The Top 5 Toys of the 1990s Christmas
Beanie Babies, Buzz Lightyear, Tickle Me Elmo, Tamagotchi and Furby: five toys the 1990s Decembers were about, with what the record says and where to look today.
November 3, 2026 · ZABI LLC
By the 1990s the toy aisle had become news. When the Deseret News wrote up the Furby rush in December 1998, it did not need to explain itself: it simply listed the earlier holiday crazes that readers would remember, among them Cabbage Patch Kids, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Tickle Me Elmo. Parents already knew the genre.
Here are five toys from that decade, chosen for a documented December and a story worth retelling. Two have a longer account of their own, which we link where it fits. The rest need only a page each.
The five
Documented in Mental Floss's history of the craze
Beanie Babies
H. Ty Warner founded Ty Inc. in 1986, and the first Beanie Babies line appeared at the World Toy Fair in New York in 1993. What turned small stuffed animals into a craze was scarcity. In 1995 Ty discontinued a lamb called Lovie because of supplier problems. Warner then retired more, reportedly because he saw that scarcity drove demand, and Ty limited retailers to a few dozen of any one animal.
Mental Floss adds a detail that parents of the era will recall: birthdays and poems on the hang tags, an idea credited to Lina Trivedi around 1995. By 1998 Beanie Babies made up 10 percent of all eBay sales, the same piece says, and in 1999 Ty announced plans to retire the whole line before reversing course after an online poll. By the early 2000s sales were down 90 percent from the peak. A toy that tells you quite a lot about collecting, and rather less about play.
V&A: voted most elusive toy of the year, 1996
Buzz Lightyear
Toy Story, released in 1995, was the first full-length computer-animated film, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Buzz Lightyear, the toy who believes he is a superhero, came with a line of spin-off products. Many expected Woody, the cowboy doll, to be the most wanted of them, but the museum records that Buzz proved far more popular.
The museum's record says that in 1996 supply could not meet Christmas demand and that the toy was voted "most elusive Toy of the Year". Its own example was made in China for Thinkway Toys in 1997, with retractable wings, a clear bubble helmet and a red light at the wrist that stands for a laser beam. Meeting him again, the appeal is not hard to see: a figure that does what the film says it does, with electronic noises on the chest buttons.
Covered by AARP and the Rochester Post Bulletin
Tickle Me Elmo
Tyco introduced Tickle Me Elmo in July 1996, expecting to sell 400,000 that year, according to the New York Times as cited by Fox. Then in October Tyco sent 200 dolls to The Rosie O'Donnell Show, and the toy was given away on air. AARP's history says that was when demand surged, and that more than a million were sold by Christmas.
The shortage was real enough for newspapers to log it. A Post Bulletin look-back describes a Rochester, Minnesota, shopper who was first in line on Black Friday and said, "I've looked everywhere." AARP cites People magazine on a Canadian store employee injured when shoppers stampeded him. By Christmas 1997 more than five million had been sold, per AARP. The full story is in our account of Elmo's 1996.
Documented in Mental Floss's Tamagotchi history
Tamagotchi
Aki Maita, then a 30-year-old Bandai office worker, came up with the idea, and she worked with the designer Akihiro Yokoi. Bandai released the toy in Japan in November 1996. It reached the United States in 1997. By June 1997, Mental Floss says, 10 million had shipped worldwide.
A small screen showed a digital pet. Mental Floss says one day equalled one human year, three buttons were used to feed and clean it, and neglect could kill it. Some schools banned them. Mental Floss cites a 1997 Baltimore Sun piece in which a writer reported that his son's principal had done so after pupils grew so despondent over dead pets that they needed consoling. It was a toy that taught responsibility by way of a small, beeping funeral.
Reported by the Deseret News, December 1998
Furby
Furby came from Tiger Electronics, an Illinois division of Hasbro. The Deseret News describes a furry electronic creature with a vocabulary of about 200 words in its own "Furbish" language that sneezed, snored and laughed. It was introduced at F.A.O. Schwarz in early October 1998, after a September Wired article called it the hot toy of the year.
Tiger had shipped more than a million by early December and expected to ship up to two million by the end of the year. At 19 K-B Toys stores in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, thousands waited for a 6 a.m. opening on 27 November, and each store's 200 Furbies were gone within an hour. An industry analyst said the manufacturer was not to blame: retailers had ordered fewer toys in advance. The longer story is in our piece on Furby.
What the decade tells us
Read together, the five suggest that a December in the 1990s could turn on how well a manufacturer guessed the crowd. The Deseret analyst's point about retailers ordering late is the sort of detail that never reaches the box, and it explains more than any slogan.
It also shows how different the toys were underneath: one was a collector's game as much as a plush animal, one a film tie-in, one a digital pet with a short life. If you are looking back to the decade before, the 1980s list is the place to start.
Sources
Where the facts in this post come from. Rankings and lists belong to the people who published them; the selection and the stories are ours.
- Furby frenzy fueling face-offs, Deseret News, 5 December 1998 — Furby details and shortage; list of earlier holiday crazes
- Memorable holiday toy crazes, AARP — Tickle Me Elmo 1996 demand, Rosie O'Donnell, sales, People magazine report
- A brief history of Tickle Me Elmo, Fox — Elmo introduced July 1996, 400,000 expectation (New York Times as cited), Rosie O'Donnell dolls
- Remember Tickle Me Elmo? Brainerd Dispatch (Rochester Post Bulletin look-back) — Black Friday 1996 shopper quote
- The Beanie Bubble real history, Mental Floss — Ty Inc., 1993 launch, retirement strategy, eBay share, decline
- Tamagotchi facts, Mental Floss — Tamagotchi origins, releases, how it worked, school bans
- Buzz Lightyear action figure, Thinkway Toys, Victoria and Albert Museum — Buzz Lightyear 1996 demand and "most elusive" note; toy description
- Every year's top holiday toy craze since 1989, Moneywise (via Yahoo Finance) — Pointer to which toys the decade's retrospectives name (not used for figures)