Definitely prefer the ones with mechanical parts rather than the modern ones with eyes that are just backlit screens. I've always found animatronics fascinating, and it's neat that they managed to sell what was effectively a mini animatronic at consumer prices.
I'm a big fan of the various mods of them that people make, like the long furbys, hydras, etc. I'm sad that most of the mods don't go farther, like custom microcontrollers and such. I'm shocked there isn't some open source project to replace the guts with an rPi Zero or something hackable.
Your question sent me down a rabbit hole and apparently the original source code is semi-available. Scanned PDF of code included with the original patent filing.
