The Oddbody Furby Community Turns ’90s Kids’ Toys Into Lovely Nightmares
Devin Gardner makes some fucked-up Furbies, but they’re widely loved on Instagram and Tumblr. Hunched over his desk in his bedroom turned workspace, the 24-year-old painstakingly “skins” vintage Furbies by removing their furry casings.
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After separating the toy’s eyes and beak from its electronic core, he hunches over a comically tiny sewing machine and constructs a new body. The lengthy, snakelike creations are known as “long Furbies.” The squat, hefty ones are known as “loafs.”
Once the corporeal form is complete, Gardner attaches the Furby’s original face onto its new flesh prison, resulting in a kind of plush Frankenstein. When a new member of the “family” is born, he photographs it and posts it to his Instagram account, long.furby.fam, which has grown to more than 30,000 followers since its start earlier this year.
To make content viral, Gardner stresses the importance of creating something concise, consumable, and bizarre. He thinks of his Instagram posts, where he poses his Furbies in a variety of absurd scenarios, as skits or jokes.
