knob, it blinks, it moves its head,
it wiggles around. It's rudimentary, for sure, but there's something there.
Dave calls it Ferby. Dave has big dreams for Ferby.
He envisions a toy that reacts to stimuli around it,
(07:29):
that talks and dances and burps and sneezes and laughs,
a toy that can communicate with other Ferbies and even
learn English. He wants it to be more like a
friend than an amalgamation of cold plastic parts. Dave starts
shopping the prototype around to the toy manufacturers, and by
(07:53):
mid nineteen ninety seven, Ferby has made its way to
Tiger Electronics. Tiger was a small but mighty toy powerhouse,
best known for its handheld electronic games, for a Tamagotchi
competitor called GigaPets, and for Talkboy now, the voice recorder
(08:15):
and modulator made famous in home alone too. Tiger had
a reputation for taking chances, and they were looking for
a new hit. This early Ferby. It seemed promising.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
You know, we as a company saw lots and lots
of tremendous and exciting inventor concepts, but generally they would
fall into different categories of toys that sort of existed,
and this was the first time that we were presented
a product that was going to, in a lot of ways,
feel alive.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Jeff Jones was VP of Marketing at Tiger Electronics at
the time.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
I don't know what made me think it was a
good idea, but I you know, we saw it. It
was super rudimentary, but there was something just inherently unique
and special about it.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Jeff's boss, Stuart Simms remembers seeing Ferby for the first
time too well.
Speaker 5 (09:16):
Captinated me about it was it sounded like something that
was totally fresh and new, and I thought our line
needed something unique, and so I wanted to do it.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Stuart Simms, as we were walking out after having seen it,
I looked at him and I said, if we do it,
I want it.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
By the fall of nineteen ninety seven, all of Tiger
is fully on board with Ferby, so much so they
decide they want it available to the public before Christmas
nineteen ninety eight, which means it needs to be ready
to show off to industry buyers by next year's toy
(09:54):
Fare just a few short months away. It's a timeline
that is almost unheard of, but they pull it off.
And exactly one year after Dave Hampton and first struck
upon the idea, Ferby is at Toy Fair in a
display surrounded by purple tumbleweeds and a sparkly sky, ready
(10:18):
to wow, or at least they hope so. Because the
thing is the prototype they've rushed to get together. It's
a little well crude.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
When we first presented Ferbi at Toy Fair, we didn't
have a Furby that was working.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
This Ferby was a long way from the Ferby children
across the world came to know and love. Sure, it
more or less looked the same, the big eyes and ears,
the furry body. But this Ferby wasn't free and loose
and chatty. It was tethered by a cable to an
(10:56):
electronics box. Still, there was something about it that caught
buyer's eyes. Ferby soon became the talk of the fair.
KB toys asked for several hundred thousand of them. The
Walmart buyer in attendance snaps up a third of the
(11:16):
entire supply. A supply that is at this point completely hypothetical.
As Jeff Jones explains.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
I remember riding back to the airport after Toyfair. We
have a product manager and he said to me, you know,
how does it feel to have the hit of Toy Fair?
And I said, well, it's great, except we haven't shipped
any we haven't sold any, so still we still have
ways to go.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Not only has Tiger not actually sold any, they haven't
even fully built any, at least not any that are
ready for the public. And now they have to do
this coding, building, testing, producing, shipping by October. This process
could normally take years, and now they're doing it in months.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
From the faithful day when I've said to sit said
if we do it, I want it to when we shipped,
my entire life became consumed with this, absolutely consumed.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
The whole team, in fact, is consumed. Dave Hampton designs
and programs the Ferbie brain and how it reacts and
responds to stimuli. Another group develops its mechanics and puppeteers
orchestrate it's every movement. Really, it's a work of art.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
The way that Ferby moved was extremely lifelike. They puppeteered
every possible movement Ferbie could think, from the speed of
its eyes to the synchronization of the beak when it
was speaking, to when it would tilt forward and back dancing,
(12:57):
to ear movements, everything like that.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Dave also creates a language for Ferby, Furbish, which borrows
from Thi, Mandarin, and Hebrew. When everything is finished, Ferby
is capable of at least three hundred different unique combinations
of eye, ear, and mouth movements, and at full capacity,
(13:19):
can speak nearly two hundred words.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
It had a sense of actual life. Right. The thing
about toys is that they tend to be very cause
and effect, Like you do this, and this happens. You
do something else, something else happens. The thing about Ferby
was Ferby behaved the way Ferbey behaved most of the time,
unless it didn't like sometimes when you tickled it. Most
(13:48):
of the time, it would laugh. Occasionally, it would burp, occasionally,
it would fart, occasionally, it would make some other sound. Right,
that's very organic, that's very alive.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
In September nineteen ninety eight, Wired magazine publishes an article
that delves extensively into Ferby's creation and development. It sets
Ferby up as the hottest toy of the upcoming holiday season.
It also sets off a media frenzy. Reporters are hustling
(14:19):
to cover a thing that doesn't even exist, so when
Ferby arrives, it arrives in a big way. On October second,
nineteen ninety eight, Ferby makes its debut, fittingly in the
same city Dave Hampton first had his revelation, New York.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Ferby was launched at fair Schwartz.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
That's Jeff Jones again, VP of Marketing at Tiger.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
So there was lots of media there and there were
kids lined up to experience Ferby for the first time.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
At the appointed time, a white stretch limousine pulls up
on Fifth Avenue. Six children, each carrying a purple pillow
with a Ferby carefully balanced on top, make their way
down the red carpet as kids around them cheer. It is,
(15:14):
in short, a spectacle and it works.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
It started generating momentum, and then it sort of got crazy.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Ferby's start making their way into toy stores across America.
They arrive in shipments of a dozen, thirty or a
couple hundred, far fewer numbers than the customers that want one.
The race to get a Ferbie is on.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
There were lines and stores. The receptionist that the Tiger
office was absolutely bombarded with phone calls. And then people
started buying it and we sold out of the initial
shipment and like no time at.
Speaker 10 (15:57):
All, Ferby has fueled a feeding frenzy.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Every morning we have a line out the front door
for a month.
Speaker 11 (16:05):
People had been on the prowl hunting for Ferby. This
year is hotter than hot new toy.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Now my money right here, Irby.
Speaker 9 (16:13):
Ah, the Ferby, the little gremlin like creature.
Speaker 8 (16:16):
People were lined up at midnight to get.
Speaker 12 (16:18):
It's the hottest toy in America. There is one hundreds
and hundreds of people and there's hundreds of people waiting
still in line.
Speaker 13 (16:25):
Police were even on hand to keep the peace.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
We are out of Ferbi.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
How do you describe a spark? Right, It just sort
of happened. It just took off, and then the legend grew.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Profits grow too. Around two million Furbies are sold between
October and December nineteen ninety eight. Demand is so great
that a secondary market emerges where folks sell Ferbies for
hundreds and hundreds of dollars, far more than their thirty
(16:57):
dollars retail price, it seems like people would do anything
to get one.
Speaker 11 (17:03):
With a chug of eggnog, the Ferbie Derby is on.
These three Ferby seekers are competing in a radio contest
for one of the rare toys. The rules are easy.
Drink the eggnog, decorate a Christmas tree, wrap a package
sort of, then throw fruitcakes through a wreath.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Ferbies are so omnipresent they even make an appearance in
Congress where Representative Mary Bono quips, quote, the economy is strong,
the stock market is great, although some of us still
can't get Ferbies, so it's not strong enough. The team
at Tiger, they'd had a feeling Ferbie would do well,
(17:40):
but this response, it's beyond their wildest dreams.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
We stopped running TV commercials because it was everywhere. We
didn't need to pay for TV space because we were
getting it for free.
Speaker 5 (17:55):
Every toy you do, you hope is going to be
a winner. But I've never seen anything quite like this.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
We would call it viral today. There was no such
word back then, but it just became viral.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
If there's one thing we know about viruses, though, it's
that sometimes they get out of control.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
I love toys.
Speaker 6 (18:25):
I always have, probably always will.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Mercy Depina was one of the lucky ones who managed
to get a Ferbie courtesy of her then boyfriend.
Speaker 6 (18:35):
He claims that he had to suffer to get it.
I don't know if that's actually true or not.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Even now, twenty five years later, the memory of Ferbi
entering her life is still vivid.
Speaker 6 (18:48):
All I remember was running around my apartment, probably.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Like a four year old like.
Speaker 14 (18:56):
Herb.
Speaker 6 (18:56):
It's like losing my mind because I had this Furby.
I was so so excited, I could barely contain myself.
I was hugging it, I was petting it. I was like,
we have a new member of the family.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
She named this new family member Malik, and at first
their relationship was well magical.
Speaker 6 (19:17):
So we would play music for it and be like
dance Ferbie dance.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
It was so cute.
Speaker 6 (19:21):
It would like move around and dance it like kind
kind of like shake and shimmy a little bit.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
She also took care of Malik. He, like all furby's,
needed regular feedings. He wanted to be played with, and
this soon became part of Marcy's routine.
Speaker 6 (19:37):
They used to work down the street from my house.
I was like coming home to feed my Ferbie, like
the same way that you would have to go home
to walk your dog or go pick up your kid
from the babysitter. I was like, Yeah, I gotta get
home to my Ferbie.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
At first, these attributes made Marci love Malik even more.
Speaker 6 (19:55):
Even though it was an electronic toy. You know, he
felt like a real entity, like a person or an animal.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Like he really felt alive.
Speaker 6 (20:04):
I actually had to interact with it, and as crazy
as it sounds, like that made me bond with it,
Like I actually had a connection with this electronic toy.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
This connection, It was exactly what Tiger had hoped would happen.
They wanted people to create and find their own interactions
with Ferby. As Jeff Jones explains.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
It didn't have a call, it defined play pattern. There
was no one way to play with it. There was
no one way to interact with it. Ferby's just were
and so they could be anything you wanted them to be.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
The magic of Ferby started from the minute you put
the batteries in and it spoke its first words of Furbish.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
So like do alo ulai means good morning? Right, It
was it's a general greeting, and it kind of sounds
like that, right, you know, it's sort of like, yeah,
good morning, diela ulai, that sort of thing. And then
gradually over time it did speak English, and so that
that whole pattern of I'm learning to communicate with Ferbey,
(21:11):
Ferby's learning to communicate with me. It was just another
layer of depth in the relationship.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
And maybe the most important thing about Ferby what made
it so lifelike.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Ferby didn't have an on off switch, and that was
a very deliberate decision and I think was pretty much
critical to the way that people reacted to it. Right,
people put a sheet over a bird's cage so that
it won't wake them up in the morning. You were
doing that. You were treating Ferby like a living thing.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Similar to a living thing, Ferbey's could also be needy
and dependent. If left alone, a Ferby might go to sleep,
but might also cry or become despondent when ignored. Many
people reported Ferby's rebelling or changing in odd ways. He
(22:07):
remembers this too.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
Okay, So here's the thing about about Malik. If you
didn't play with him, or feed him or take care
of him, they would like kind of cry, like kind
of like a kid or a dog, And so that
was kind of cute at first, and then it like
wasn't cute, right, it wasn't cute. I'd come home and
(22:29):
this Ferbie would be literally like having a temper tantrum.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Mercy looked for a solution.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
We tried to turn it off. There's no way to
really turn it off, so we decided to put it
in the closet. Then you'd think that, Okay, it's occupied,
it's sleeping or whatever. But as soon as it knew
that you were in the vicinity, it would start communicating
with you. So that meant there was no quiet time
like hey, we're going to watch a movie or oh,
I'm going to take a.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Nap, and there was no knowing what would set Malik off.
Speaker 6 (23:00):
I could still hear exactly how it sounds, because it
was pretty weird to be sleeping and then hear this
thing like calling out to you. It became really annoying.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
For some, though Ferbi's were more than annoying. For some,
Ferbies seemed downright sinister. Jenny Sparks and Lars Nordstrom are
video game developers. They also ran the website Ferbie Autopsy,
which they built in ninety ninety eight. It still exists today.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
It has not changed since nineteen ninety eight. Is exactly
the same.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
I don't really know how to edit it anymore. Yeah,
it's preserved. It's not han solo and carbonite.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It's just it's frozen in time.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
The couple built the site after the motor on their own.
Ferby froze and died just a few days after they
got it.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
It started to smell like burning electronics, and we.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Still use that.
Speaker 7 (23:57):
Whenever we smell something that smells like it's electronically burning,
I go it smells like burning Ferbian Here.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Lars and Jenny were curious how this toy actually worked,
and so they decided to take it apart to find out,
and they figured they'd share what they'd learned.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
There was a lot of misinformation about what the Ferbies
could do and what they were capable of, and like
what sort of magic powers they had.
Speaker 7 (24:23):
There were so many crazy rumors going around. We just
knew that that couldn't be true.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
To Lars and Jenny, Ferbie Autopsy was always meant to
be a little tongue in cheek part of a certain
style of websites popular in the late nineties. Still, the
couple was curious what the general response to Ferbie Autopsy
might be.
Speaker 7 (24:44):
I said, let's put this up here and see what
people think. And boy did we get thousands and thousands
and thousands of emails.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
We still get emails. They're very funny.
Speaker 4 (24:54):
Some of them, but.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
And they're very weird. We just got it was a
lot of children writing to us.
Speaker 7 (25:00):
In those early days of the web, when kids no
one really thought about kids being on the computer, and
so they're in their school computer lab typing away. It
was pretty much half hate mail, half can you fix
my Ferbi too? I would answer everyone.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
With little official Ferbie information on the web, and with
millions of Ferbie owners, Ferbie Autopsy soon became the de
facto site for people wanting to find answers or ask
questions about these strange little creatures that seemed to have
minds of their own.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
There's just such weird.
Speaker 15 (25:36):
Hi.
Speaker 7 (25:37):
My name is Arthur, and I was wondering if you
could burn a Ferbie in a cardboard box.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I heard answer these, go for it, God, Arthur, Yeah,
or that you know, my Ferbie has learned new words
from me?
Speaker 7 (25:50):
So many kids saying, my Ferbie learned to say blankety
blank blank blank, and my Ferby is haunted. My Ferby
says it wakes up in the middle of the night
and says it wants to kill us all.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
My Ferbie can walk.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
That was a good one. Your Furbie can walk?
Speaker 16 (26:03):
Okay, Yeah, you don't have motors for that.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Local radio station executed a Ferby and there was some
kind of blood in it. Is that true?
Speaker 7 (26:14):
There was a lot of people who thought that there
was some sort of blood or something in it.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah, don't believe everything you see on the radio.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Tiger, of course, did receive some of these complaints too.
Here's its president Roger Schiffman talking to CBS.
Speaker 17 (26:30):
I've been told that we're developing a Ferbie that can
drive a car in the year two thousand. We've also
been told that the current Ferby has the technology to
launch the space Shuttle. We have one woman who was
absolutely insistent that her Ferbie Singh's Italian operation.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Stuart and Jeff also remember these calls.
Speaker 5 (26:47):
The whole idea of popularizing electronics was still very new,
at least in the toy industry.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
There were lots and lots of stories. We tried to
focus on the ones where Ferby we're saving people's lives,
but there were others as well. You know, Ferby's been
hacked to do this, and Ferby's been hacked to do that.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
But I also suspected some of it had to do
with fun. People were pulling our leg a little bit too.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
There has never been a toy that I've ever worked
on that had recorded voices where we didn't get at
least one complaint that it was swearing. I think there's
just a thing in society where something gets too big,
somebody's going to vilify it. And you know, Ferby was
at the time sort of the biggest thing that everybody
(27:30):
was talking about.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Everybody was talking about it, and the talking that was
a problem, but not in the way you might expect.
One day, the folks at Tiger get another call, not
from a customer declaring that Ferby was singing opera or
counting in French, or had saved them from a house fire.
(27:52):
This call was from the US government and Uncle Sam
was accusing Ferby of international espionage. It's now January nineteen
ninety nine. Ferby is still the hottest thing in stores.
(28:16):
Ferby seems to be everywhere, and the government they're getting worried.
Stuart Sims from Tiger Electronics remembers what happened next.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
And we got a phone call at one point. But
apparently the NSA had banned it from the offices because
they suspected that Ferby might be able to pick up
government secrets.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The NSA had just issued a memo to its staff
banning all Ferby's from NSA grounds, and that memo, it leaks.
Speaker 13 (28:50):
Ferby's might have been toy stores big seller this Christmas season,
but those furry playthings are off limits at the super
secret National Security Agency. Here, the NSA has issued a
directive banning Ferby's at its Fort Meade headquarters because they
contain a built in record or.
Speaker 14 (29:07):
The National Security Agency is banning Ferby, it says, quote,
they prohibit the use of recording equipment in agency workspaces.
This includes any items with built in recording features, and
that means Ferby.
Speaker 18 (29:18):
You may have heard that US Intelligence has a new
spy concern inside its own ranks, not a mole of Ferby,
the popular electronic toy Well tonight, the untold toy story
behind the stories are Ferby's with loose lips really a
national security threat.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the NSA does not respond to requests for comment,
so the press turns to another Stuart.
Speaker 16 (29:47):
I am Stuart Baker. I'm a lawyer in Washington.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Stuart had been a lawyer for the NSA, though he
was no longer there when the Ferby memo leaked.
Speaker 16 (29:58):
I was one of the few people who was known
to have worked at the NSA and whose phone number
of people could find, so I got called all the
masked for comment on it. I don't know what was
going on in the hands of the people inside the
agency when they did what they did, but I've got
a pretty good idea.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
We have a pretty good idea too. In early twenty
twenty four, the NSA released the internal conversation around Ferby's
after an Internet sleuth submitted a Freedom of Information Act request.
The sleuth, who uses the handle Dakota the Cat, then
shared the documents on Twitter.
Speaker 19 (30:40):
Hi.
Speaker 20 (30:40):
There, it's come to my attention that a new toy
on the market has an artificial intelligent chip on board.
Apparently these stuffed critters learned from nearby speech patterns. It
would seem to me that this might be a security issue.
I believe these things are called froppies, but I'm not sure.
My understanding is that these guys contain a writeable chip
that would definitely be a security concern.
Speaker 12 (31:01):
Please help clear this up.
Speaker 21 (31:03):
Now, the big curiosity is what medium of Ferbie uses
to record audio. I would assume that since it can
respond to certain audio cues, that it will use storage
similar to a digital answering machine or straight computer memory chips.
Speaker 10 (31:16):
Anybody know, well, hopefully the Harry intruders have been properly
handled and removed from agency spaces. We surely want to
avoid the situation turning into a Furbie gate.
Speaker 8 (31:28):
Anyone else consider this maybe a little embarrassing to the agency.
Speaker 12 (31:33):
Not as embarrassing as security breach caused by employees toy
somewhat far fetch scenario, but way this possibility against how
badly anyone needs to have a furbiate work.
Speaker 16 (31:45):
If you're NSA and one of these dolls is sitting
on a desk where very classified material is discussed routinely,
you say, well, do I really want this device listening
to these classified discussions and then walking out and maybe
(32:05):
saying something that it shouldn't say. Their job was security.
They weren't going to get fired for taking security seriously.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
But it isn't only the NSA.
Speaker 15 (32:16):
The security scare involving the Ferbie doll is spreading the now.
NASA has issued a memo barring Ferbies from Cape Canaveral,
saying the dolls should be treated no differently than cameras
and other recording devices.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
And if a Ferbe is spotted at Virginia's Norfolk Naval Shipyard,
personnel are ordered to immediately quote seize it and its owner.
The University of Calgary is so concerned Ferbies might confuse
voice activated medical equipment that the Canadian Ministry of Health
(32:51):
launches an investigation, and the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA,
suggested protocols to protect Americans from potential damage the gremlin
like toys might reek. Because Ferby's were an electronic device,
the FAA is concerned the chatting creature might interfere with
(33:15):
sensitive flight equipment before flight takes off. Passengers are now
required to power down their discmn beepers and Ferby's. Even
Lars and Jenny at Ferbie Autopsy were asked about this.
Speaker 7 (33:32):
We did hear from someone who's an engineer. At a
major airline that wanted to know more because they were
concerned about how you have to turn off your electronic
devices on a plane. They wanted to know if this
was another device that could perhaps do something.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
The fear that Ferby would crash airplanes and divulge sensitive
information is escalating. But the thing is, none of the
rumors fueling these fears are actually true. Jeff Jones from
Tiger explains.
Speaker 4 (34:03):
Ferbi posed no threat to the security of the United States,
and anyway, Japer warm Ferby's didn't even have recording capabilities.
They had a microphone, that's true, but the microphone was
a sensor to pick up sounds. Ferbie had no idea
what you were saying. It just didn't.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
However, Stuart Baker, the former NSA lawyer, blames Tiger's promotional
efforts for the panic.
Speaker 16 (34:28):
Here's what I think happened. When they made the Ferbian
started to sell it, they were, I think the nicest
word for it. They were puffing its capabilities. The manufacturers
they said, oh it will it will learn to speak
English from you.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
The NSSA and all the others bought into the hype.
Speaker 16 (34:52):
I think they relied on the marketing materials. They just
did the easiest bureaucratic thing, which was to say we're
going to say no to this. And obviously there was
nobody who needed a Ferbie at work, so it was
pretty easy to say, don't do that.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
On October second, twenty twenty three, Ferbie celebrated its twenty
fifth anniversary. More than fifty eight million have been sold
to date. A new Ferbi, which now comes in colors
like fluorescent, purple and teal, cost seventy dollars and knows
over six hundred words, phrases and jokes. There are Ferbi
(35:36):
fashion accessories and Ferbi apparel, and of course.
Speaker 19 (35:41):
Have you seen the furbletz. They're baby Ferby's. They can't
keep them in stock at Amazon and on Walmart. These
furblets are off the chart.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
That's Richard Levy. He's a toy and game inventor and
was instrumental in bringing Ferbi two, Tiger Electronics and into existence.
Speaker 19 (36:03):
The toy gods were smiling on Ferby from day one.
Consumed us for the longest time, but it's just been
a wonderful ride.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Richard is struck by how Ferbey's popularity still seems to
know no boundaries.
Speaker 19 (36:21):
Ferby is a mega, mega brand. I travel oversees a
great deal and I'll take along a Ferby t shirt
just to see if a foreign audience recognizes it. And
I remember once I was coming out of Santiago, Chile
into the Andes Mountains and a truck from Bolivia had
(36:42):
broken down, and I got out of the our car
to see what was going on if I could help
the guy with his broken tire. And he looks at
my shirt and he goes, wit you a minute that
you know, you know, I mean, here's a truck driver
in Bolivia who knew Ferby. And I found that all
over the world, Malta, Greece, Singapore, Korea. It just it
(37:06):
hits all the right notes.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Ferby has indeed reached cult status. Visual artists have used
Ferbi or pieces of Ferby to examine identity and artificial intelligence.
There's a whole world on Etsy dedicated to Ferby, including
customized Ferbi's long Ferbi Ferbie jewelry, a Ferby made of
(37:32):
bark and moss, and a hand painted Ferbi altar. A
diamond encrusted Ferby even made an appearance in the twenty
nineteen movie Uncut gems. Today, no one's afraid of Ferby
spilling state secrets. But if you ask me if you
still have one of those little guys lying around your house,
(37:54):
somewhere tucked in a dark corner behind your polypocket collection
and tickle me Elmo, I'd be extra careful about what
you say around it.
Speaker 8 (38:07):
I had mentioned previously that we were working on a
Ferbie episode and we got a wild email from a reader.
He didn't want us to use his name, so I'm
going to call him Hank. I have a Ferbie story.
I was a freshman in college when the Ferbi came out.
This annoying guy on my hall got one for Christmas
from his long distance girlfriend and it never shut up.
(38:28):
I don't know if it was defective or if this
is just what ferbi's do. After many jokes and some arguments,
we eventually stole the Ferbie and left it in the
woods off campus. He laughed about it at first, but
the girlfriend freaked out, so he went to our ra
and turned us in for stealing his personal property. There
was a disciplinary hearing, the dumbest disciplinary hearing of all time.
(38:54):
For our defense, we bought another Ferby and put it
on the table and watched it make annoying noises. The
case was dismissed.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Nice, that's so funny.
Speaker 9 (39:04):
They could have gone over the RAS and over the
disciplinary board and it appealed to the NSA and say, look,
we got a threat for you. Have them come in. Yep, dude,
how wild's that?
Speaker 8 (39:14):
Sarah? Did you happen to cast this episode?
Speaker 4 (39:16):
I did.
Speaker 9 (39:17):
I had some fun with this one. There were some
characters in it. Like I loved the Dave Hampton inventor right,
So for him, I was picturing Chris Pine, but dressed
as Chris Pine, you know, like all those celebrity shots
you see him in, like outside of a coffee shop.
I'm like, perfect, just wear that to the set. Then
see Malik the Ferbie. I thought you'd take a refurbished
old Chucky doll to give it the right menace, and
then you just skin it with the Ferby skin. For Marci,
(39:40):
I was thinking Journey Smolette the actress. I thought she
would be perfect. And for Jeff Jones, the toy company executive.
Benedict Cumberbatch, I don't know why he just screams executive
to me.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I feel like he could definitely do like Stern executive
right exactly.
Speaker 10 (39:55):
He can.
Speaker 9 (39:55):
He can do either like your cigarettes company executive, alcohol
company executive, Ferbie company executive. I believe him in every role.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I never had a Ferbie. Did either of you have Ferby's?
Speaker 9 (40:04):
I wanted to ask you, Danna, because I know you're
a little younger, so I was did you have one?
Because I babysat kids who had them, so I know
the annoyance, but I never personally.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
I never had one. Had I think my parents preemptively
understood how annoying it was absolutely going to be.
Speaker 8 (40:18):
Did you want one?
Speaker 1 (40:20):
No, that was not a toy that was appealing to me.
Speaker 8 (40:24):
I thought about because they still make them, They're still
in for sale. Last night I thought, could I get
one here for this recording? And I could get one
here for tomorrow? And I didn't want to hold us up,
and I also didn't want to spend forty nine dollars.
But if anyone was inspired by this episode to go
get one, leave it in a college dorm, see what happens,
go for it.
Speaker 9 (40:44):
I'm definitely going to check out Ferbie Autopsy website. I'll
tell you him that much for sure.
Speaker 8 (40:48):
Yes, love those people. Any very special character nominations.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
I'm going to go with the Ferbie itself. I think
that Ferby's are sentient beings and that the Ferbie should count.
Speaker 9 (40:59):
I'm with that. I'm just gonna go more specifically with
Malik the Ferby, just because of the agent of chaos
energy he brings to this story.
Speaker 10 (41:05):
I liked him.
Speaker 8 (41:06):
I'm going to nomine and any mall workers or toy
store workers in nineteen ninety eight, ninety.
Speaker 9 (41:11):
Nine, good one.
Speaker 10 (41:13):
Really like that.
Speaker 8 (41:14):
I think that would have been fun, not at the time,
but a good story years later.
Speaker 10 (41:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (41:19):
Like Veterans in the Trenches.
Speaker 8 (41:23):
Very special episodes is made by some very special people.
The show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and
Jason English. Today's episode, The Ferbie Files was written and
produced in conjunction with Celia Aniskovich and dial Tone Films
for I Heart. Today's episode was written and story edited
by Marisa Brown. Our producers are Karl Catel and Josh Fisher.
(41:46):
Editing and sound design by Zoey Denkla and Josh Fisher,
Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser. Original music by Aaron
Kaufman and Alis McCoy. Research in fact checking by Celia
Aniskovich and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Kintinia. Our
executive producer is Jason English. You'd like to email the show,
(42:07):
you can reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail
dot com. You can check out more of Celia's work
at dial Tonefilms dot com. Call me Miss Cleo, Fruitcake Frauds.
She's got something for everyone. We've got more episodes in
the works with Celia's company. Be on the lookout for
those later this season. Very Special Episodes is a production
(42:27):
of iHeart Podcasts.
This is an iHeart original.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Okay, So like it's a little triangular, cone shaped creepy
animal with two little feet sticking out the bottom that
are don't do anything.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It's kind of a cross between like a bird and
a little bear.
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Maybe had a soft fur and a very sweet, expressive face,
and it was sort of like it looked like a
lot of things, so it was generally compared to.
Speaker 5 (00:37):
Like a Grumlin.
Speaker 6 (00:38):
It looks a little bit like Gizmo. Is these cute
little eyes and bats, its eyelashes.
Speaker 7 (00:43):
Buzzy tail like a rabbit, and long ears for some reason,
are they are the ears of Yeah, there's been years.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
I guess I guess they're ears.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Yeah, they're cute but a little creepy at the same time.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
It's a couple of weeks before Christmas nineteen ninety eight.
Crowds across the US are out in droves doing their
holiday shopping. But if you happen to be buying a
gift for a kid, you're looking for one thing, and
one thing only, the must have toy that's both cute
(01:14):
and a little creepy Ferbie, and godspeed to you, because
nineteen ninety eight hottest toy is also nearly impossible to
find for the past two months. Ever since this six
inch furry animatronic creature appeared, crowds have been lining up
(01:35):
outside toy stores in the early morning hours. But even
that level of preparation doesn't guarantee protection from the shall
we say tenacity of other American consumers. Despite being first
in line at a Walmart in Des Moines, one grandmother
(01:55):
was shoved hard against a door by the matting crowd.
She walked away with an armful of bruises, not toys.
In other cities, there were reports of fights, cursing stampedes.
By the end of the year, the world was split
into two groups, the have ferbies and the have nots,
(02:19):
But just a month later, in early nineteen ninety nine,
it wasn't clear who the winners actually were. Parents reported
their Ferbies wouldn't shut up. They were talking in a
language people couldn't understand except for what sounds like swear words.
(02:40):
But as we'd later find out, the biggest issue with
ferbies wasn't that they were scarce or that they were swearing.
The biggest issue they might be spying on us. Welcome
to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host,
(03:00):
Dana Schwartz, and this is the Ferbie Files.
Speaker 8 (03:10):
Welcome to season two. I'm Jason English. I'm here with
Danish Wartz and Zaron Burnett. As always, put up Jason, Dana. Hey, Hey,
big day.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
For us, Very exciting.
Speaker 8 (03:21):
Good to be back here, Good to be back in.
Just before we started recording, I got an email. I
got word that the Very Special Episode's podcast has been
nominated for a Signal Award.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Oh my god, look at us.
Speaker 8 (03:34):
This is legit, dude. The Signal Awards are the Webby
Awards podcast awards. If that's confusing, it's kind of like
the Grammys of podcasting, the MTV Video Music Awards and podcasting.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
The Oscars of podcasts.
Speaker 8 (03:49):
Yeah, the JD Power and Associates. We're in the Best
Commute Podcast category. Very cool category. Yes, congratulations, gratulations Josh
producer Josh here as well the whole team.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
This is very exciting. I'm very proud of us, and
I feel like there's no better way to kick off
season two than with this specific episode.
Speaker 9 (04:13):
This is a fun one. Oh my god, so perfect
for a commute I mean, like, lend us your ears,
We'll give you entertainment.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
When you think of Ferbees today, if you think of
Ferbe's today, you might think of one of the first
successful electronic toys of its kind. They must have toy
of the nineties an absolute worldwide phenomenon, But of course
it wasn't always that way. Every legend has its origin story,
(04:42):
and every multimillion dollar toy brand has its humble beginnings.
In the case of Ferby, it was a forty somethingter
former naval electronics expert who was living off the grid
in rural California.
Speaker 5 (04:58):
The guy who really deserves most of the credit, I'd
say ninety nine percent out of the state.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Amped After leaving the Navy, Dave had turned to toy
to He spent much of his career developing new products
for large companies like Mattel, but by the nineteen nineties
he decided to go the independent route because what Dave
really wanted to do was build something of his own,
(05:24):
and in February nineteen ninety seven, he found himself in
New York City looking for inspiration at the industry's annual
trade show, Toy Fair.
Speaker 5 (05:37):
Just for the year or two prior to Ferby, there
was a very popular electronic character or thing called Tamagatchi.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
That's Stuart Simms. He met Dave when he was senior
vice president of Product development and Marketing for Tiger Electronics, and.
Speaker 5 (05:54):
These were sort of little characters that were on in
LCD screen. The display was about the size of a pendant,
and the idea was that you more you interacted with it,
the healthier it became, and the more fun you had
with it. Theoretically, you were raising a pet.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
So Dave Hampton is wandering around Toy Fair hoping something
will catch his eye. On his last day there, he
sees the Tamagachi. At this point, it's already big in Japan,
but it hasn't been released in the US yet. Dave
likes how interactive it is, but in his opinion, there's
(06:32):
one very clear problem. You can't pet it.
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Stave's that we can do a lot better than that.
We can make something that's real or appears to be real.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
So Dave goes back to California and, alongside fellow toy
designer Caleb Chung, starts feverishly working on this idea, a
Tamagatchi that you can pet. After some tinkering, the toy
starts coming together. It has large expressive eyes, big ears,
(07:05):
a little beak, and a round, fuzzy body. With the
help of a knob, it blinks, it moves its head,
it wiggles around. It's rudimentary, for sure, but there's something there.
Dave calls it Ferby. Dave has big dreams for Ferby.
He envisions a toy that reacts to stimuli around it,
(07:29):
that talks and dances and burps and sneezes and laughs,
a toy that can communicate with other Ferbies and even
learn English. He wants it to be more like a
friend than an amalgamation of cold plastic parts. Dave starts
shopping the prototype around to the toy manufacturers, and by
(07:53):
mid nineteen ninety seven, Ferby has made its way to
Tiger Electronics. Tiger was a small but mighty toy powerhouse,
best known for its handheld electronic games, for a Tamagotchi
competitor called GigaPets, and for Talkboy now, the voice recorder
(08:15):
and modulator made famous in home alone too. Tiger had
a reputation for taking chances, and they were looking for
a new hit. This early Ferby. It seemed promising.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
You know, we as a company saw lots and lots
of tremendous and exciting inventor concepts, but generally they would
fall into different categories of toys that sort of existed,
and this was the first time that we were presented
a product that was going to, in a lot of ways,
feel alive.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Jeff Jones was VP of Marketing at Tiger Electronics at
the time.
Speaker 4 (08:57):
I don't know what made me think it was a
good idea, but I you know, we saw it. It
was super rudimentary, but there was something just inherently unique
and special about it.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Jeff's boss, Stuart Simms remembers seeing Ferby for the first
time too well.
Speaker 5 (09:16):
Captinated me about it was it sounded like something that
was totally fresh and new, and I thought our line
needed something unique, and so I wanted to do it.
Speaker 4 (09:26):
Stuart Simms, as we were walking out after having seen it,
I looked at him and I said, if we do it,
I want it.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
By the fall of nineteen ninety seven, all of Tiger
is fully on board with Ferby, so much so they
decide they want it available to the public before Christmas
nineteen ninety eight, which means it needs to be ready
to show off to industry buyers by next year's toy
(09:54):
Fare just a few short months away. It's a timeline
that is almost unheard of, but they pull it off.
And exactly one year after Dave Hampton and first struck
upon the idea, Ferby is at Toy Fair in a
display surrounded by purple tumbleweeds and a sparkly sky, ready
(10:18):
to wow, or at least they hope so. Because the
thing is the prototype they've rushed to get together. It's
a little well crude.
Speaker 5 (10:30):
When we first presented Ferbi at Toy Fair, we didn't
have a Furby that was working.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
This Ferby was a long way from the Ferby children
across the world came to know and love. Sure, it
more or less looked the same, the big eyes and ears,
the furry body. But this Ferby wasn't free and loose
and chatty. It was tethered by a cable to an
(10:56):
electronics box. Still, there was something about it that caught
buyer's eyes. Ferby soon became the talk of the fair.
KB toys asked for several hundred thousand of them. The
Walmart buyer in attendance snaps up a third of the
(11:16):
entire supply. A supply that is at this point completely hypothetical.
As Jeff Jones explains.
Speaker 4 (11:25):
I remember riding back to the airport after Toyfair. We
have a product manager and he said to me, you know,
how does it feel to have the hit of Toy Fair?
And I said, well, it's great, except we haven't shipped
any we haven't sold any, so still we still have
ways to go.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Not only has Tiger not actually sold any, they haven't
even fully built any, at least not any that are
ready for the public. And now they have to do
this coding, building, testing, producing, shipping by October. This process
could normally take years, and now they're doing it in months.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
From the faithful day when I've said to sit said
if we do it, I want it to when we shipped,
my entire life became consumed with this, absolutely consumed.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
The whole team, in fact, is consumed. Dave Hampton designs
and programs the Ferbie brain and how it reacts and
responds to stimuli. Another group develops its mechanics and puppeteers
orchestrate it's every movement. Really, it's a work of art.
Speaker 4 (12:36):
The way that Ferby moved was extremely lifelike. They puppeteered
every possible movement Ferbie could think, from the speed of
its eyes to the synchronization of the beak when it
was speaking, to when it would tilt forward and back dancing,
(12:57):
to ear movements, everything like that.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Dave also creates a language for Ferby, Furbish, which borrows
from Thi, Mandarin, and Hebrew. When everything is finished, Ferby
is capable of at least three hundred different unique combinations
of eye, ear, and mouth movements, and at full capacity,
(13:19):
can speak nearly two hundred words.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
It had a sense of actual life. Right. The thing
about toys is that they tend to be very cause
and effect, Like you do this, and this happens. You
do something else, something else happens. The thing about Ferby
was Ferby behaved the way Ferbey behaved most of the time,
unless it didn't like sometimes when you tickled it. Most
(13:48):
of the time, it would laugh. Occasionally, it would burp, occasionally,
it would fart, occasionally, it would make some other sound. Right,
that's very organic, that's very alive.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
In September nineteen ninety eight, Wired magazine publishes an article
that delves extensively into Ferby's creation and development. It sets
Ferby up as the hottest toy of the upcoming holiday season.
It also sets off a media frenzy. Reporters are hustling
(14:19):
to cover a thing that doesn't even exist, so when
Ferby arrives, it arrives in a big way. On October second,
nineteen ninety eight, Ferby makes its debut, fittingly in the
same city Dave Hampton first had his revelation, New York.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Ferby was launched at fair Schwartz.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
That's Jeff Jones again, VP of Marketing at Tiger.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
So there was lots of media there and there were
kids lined up to experience Ferby for the first time.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
At the appointed time, a white stretch limousine pulls up
on Fifth Avenue. Six children, each carrying a purple pillow
with a Ferby carefully balanced on top, make their way
down the red carpet as kids around them cheer. It is,
(15:14):
in short, a spectacle and it works.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
It started generating momentum, and then it sort of got crazy.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Ferby's start making their way into toy stores across America.
They arrive in shipments of a dozen, thirty or a
couple hundred, far fewer numbers than the customers that want one.
The race to get a Ferbie is on.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
There were lines and stores. The receptionist that the Tiger
office was absolutely bombarded with phone calls. And then people
started buying it and we sold out of the initial
shipment and like no time at.
Speaker 10 (15:57):
All, Ferby has fueled a feeding frenzy.
Speaker 5 (16:02):
Every morning we have a line out the front door
for a month.
Speaker 11 (16:05):
People had been on the prowl hunting for Ferby. This
year is hotter than hot new toy.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Now my money right here, Irby.
Speaker 9 (16:13):
Ah, the Ferby, the little gremlin like creature.
Speaker 8 (16:16):
People were lined up at midnight to get.
Speaker 12 (16:18):
It's the hottest toy in America. There is one hundreds
and hundreds of people and there's hundreds of people waiting
still in line.
Speaker 13 (16:25):
Police were even on hand to keep the peace.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
We are out of Ferbi.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
How do you describe a spark? Right, It just sort
of happened. It just took off, and then the legend grew.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Profits grow too. Around two million Furbies are sold between
October and December nineteen ninety eight. Demand is so great
that a secondary market emerges where folks sell Ferbies for
hundreds and hundreds of dollars, far more than their thirty
(16:57):
dollars retail price, it seems like people would do anything
to get one.
Speaker 11 (17:03):
With a chug of eggnog, the Ferbie Derby is on.
These three Ferby seekers are competing in a radio contest
for one of the rare toys. The rules are easy.
Drink the eggnog, decorate a Christmas tree, wrap a package
sort of, then throw fruitcakes through a wreath.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Ferbies are so omnipresent they even make an appearance in
Congress where Representative Mary Bono quips, quote, the economy is strong,
the stock market is great, although some of us still
can't get Ferbies, so it's not strong enough. The team
at Tiger, they'd had a feeling Ferbie would do well,
(17:40):
but this response, it's beyond their wildest dreams.
Speaker 4 (17:45):
We stopped running TV commercials because it was everywhere. We
didn't need to pay for TV space because we were
getting it for free.
Speaker 5 (17:55):
Every toy you do, you hope is going to be
a winner. But I've never seen anything quite like this.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
We would call it viral today. There was no such
word back then, but it just became viral.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
If there's one thing we know about viruses, though, it's
that sometimes they get out of control.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
I love toys.
Speaker 6 (18:25):
I always have, probably always will.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Mercy Depina was one of the lucky ones who managed
to get a Ferbie courtesy of her then boyfriend.
Speaker 6 (18:35):
He claims that he had to suffer to get it.
I don't know if that's actually true or not.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Even now, twenty five years later, the memory of Ferbi
entering her life is still vivid.
Speaker 6 (18:48):
All I remember was running around my apartment, probably.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
Like a four year old like.
Speaker 14 (18:56):
Herb.
Speaker 6 (18:56):
It's like losing my mind because I had this Furby.
I was so so excited, I could barely contain myself.
I was hugging it, I was petting it. I was like,
we have a new member of the family.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
She named this new family member Malik, and at first
their relationship was well magical.
Speaker 6 (19:17):
So we would play music for it and be like
dance Ferbie dance.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
It was so cute.
Speaker 6 (19:21):
It would like move around and dance it like kind
kind of like shake and shimmy a little bit.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
She also took care of Malik. He, like all furby's,
needed regular feedings. He wanted to be played with, and
this soon became part of Marcy's routine.
Speaker 6 (19:37):
They used to work down the street from my house.
I was like coming home to feed my Ferbie, like
the same way that you would have to go home
to walk your dog or go pick up your kid
from the babysitter. I was like, Yeah, I gotta get
home to my Ferbie.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
At first, these attributes made Marci love Malik even more.
Speaker 6 (19:55):
Even though it was an electronic toy. You know, he
felt like a real entity, like a person or an animal.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Like he really felt alive.
Speaker 6 (20:04):
I actually had to interact with it, and as crazy
as it sounds, like that made me bond with it,
Like I actually had a connection with this electronic toy.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
This connection, It was exactly what Tiger had hoped would happen.
They wanted people to create and find their own interactions
with Ferby. As Jeff Jones explains.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
It didn't have a call, it defined play pattern. There
was no one way to play with it. There was
no one way to interact with it. Ferby's just were
and so they could be anything you wanted them to be.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
The magic of Ferby started from the minute you put
the batteries in and it spoke its first words of Furbish.
Speaker 4 (20:49):
So like do alo ulai means good morning? Right, It
was it's a general greeting, and it kind of sounds
like that, right, you know, it's sort of like, yeah,
good morning, diela ulai, that sort of thing. And then
gradually over time it did speak English, and so that
that whole pattern of I'm learning to communicate with Ferbey,
(21:11):
Ferby's learning to communicate with me. It was just another
layer of depth in the relationship.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
And maybe the most important thing about Ferby what made
it so lifelike.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Ferby didn't have an on off switch, and that was
a very deliberate decision and I think was pretty much
critical to the way that people reacted to it. Right,
people put a sheet over a bird's cage so that
it won't wake them up in the morning. You were
doing that. You were treating Ferby like a living thing.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Similar to a living thing, Ferbey's could also be needy
and dependent. If left alone, a Ferby might go to sleep,
but might also cry or become despondent when ignored. Many
people reported Ferby's rebelling or changing in odd ways. He
(22:07):
remembers this too.
Speaker 6 (22:08):
Okay, So here's the thing about about Malik. If you
didn't play with him, or feed him or take care
of him, they would like kind of cry, like kind
of like a kid or a dog, And so that
was kind of cute at first, and then it like
wasn't cute, right, it wasn't cute. I'd come home and
(22:29):
this Ferbie would be literally like having a temper tantrum.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
Mercy looked for a solution.
Speaker 6 (22:35):
We tried to turn it off. There's no way to
really turn it off, so we decided to put it
in the closet. Then you'd think that, Okay, it's occupied,
it's sleeping or whatever. But as soon as it knew
that you were in the vicinity, it would start communicating
with you. So that meant there was no quiet time
like hey, we're going to watch a movie or oh,
I'm going to take a.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Nap, and there was no knowing what would set Malik off.
Speaker 6 (23:00):
I could still hear exactly how it sounds, because it
was pretty weird to be sleeping and then hear this
thing like calling out to you. It became really annoying.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
For some, though Ferbi's were more than annoying. For some,
Ferbies seemed downright sinister. Jenny Sparks and Lars Nordstrom are
video game developers. They also ran the website Ferbie Autopsy,
which they built in ninety ninety eight. It still exists today.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
It has not changed since nineteen ninety eight. Is exactly
the same.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
I don't really know how to edit it anymore. Yeah,
it's preserved. It's not han solo and carbonite.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
It's just it's frozen in time.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
The couple built the site after the motor on their own.
Ferby froze and died just a few days after they
got it.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
It started to smell like burning electronics, and we.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Still use that.
Speaker 7 (23:57):
Whenever we smell something that smells like it's electronically burning,
I go it smells like burning Ferbian Here.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Lars and Jenny were curious how this toy actually worked,
and so they decided to take it apart to find out,
and they figured they'd share what they'd learned.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
There was a lot of misinformation about what the Ferbies
could do and what they were capable of, and like
what sort of magic powers they had.
Speaker 7 (24:23):
There were so many crazy rumors going around. We just
knew that that couldn't be true.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
To Lars and Jenny, Ferbie Autopsy was always meant to
be a little tongue in cheek part of a certain
style of websites popular in the late nineties. Still, the
couple was curious what the general response to Ferbie Autopsy
might be.
Speaker 7 (24:44):
I said, let's put this up here and see what
people think. And boy did we get thousands and thousands
and thousands of emails.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
We still get emails. They're very funny.
Speaker 4 (24:54):
Some of them, but.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
And they're very weird. We just got it was a
lot of children writing to us.
Speaker 7 (25:00):
In those early days of the web, when kids no
one really thought about kids being on the computer, and
so they're in their school computer lab typing away. It
was pretty much half hate mail, half can you fix
my Ferbi too? I would answer everyone.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
With little official Ferbie information on the web, and with
millions of Ferbie owners, Ferbie Autopsy soon became the de
facto site for people wanting to find answers or ask
questions about these strange little creatures that seemed to have
minds of their own.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
There's just such weird.
Speaker 15 (25:36):
Hi.
Speaker 7 (25:37):
My name is Arthur, and I was wondering if you
could burn a Ferbie in a cardboard box.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
I heard answer these, go for it, God, Arthur, Yeah,
or that you know, my Ferbie has learned new words
from me?
Speaker 7 (25:50):
So many kids saying, my Ferbie learned to say blankety
blank blank blank, and my Ferby is haunted. My Ferby
says it wakes up in the middle of the night
and says it wants to kill us all.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
My Ferbie can walk.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
That was a good one. Your Furbie can walk?
Speaker 16 (26:03):
Okay, Yeah, you don't have motors for that.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Local radio station executed a Ferby and there was some
kind of blood in it. Is that true?
Speaker 7 (26:14):
There was a lot of people who thought that there
was some sort of blood or something in it.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah, don't believe everything you see on the radio.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Tiger, of course, did receive some of these complaints too.
Here's its president Roger Schiffman talking to CBS.
Speaker 17 (26:30):
I've been told that we're developing a Ferbie that can
drive a car in the year two thousand. We've also
been told that the current Ferby has the technology to
launch the space Shuttle. We have one woman who was
absolutely insistent that her Ferbie Singh's Italian operation.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Stuart and Jeff also remember these calls.
Speaker 5 (26:47):
The whole idea of popularizing electronics was still very new,
at least in the toy industry.
Speaker 4 (26:53):
There were lots and lots of stories. We tried to
focus on the ones where Ferby we're saving people's lives,
but there were others as well. You know, Ferby's been
hacked to do this, and Ferby's been hacked to do that.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
But I also suspected some of it had to do
with fun. People were pulling our leg a little bit too.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
There has never been a toy that I've ever worked
on that had recorded voices where we didn't get at
least one complaint that it was swearing. I think there's
just a thing in society where something gets too big,
somebody's going to vilify it. And you know, Ferby was
at the time sort of the biggest thing that everybody
(27:30):
was talking about.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Everybody was talking about it, and the talking that was
a problem, but not in the way you might expect.
One day, the folks at Tiger get another call, not
from a customer declaring that Ferby was singing opera or
counting in French, or had saved them from a house fire.
(27:52):
This call was from the US government and Uncle Sam
was accusing Ferby of international espionage. It's now January nineteen
ninety nine. Ferby is still the hottest thing in stores.
(28:16):
Ferby seems to be everywhere, and the government they're getting worried.
Stuart Sims from Tiger Electronics remembers what happened next.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
And we got a phone call at one point. But
apparently the NSA had banned it from the offices because
they suspected that Ferby might be able to pick up
government secrets.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The NSA had just issued a memo to its staff
banning all Ferby's from NSA grounds, and that memo, it leaks.
Speaker 13 (28:50):
Ferby's might have been toy stores big seller this Christmas season,
but those furry playthings are off limits at the super
secret National Security Agency. Here, the NSA has issued a
directive banning Ferby's at its Fort Meade headquarters because they
contain a built in record or.
Speaker 14 (29:07):
The National Security Agency is banning Ferby, it says, quote,
they prohibit the use of recording equipment in agency workspaces.
This includes any items with built in recording features, and
that means Ferby.
Speaker 18 (29:18):
You may have heard that US Intelligence has a new
spy concern inside its own ranks, not a mole of Ferby,
the popular electronic toy Well tonight, the untold toy story
behind the stories are Ferby's with loose lips really a
national security threat.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the NSA does not respond to requests for comment,
so the press turns to another Stuart.
Speaker 16 (29:47):
I am Stuart Baker. I'm a lawyer in Washington.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Stuart had been a lawyer for the NSA, though he
was no longer there when the Ferby memo leaked.
Speaker 16 (29:58):
I was one of the few people who was known
to have worked at the NSA and whose phone number
of people could find, so I got called all the
masked for comment on it. I don't know what was
going on in the hands of the people inside the
agency when they did what they did, but I've got
a pretty good idea.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
We have a pretty good idea too. In early twenty
twenty four, the NSA released the internal conversation around Ferby's
after an Internet sleuth submitted a Freedom of Information Act request.
The sleuth, who uses the handle Dakota the Cat, then
shared the documents on Twitter.
Speaker 19 (30:40):
Hi.
Speaker 20 (30:40):
There, it's come to my attention that a new toy
on the market has an artificial intelligent chip on board.
Apparently these stuffed critters learned from nearby speech patterns. It
would seem to me that this might be a security issue.
I believe these things are called froppies, but I'm not sure.
My understanding is that these guys contain a writeable chip
that would definitely be a security concern.
Speaker 12 (31:01):
Please help clear this up.
Speaker 21 (31:03):
Now, the big curiosity is what medium of Ferbie uses
to record audio. I would assume that since it can
respond to certain audio cues, that it will use storage
similar to a digital answering machine or straight computer memory chips.
Speaker 10 (31:16):
Anybody know, well, hopefully the Harry intruders have been properly
handled and removed from agency spaces. We surely want to
avoid the situation turning into a Furbie gate.
Speaker 8 (31:28):
Anyone else consider this maybe a little embarrassing to the agency.
Speaker 12 (31:33):
Not as embarrassing as security breach caused by employees toy
somewhat far fetch scenario, but way this possibility against how
badly anyone needs to have a furbiate work.
Speaker 16 (31:45):
If you're NSA and one of these dolls is sitting
on a desk where very classified material is discussed routinely,
you say, well, do I really want this device listening
to these classified discussions and then walking out and maybe
(32:05):
saying something that it shouldn't say. Their job was security.
They weren't going to get fired for taking security seriously.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
But it isn't only the NSA.
Speaker 15 (32:16):
The security scare involving the Ferbie doll is spreading the now.
NASA has issued a memo barring Ferbies from Cape Canaveral,
saying the dolls should be treated no differently than cameras
and other recording devices.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
And if a Ferbe is spotted at Virginia's Norfolk Naval Shipyard,
personnel are ordered to immediately quote seize it and its owner.
The University of Calgary is so concerned Ferbies might confuse
voice activated medical equipment that the Canadian Ministry of Health
(32:51):
launches an investigation, and the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA,
suggested protocols to protect Americans from potential damage the gremlin
like toys might reek. Because Ferby's were an electronic device,
the FAA is concerned the chatting creature might interfere with
(33:15):
sensitive flight equipment before flight takes off. Passengers are now
required to power down their discmn beepers and Ferby's. Even
Lars and Jenny at Ferbie Autopsy were asked about this.
Speaker 7 (33:32):
We did hear from someone who's an engineer. At a
major airline that wanted to know more because they were
concerned about how you have to turn off your electronic
devices on a plane. They wanted to know if this
was another device that could perhaps do something.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
The fear that Ferby would crash airplanes and divulge sensitive
information is escalating. But the thing is, none of the
rumors fueling these fears are actually true. Jeff Jones from
Tiger explains.
Speaker 4 (34:03):
Ferbi posed no threat to the security of the United States,
and anyway, Japer warm Ferby's didn't even have recording capabilities.
They had a microphone, that's true, but the microphone was
a sensor to pick up sounds. Ferbie had no idea
what you were saying. It just didn't.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
However, Stuart Baker, the former NSA lawyer, blames Tiger's promotional
efforts for the panic.
Speaker 16 (34:28):
Here's what I think happened. When they made the Ferbian
started to sell it, they were, I think the nicest
word for it. They were puffing its capabilities. The manufacturers
they said, oh it will it will learn to speak
English from you.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
The NSSA and all the others bought into the hype.
Speaker 16 (34:52):
I think they relied on the marketing materials. They just
did the easiest bureaucratic thing, which was to say we're
going to say no to this. And obviously there was
nobody who needed a Ferbie at work, so it was
pretty easy to say, don't do that.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
On October second, twenty twenty three, Ferbie celebrated its twenty
fifth anniversary. More than fifty eight million have been sold
to date. A new Ferbi, which now comes in colors
like fluorescent, purple and teal, cost seventy dollars and knows
over six hundred words, phrases and jokes. There are Ferbi
(35:36):
fashion accessories and Ferbi apparel, and of course.
Speaker 19 (35:41):
Have you seen the furbletz. They're baby Ferby's. They can't
keep them in stock at Amazon and on Walmart. These
furblets are off the chart.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
That's Richard Levy. He's a toy and game inventor and
was instrumental in bringing Ferbi two, Tiger Electronics and into existence.
Speaker 19 (36:03):
The toy gods were smiling on Ferby from day one.
Consumed us for the longest time, but it's just been
a wonderful ride.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Richard is struck by how Ferbey's popularity still seems to
know no boundaries.
Speaker 19 (36:21):
Ferby is a mega, mega brand. I travel oversees a
great deal and I'll take along a Ferby t shirt
just to see if a foreign audience recognizes it. And
I remember once I was coming out of Santiago, Chile
into the Andes Mountains and a truck from Bolivia had
(36:42):
broken down, and I got out of the our car
to see what was going on if I could help
the guy with his broken tire. And he looks at
my shirt and he goes, wit you a minute that
you know, you know, I mean, here's a truck driver
in Bolivia who knew Ferby. And I found that all
over the world, Malta, Greece, Singapore, Korea. It just it
(37:06):
hits all the right notes.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Ferby has indeed reached cult status. Visual artists have used
Ferbi or pieces of Ferby to examine identity and artificial intelligence.
There's a whole world on Etsy dedicated to Ferby, including
customized Ferbi's long Ferbi Ferbie jewelry, a Ferby made of
(37:32):
bark and moss, and a hand painted Ferbi altar. A
diamond encrusted Ferby even made an appearance in the twenty
nineteen movie Uncut gems. Today, no one's afraid of Ferby
spilling state secrets. But if you ask me if you
still have one of those little guys lying around your house,
(37:54):
somewhere tucked in a dark corner behind your polypocket collection
and tickle me Elmo, I'd be extra careful about what
you say around it.
Speaker 8 (38:07):
I had mentioned previously that we were working on a
Ferbie episode and we got a wild email from a reader.
He didn't want us to use his name, so I'm
going to call him Hank. I have a Ferbie story.
I was a freshman in college when the Ferbi came out.
This annoying guy on my hall got one for Christmas
from his long distance girlfriend and it never shut up.
(38:28):
I don't know if it was defective or if this
is just what ferbi's do. After many jokes and some arguments,
we eventually stole the Ferbie and left it in the
woods off campus. He laughed about it at first, but
the girlfriend freaked out, so he went to our ra
and turned us in for stealing his personal property. There
was a disciplinary hearing, the dumbest disciplinary hearing of all time.
(38:54):
For our defense, we bought another Ferby and put it
on the table and watched it make annoying noises. The
case was dismissed.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Nice, that's so funny.
Speaker 9 (39:04):
They could have gone over the RAS and over the
disciplinary board and it appealed to the NSA and say, look,
we got a threat for you. Have them come in. Yep, dude,
how wild's that?
Speaker 8 (39:14):
Sarah? Did you happen to cast this episode?
Speaker 4 (39:16):
I did.
Speaker 9 (39:17):
I had some fun with this one. There were some
characters in it. Like I loved the Dave Hampton inventor right,
So for him, I was picturing Chris Pine, but dressed
as Chris Pine, you know, like all those celebrity shots
you see him in, like outside of a coffee shop.
I'm like, perfect, just wear that to the set. Then
see Malik the Ferbie. I thought you'd take a refurbished
old Chucky doll to give it the right menace, and
then you just skin it with the Ferby skin. For Marci,
(39:40):
I was thinking Journey Smolette the actress. I thought she
would be perfect. And for Jeff Jones, the toy company executive.
Benedict Cumberbatch, I don't know why he just screams executive
to me.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
I feel like he could definitely do like Stern executive
right exactly.
Speaker 10 (39:55):
He can.
Speaker 9 (39:55):
He can do either like your cigarettes company executive, alcohol
company executive, Ferbie company executive. I believe him in every role.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
I never had a Ferbie. Did either of you have Ferby's?
Speaker 9 (40:04):
I wanted to ask you, Danna, because I know you're
a little younger, so I was did you have one?
Because I babysat kids who had them, so I know
the annoyance, but I never personally.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
I never had one. Had I think my parents preemptively
understood how annoying it was absolutely going to be.
Speaker 8 (40:18):
Did you want one?
Speaker 1 (40:20):
No, that was not a toy that was appealing to me.
Speaker 8 (40:24):
I thought about because they still make them, They're still
in for sale. Last night I thought, could I get
one here for this recording? And I could get one
here for tomorrow? And I didn't want to hold us up,
and I also didn't want to spend forty nine dollars.
But if anyone was inspired by this episode to go
get one, leave it in a college dorm, see what happens,
go for it.
Speaker 9 (40:44):
I'm definitely going to check out Ferbie Autopsy website. I'll
tell you him that much for sure.
Speaker 8 (40:48):
Yes, love those people. Any very special character nominations.
Speaker 1 (40:53):
I'm going to go with the Ferbie itself. I think
that Ferby's are sentient beings and that the Ferbie should count.
Speaker 9 (40:59):
I'm with that. I'm just gonna go more specifically with
Malik the Ferby, just because of the agent of chaos
energy he brings to this story.
Speaker 10 (41:05):
I liked him.
Speaker 8 (41:06):
I'm going to nomine and any mall workers or toy
store workers in nineteen ninety eight, ninety.
Speaker 9 (41:11):
Nine, good one.
Speaker 10 (41:13):
Really like that.
Speaker 8 (41:14):
I think that would have been fun, not at the time,
but a good story years later.
Speaker 10 (41:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 9 (41:19):
Like Veterans in the Trenches.
Speaker 8 (41:23):
Very special episodes is made by some very special people.
The show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett and
Jason English. Today's episode, The Ferbie Files was written and
produced in conjunction with Celia Aniskovich and dial Tone Films
for I Heart. Today's episode was written and story edited
by Marisa Brown. Our producers are Karl Catel and Josh Fisher.
(41:46):
Editing and sound design by Zoey Denkla and Josh Fisher,
Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser. Original music by Aaron
Kaufman and Alis McCoy. Research in fact checking by Celia
Aniskovich and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Kintinia. Our
executive producer is Jason English. You'd like to email the show,
(42:07):
you can reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail
dot com. You can check out more of Celia's work
at dial Tonefilms dot com. Call me Miss Cleo, Fruitcake Frauds.
She's got something for everyone. We've got more episodes in
the works with Celia's company. Be on the lookout for
those later this season. Very Special Episodes is a production
(42:27):
of iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Zaron Burnett
Dana Schwartz
Jason English
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