I was recently on a Qantas flight. Things went relatively well, considering I was stuck in cattle class for over 12 hours. But anyway, on their safety information card, Furbies are singled out amongst the usual suspects such as mobile phones or radios that are prohibited for the entire flight. Did they have a bad experience? Do Australians hate Furbies?
PS: I saw that Qantas take their safety information card very seriously. It has the most detailed instructions on how to brace properly I’ve ever seen. Good job!
I’m pretty sure it’s because of the recording/playback abilities of the Furby, which probably puts it in the same electrical category as a Walkman or an iPod.
But seriously, who still has Furbies? I haven’t seen one of those things in over a decade…
They all have playback abilities- they “learn” a language from being talked to, IIRC. A friend whose kids had them years ago mentioned there was some way Furbies could “talk” to each other, too.
Also, they’re noisy things, so it’s quite possible they’re not allowed to be used inflight simply so they don’t drive the passengers mad (although crying children are still OK on flights for some reason ;))
I agree it’s an odd prohibition though, given that Furbies haven’t been a popular item in nearly a decade…
Yeah, I wanted to put together a Furbie room for an event with hundreds of Furbies and see how they react to hearing all the conversations people have.
I have one regular Furbie and two Furbie babies. However, my husband removed their batteries long ago, not because we needed the batteries elsewhere, but because the Furbies were driving him right around the bend.
I might put batteries back in the regular Furbie. I never did like the Furbie babies, though, so they’ll never get any more batteries.
Furbies only recognize that there is sound around them and become more coherently talkative after a predetermined amount of time and audio input. They don’t actually “learn” and playing noise at them was as good as talking. However, they were pitched as appearing to learn from being interacted with, leading to many people mistakenly believing that they were capable of recording and playback. I vaguely recall them being banned from some offices under concerns that they’d pick up confidential phrases.
One feature they did have, however, was IR to trigger responses in other Furbies. It’s probably the IR that made them a no-no electronic gadget for an airplane.
I have one from 1999. It “learns English from being talked to” which means it starts out speaking pre-programmed Furbish words and eventually replaces them with pre-programmed English words but you cannot teach it anything new. It has a sound sensor, but not a recorder.
I could imagine them driving the other passengers barmy though!
