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Writer's pictureChristine Boone

<Puke> Long Furby

It's quite unfortunate, but I feel as though I must write about Long Furby. These very strange suggested items from Etsy appeared on my social media feed several months ago, and I took a screenshot because I needed other people to see how disturbing it was. Behold:



It took a colleague of mine to alert me to the fact that Long Furby is, in fact, a mashup. "Am I going to have to write about this??" I asked. And unfortunately, here we are.


So even though my colleague called it a mashup, based on the categories laid out in my 2013 typology article, Long Furby is actually a remix. It's made from one already completed work of art, and it's been added to with additional material. Of course, the original work is still recognizable. (Although the one with the mannequin hand is both a mashup AND a remix!)


I have to admit that even though I hate it, it's incredibly creative, and I think the world is a better place with Long Furby in it. When creators make things using already-completed works as raw material, they have the ability comment on culture while using culture itself. This is one of the main things that speaks to me about mashups, and, reluctantly, Long Furby. I think that the commentary here might be bringing attention to the fact that even though they were a Must-Have Toy when they were introduced in 1998, Furbies have always been polarizing: “Some people absolutely love it... [o]thers see Furby as evidence of a physical manifestation of evil and want to douse it in gasoline and burn it with cleansing fire." They look sort of like a cross between an owl and a Mogwai, with their beaks, fur, and large ears. They have [disturbingly?] human eyes. And, perhaps most importantly, they were designed to mimic artificial intelligence and human learning. When unboxed, a Furby only speaks a nonsense language called "Furbish," but the more a user interacts with them, the more English words are introduced into a Furby's vocabulary. This was all pre-programmed, of course, but was designed to appear as though the toy were sentient in some way. Because of embedded sensors, Furby could play peek-a-boo, demand to be tickled (and respond when a user acquiesced); when held upside-down, the Furby would cry, "I'm scared!" Herein lies the remix as commentary: the idea of a sentient toy is creepy, and this is what Long Furby plays upon. It takes the slight degree of unease that a person might get from a normal Furby, and turns the dial up to 11. Don't pretend that you're fine with Long Furby; it will haunt your dreams, and that is its very intention.

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