How A Bobblehead Toy Represents Our Blind Allegiance to Consumerism
By: Brock Wilbur
Tags: Pop Culture, Hoarding, Toys, Funko Pop, Collecting

These days, I keep engaging in an action that I recognize as blatant capitalist completionism. It’s also an addiction, but a strange addiction; I know addiction pretty well, and this one simply doesn’t make sense to me. There’s no real dopamine release, nor does it bring me any sense of accomplishment or fulfillment. And yet I keep finding myself trying to dip my toe into a world where I have no business dabbling—a world I don’t even want to be involved in. The world of Funko Pops.

Formed in 1998, Funko originally planned to make small bobbleheads of vintage things that people like. The company mostly made bobbleheads of fast-food icon Bob’s Big Boy. That’s it. Funko was a Bob’s Big Boy company. The company was sold in 2005, when its creator was clearly losing interest in his own invention. In 2010, the new owner showed up at Comic-Con with an idea for Funko 2.0: a series of bobbleheads based on pop-culture collectibles. These bobbles included two Batmen, a Green Lantern, and a Batgirl.

With that, the world of Funko exploded.

Now, Funko Pop! Vinyl characters are basically their own economy. But they’re also an economy of scale. A 2010 metallic Batman figure (with fewer than 500 units produced) currently trades at $800, and a production of 1,000 Headless Ned Starks from Game of Thrones exchanges for more than $600 per unit. Trying to understand why certain characters are suddenly worth a grand in resale is like trying to wrap your mind around bitcoin. Funko is cryptofandom. How do you rank it or give it a financial rating? And why does it speak to certain people so much? This is my problem.

And I do mean it has literally become my problem. To me, the Outsider, every single Funko Pop Vinyl is a 3.5-inch-tall plastic bit of nonsense. These bobbleheads directly suggest that all pop culture is interchangeable, because any character from any medium now can be easily molded into a small, interchangeable format. Hellboy is now mostly indistinguishable from the Mother of Dragons. Batman kind of looks like Boba Fett. Funko, on the surface, looks like a joke made at the expense of nerd fandom about the interchangeability and unoriginality of fandom. It is collecting the idea of collecting. Why should any part of this enter into my life?

But Funkos are everywhere, and so, one day, almost by sheer cultural wave of habit, I started buying Funkos for my wife. “Here,” I thought. “Here is a physical representation of a thing you like.” That’s when she got Hillary Clinton. And both Gilmore Girls. And from my press screening of Thor: Ragnarock, I was able to bring one character home. Instead of a Thor or Loki for me, I brought her Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie.

Despite my turn into Funko-gifting, I still found them crazy annoying and pedantic and was upset about the fact that they were basically clutter.

But then I started receiving Funkos. People started giving me bobblehead toys based on characters I loved, and suddenly I found myself enraptured by the power of a tiny statue. I got a Doctor Who who was holding a spoon. I got a Scott Pilgrim holding a bass. I got a Winnie the Pooh stuck in a jar. Was that the real draw here? The ability to expand the understanding of one’s control of an idea, or was this the idea taking control over me?

Both Funko collectors and Funko itself use the language of addiction to describe this empire. My friend Craig says collecting has been a “slippery slope.” At first, he wanted only three Funkos: “Heisenberg from Breaking Bad, Hank McCoy/Beast from X-Men, and the Dude from The Big Lebowski.” But once he had those three, Craig realized he wanted Funkos of “all the movies, TV shows, video games, comics, and cartoons I’ve enjoyed from adolescence to adulthood.” That three-unit goal became an unstoppable machine, and now Craig strives to capture every corner of pop culture in Funko form.

Like me, Craig doesn’t Funko alone. “I really enjoy them for decorative purposes, even though my apartment looks a bit like a Hot Topic,” he says. “I’ve got three main displays: my MCU display for the Marvel films–related figures, a Star Wars display with about 30 figures from the series, and then my wife’s got a Harry Potter display. Shockingly, despite being this big of a nerd, I am married, and my wife is probably more into collecting them than I am.”

Funko calls its most passionate collectors “funatics,” and the world of funatics is strangely and inspiringly democratic. Funko’s website recently featured Caitlyn Ellis, who owns more than 400 Funkos and posts her custom Funko creations on her Instagram. And Funko acknowledges her for it. She’s been involved with the scene for three years and has like a dozen items, and the company is recognizing her fandom equally to any of the funatics who have spent thousands on stupid tiny plastic dolls. This is sincere and good and the best look I’ve ever seen for Funko.

But now I have half the Fallout characters for some reason. And two-thirds of the show Hannibal. I have the entire cast of BoJack Horseman, but that will only expand with the next season. I don’t want to check, but I have a strange feeling I’m missing only a single character from Parks & Rec.

Between the pitching of this article and the release of this article, a new Star Wars film came out. And upsettingly, I found myself buying my wife every single female character (and Porg) from the related Funko line. My wife, in return, got me a Winnie the Pooh Funko that, if anything were to happen to it, I would murder everyone in my hometown and several other hometowns to avenge. What have I done? Why and how do I care about this? No one knows.

There is an idea of pop-culture slavery here. That fans need to physically own any concept they feel is owed to them. That a character is now possessable and therefore should be possessed. There is something this series forces me to believe that I need, even though…I actively don’t enjoy it?

I moved to a Midwestern city a few months ago and wound up walking the mall. The mall here features Funko Pops in a solid half of its stores. Just walls of figures. The same figures. I have no idea what the business model could be, beyond the concept that people will just mindlessly buy Funkos. I’m making fun of it, but I’m also Googling a Funko for my wife based on a variation on a Star Wars Porg that she doesn’t own yet. I am so disturbed by this in-between point of fandom that’s unlike anything pop culture has ever gripped me with. I need to have more, and I experience active disdain for every part of this subculture — except for the tiny moments that inexplicably mean the world to me.