What is a bobblehead anyway? Actually, you are probably very familiar with bobbleheads which is a type of toy that has a head that bobbles or wobbles on a spring connected to the body of the toy. This type of collectible also goes by other names which are wobbler, noddler, and bobbing head doll. You have probably seen a lot of these bobblehead toys on cars – particularly on the dashboard – where the slightest movement of the car will make the bobblehead wobble on its spring. The toys are glued or screwed into the surface they rest on so that they don’t fall off.
One use of bobblehead collectible items are for promotional purposes of different organizations, like by sporting events organizers. The modern type of bobblehead first made its public appearance back in the 1950s. In fact, one very famous type of bobblehead collectible series cropped up in the 1950s which was the Beatles collection. Bobblehead collecting was a craze until the 1970s when the trend seemed to taper off.
Though bobblehead collecting became less urgent for some time, once bobblehead manufacturing became less expensive to pursue with the switch to use of plastic as raw material, more bobbleheads were produced of varying types and bobblehead collecting became fashionable again. A key feature of modern bobbleheads is that the head of the toy is usually much bigger than the torso and other body parts which makes bobblehead toys stand out.
If you are mad about bobblehead collecting, you may want to know more about the background of the bobblehead toy series you are purchasing so that you become a true-blue bobblehead aficionado.
Bobblehead Doll in wikipedia
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A bobblehead doll, also known as a bobbing head doll, nodder, or wobbler, is a type of collectible doll. Its head is often oversized compared to its body. Instead of a solid connection, its head is connected to the body by a spring in such a way that a light tap will cause the head to bobble, hence the name.
Although bobblehead dolls have been made with a wide variety of figures such as vampiric cereal pitchman Count Chocula, beat generation author Jack Kerouac, and Nobel-prize-winning geneticist James D. Watson, the figure is most associated with athletes, especially baseball players. Bobblehead dolls are sometimes given out to ticket buyers at sporting events as a promotion. Corporations including Taco Bell (the ‘Yo Quiero Taco Bell’ Chihuahua) , McDonald’s (Ronald McDonald), and Empire Today (The Empire Man) have also produced popular bobbleheads of the characters used in their advertisements.
The earliest known reference to a bobblehead is thought to be in Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 short story The Overcoat, in which the main character’s neck was described as “like the necks of plaster cats which wag their heads”. The modern bobblehead first appeared in the 1950s. By 1960, Major League Baseball had gotten in on the action and produced a series of papier-mache bobblehead dolls, one for each team, all with the same cherubic face. The World Series held that year brought the first player-specific baseball bobbleheads, for Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Willie Mays, still all with the same face. Over the next decade, after a switch in materials from paper-mache to ceramic, bobbleheads would be produced for other sports, as well as cartoon characters. One of the most famous bobbleheads of all time also hails from this era: The Beatles bobblehead set, which is a valuable collectible today. By the mid-1970s, though, the bobblehead craze was in the process of winding down.
It would take nearly two decades before bobbleheads returned to prominence. Although older bobbleheads like the baseball teams and The Beatles were sought after by collectors during this period, new bobblehead dolls were few and far between. What finally prompted their resurgence was cheaper manufacturing processes, and the main bobblehead material switched once again, this time from ceramic to plastic. It was now possible to make bobbleheads in the very limited numbers necessary for them to be viable collectibles. The first baseball team to offer a bobblehead giveaway was the San Francisco Giants, which distributed 35,000 Willie Mays head nodders at a 1999 game. The variety of bobbleheads on the market rose exponentially to include even relatively obscure popular culture figures and notable people. The new millennium would bring a new type of bobblehead toy, the mini-bobblehead, standing just two or three inches tall and used for cereal prizes and such.