EVERYTHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BOBBLEHEADS

What is a Bobblehead and Who Came up with them Anyway?

You may have seen bobble heads, these small collectible dolls, of famous people or characters. They're about as tall as a can of soda and their head bounces around as opposed to being fixed in its place. The head bobbles by being attached to the body by a small spring and thanks to the fact that it is typically oversized compared to the body.

All in all bobble heads are quite cartoonish in nature and make their character look friendly and fun. Although their design has changed as the years have gone by.

What is the right way to call a bobblehead or bobble head?

Both names are correct, though most computers today will highlight the word bobblehead as being a spelling mistake, popular culture has adopted bobblehead and bobble head to mean one and the same.

There's some other names used to refer to these figurines, such as bobblehead doll, bobblehead nodder, or simply nodder, and bobbing head dolls or wobble heads. Even the name wobblers is sometimes used.

What is the Story Behind Bobbleheads?

Bobbleheads have been around longer than you may realize. Even though the first ever mention of a bobble head goes back as far as 1842 in a book called The Overcoat, bobbleheads are suspected to go all the way back to ancient Japan and China, where they were made of flexible bamboo strips.

The modern bobbleheads date back to around the 1950s where they popped up in Germany and were know and nodders, but they only became really popular in the 1960's through baseball teams making bobbleheads of their players.

The bobblehead designs of that time was rather different than today's. The heads were not that large, and their faces though very friendly in appearance, often didn't resemble the celebrity they represented too accurately. Bobblehead manufacturers back then got away with just making sure the uniform colors were right and the player's number was correct. When the face did resemble the person, it was usually in a cherub, highly glossy style.

The bodies of bobbleheads themselves were also very different. There was a lot of very square-looking standard bodies, that were rarely in sporty positions. It all points toward bobbleheads being a very simple item with not very high aspirations. Ironically some of these old, simple bobble heads are considered vintage relics today, selling as collectible antiques for very large amounts of money depending on the models.

The next biggest bobble head craze after baseball was that of Elvis and The Beatles. You would think that the rest was history and that bobbleheads took their place in pop culture. But in reality, for the next 20 years, bobble heads didn't really earned any celebrity status. Then, around the new millennium, bobbleheads reared their bobbing head again appearing in famous commercials, TV shows and representing many famous political characters.

By this time the design of the bobble head had become far more sophisticated, with bodies often exhibiting a great amount of detail and heads highly resembling the person they represented.

This gave room to the latest chapter in bobble head history, which is personalized bobbleheads that anyone can get their hands on. This is not to say that in the very beginning, bobble heads were not custom made, in fact this is how they started in all likelihood. But through their path in becoming popular in the 20th century, bobbleheads somehow lost their custom made touch and became mass made items.

With the availability of new production techniques and technology like the Internet where people can make their photos easily available, bobbleheads are now produced both on mass and on a personal basis.

Thought bobbleheads have changed their style, material and purpose throughout the years, they still maintain a big charm and surprise factor, which makes them somehow different and quite endearing.

Bobblehead Trivia

The most famous bobblehead of a dog is the Taco Bell Chihuahua dog from the "yo quiero Taco Bell" promotion from 1997. This is closely followed by the Churchill Auto Insurance pitbull bobblehead.

Thought there is no full consensus, the Beatles bobblehead is today's most expensive bobblehead on the market, at a recorded 32.5 thousand USD. A publicity hoax also listed a bobblehead from the TV series The Office at 10 million USD. It has not sold yet.

There is a medical condition known as the bobble head doll syndrome, where patients bob their head around involuntarily, much in the way the bobble head dolls do. It is so rare, that only 34 cases are reported since 1966.

The most popular videogame bobblehead is the vault boy bobblehead which features in the collector's edition of the game and comes in a Valu-tec lunch box.

The sport using bobbleheads most intensely is baseball, where entire teams are mass made and given away as freebies during games, sometimes in numbers as big as 35,000 in one go.

The Elvis bobbleheads are the most sought after and on average thousands of dollars are spent daily on exchanging them in EBay