Behind every toy is a story. And sometimes the story is as interesting as the toy itself—especially when the story involves grown-ups acting stupid.
BOBBLEHEADS
Believe it or not, bobbleheads have been around for more than 400 years. Papier maché bobbleheads were made in China in the 1600s and they’ve gone in and out of style ever since.
The most recent bobblehead craze began in 1999, when the San Francisco Giants gave away Willie Mays bobblehead dolls. Then the Minnesota Twins gave out four different bobbleheads. Other teams followed. When the Philadelphia 76ers offered Allen Iverson bobbleheads to the first 5,000 kids at a game, it was total chaos. Bobblehead collectors were actually renting children so they could get one of the dolls!
Today, more than a million bobbleheads are made every month. Where are they made? In China…the country where bobbleheads first began.
CABBAGE PATCH KIDS
In 1978 a 23-year-old artist named Xavier Roberts started creating soft-sculpture dolls by hand. The dolls had pudgy faces, stumpy arms, and small, close-set eyes.
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They were completely different from the traditional cute baby doll. He called them Little People Originals. But he didn’t “sell” them—he let people pay a fee to “adopt” them. He and five friends bought an old medical clinic in Georgia, renamed it Babyland General Hospital, and opened it to the public.
Assistants dressed as nurses helped customers adopt their very own “baby” by giving them birth certificates with the doll’s name and “birth date.” They even passed out official-looking adoption papers. Little People were an immediate hit.
Doll Crazy
Four years later, Roberts signed a deal with a major toy manufacturer, Coleco Toys, and changed the name of the dolls to Cabbage Patch Kids. With a vinyl head and a slightly smaller size than the Little People, each was unique—during the manufacturing process, a computer randomly placed small changes in each doll. Kids loved it!
The dolls were such a hot Christmas item in 1983 that supplies ran low. Fistfights broke out between customers desperate to get a doll. Because there weren’t enough dolls to go around, many stores held lotteries to decide who could buy one. Police had to be called in to keep shoppers from rioting.
More than $600 million worth of Cabbage Patch Kids sold in 1985, making them the most successful toy of the 1980s.
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