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.