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Kitschy, kind of funny, kind of clever, ubiquitous as giveaways
at places like baseball games, who doesn't love a bobblehead?
America most definitely does.
“I think they’re the ultimate Americana, sort of pop-culture
icon,” says Phil Sklar, a bobblehead figurine aficionado who has
parlayed that interest into founding the National Bobblehead
Hall of Fame and Museum. The Milwaukee, Wisconsin, site offers
visitors a chance to gawk at a vast array of the figurines as
well as learn more about their history, and offers bobbleheads
for sale. (Also very American? Spaces that celebrate highly
specific interests.)
The dolls aren't an American invention. Sklar says there were
head-nodding statues in China at least a few hundred years ago,
seen by Europeans who brought versions back with them. Their
popularity spread, and smaller versions were made, particularly
in Germany.
But they reached their true head-bobbing potential in America,
he says, first becoming popular in the 1960s by sports figures
being given out at baseball games and then expanding to include
a range of famous people, like the Beatles.
While there have been lulls over the decades in the level of
public interest in the dolls, they've always been around, with
whoever's in the public spotlight likely to become a bobblehead
subject. Says Sklar: “They really have just been something that
Americans have come to know and love."
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