The Instapump Fury 94 Returns as Aang, and It Is the Only Fury Reebok Is Selling

Reebok opens its Avatar: The Last Airbender collection on October 7 with the loudest shoe in it. The Instapump Fury 94 arrives in the yellows, oranges and browns of the Air Nomads, built as a tribute to Aang, with reflective arrows on the toe and the heel and the character printed inside. It is also the only Instapump Fury the brand’s own store is currently stocking, which makes a licensed cartoon the entry point to one of the strangest shoes Reebok has ever shipped.

The Instapump Fury landed in 1994 and nothing else on a shelf looked like it. Steven Smith designed it, and the idea was to take the Pump system Reebok had been fitting to basketball shoes since 1989 and make the inflatable bladder the entire shoe rather than a feature bolted onto one. That meant no laces at all. Squeeze the ball on the tongue, the bladder closes around the foot, and the split outsole carries the rest. The original colorway was black, citron and red, and Complex’s oral history of the model with Smith traces that palette back to the New Balance Super Comp he had worked on before Reebok. Retailers in 1994 did not know what to do with any of it. Three decades on the Fury sits in the Design Museum in London’s collection and has become the most reliable collaboration platform Reebok owns, the shape the brand reaches for when a partner wants something that photographs like nothing else in the room. The shoe has also outlived the technology that justified it. Most of the Pump line Reebok built around that bladder is long gone from the catalog and the Fury is still here, because the Fury was never really about the inflation. It was about the silhouette, and the silhouette has not needed updating.

The 94 in the name marks the version built back to the original proportions rather than one of the slimmer modern cuts, and this pair treats that shape as a canvas. Reebok mixes mesh, stretch canvas and hairy suede on the upper, so three materials carry the three tones of Aang’s robes, rust over tan over brown, with the suede doing the heavy lifting around the heel cage. The arrows on the toe and the heel are reflective, the same marking Aang carries on his head and hands, and they read as plain tonal panels until a light hits them. One insole prints Aang head to toe, the other carries the Avatar wordmark. Turn the shoe over and the outsole repeats the tan and rust split rather than defaulting to gum. The pair ships in custom packaging, which is where programs like this usually put the branding they cannot justify putting on the shoe itself.

What the collection really says is where Reebok is putting the Fury. A search of reebok.com returns no other Instapump Fury in stock, only two Instapump Sliver slip-ons that borrow the silhouette without the bladder, while the same search for Club C returns more than twenty. For a model this well known, that is a decision rather than an accident. Under Authentic Brands Group the brand has leaned on partners to carry its archive, and the recent run bears it out, a Reese’s colorway of the Angel Reese 1, a Billionaire Boys Club Club C 85, a lambskin Freestyle for Celine. A Nickelodeon license sits lower on the prestige ladder than a Paris fashion house and reaches a great deal further. The risk is the one every license carries. When the partner is the only reason a shoe is in the store, the shoe quietly stops being a Reebok product and becomes merchandise in a Reebok shape. The commercial logic is sound enough. Avatar: The Last Airbender finished its run on Nickelodeon in 2008, which puts the people who grew up on it squarely in the bracket that buys collaboration sneakers now.

Retail is $220, the ceiling of this collection by a distance. The Club C 85 in the same drop is $120, the Engine A 26 is $140 and the Classic Nylon is $110. A general-release Club C 85 on reebok.com is $85, so the license adds $35 to that model, and the Avatar Engine A 26 carries a $10 premium over the standard version. The Fury has no general-release counterpart on the site at all, which is the awkward part of pricing it. A buyer cannot see what this shoe costs without the cartoon on it, and $220 puts a canvas and mesh retro runner in designer collaboration territory.

The Reebok x Avatar Instapump Fury 94 releases Wednesday, October 7 at 10:00 AM ET at reebok.com, in Orange, Yellow and Beige, style code 100266848, at $220. The Club C 85 and the Engine A 26 arrive the same morning at the same time, and the Classic Nylon follows on October 8. All four sit in the Reebok x Avatar collection on the brand’s own store, which is the only confirmed retailer so far.

Written by

The Sneakers Team

The Sneakers Team is the editorial desk behind becausesneakers, founded and edited by Nick Engvall. Nick has spent more than two decades in the sneaker industry. He built the original Eastbay Blog, led the first dedicated sneaker team at Complex, ran the first UGC and seeding programs at Finish Line, was employee number nine at StockX, and served as Senior Director at Stadium Goods. He hosts the Sneaker History podcast, and his first book, Small Luxuries: Sneakers, arrives in October 2026 from Motorbooks. Release details on this site are checked against the brand's own product information before publication, and anything we cannot confirm is labelled rather than stated.

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