A Brief History of Star Wars Bobbleheads

It is hard to escape the feeling, sometimes, that we live in a monoculture. 

This might seem a strange thing to experience when we exist in a time of unprecedented access to culture, be it music, visual media, or writing. We can subscribe to massive streaming services like Netflix or we can pick from boutique streamers that scratch our niche, from Criterion to Crunchyroll. 

All that choice a bit of an illusion, though, when we look at the powerful businesses that have been consolidating the producers of mass culture into just a few brands. And with the launch of Disney+, the mighty mouse’s latest effort to capitalize on the massive vault of intellectual property he has accumulated over the last few decades, it bears reflecting on how the culture we partake in has been shaped by its mode of production.

Yes, this is about Star Wars and it is about bobbleheads.

Quick primer on bobbleheads from the beginning of time until the turn of the 21st century: They share some lineage with 19th-century waving figures of Buddha and the Thanjavur dolls of India. They were first referenced in western literature in Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat. Early baseball bobbleheads ranged in material from papier-mache to porcelain. The Bobblehead Hall of Fame in Milwaukee — because museums for trivialities like bobbleheads are always just in the hometown of whoever decided to collect them — attributes the re-popularity of the bobblehead in the modern era to a plastic Willie Mays Giants bobblehead that celebrated the 40th and final year of Candlestick Park in 1999. 

Between 1999 and 2019, bobbleheads have grown in popularity as an easily mass-produced, sorta-kinda-if-you-squint nostalgic memorabilia item. In modern years, every team puts out at least a couple every year, along with other giveaways from gnomes to snowglobes to truly accursed Funko pops. Those are all terrible. Only bobbleheads are good. 

Quick primer on Star Wars: Three science fiction-space opera movies from the late 1970s into the ’80s, then three remasters in the ’90s that make everyone angry. Three prequels in the early aughts make a lot of money, but eventual critical reappraisal again makes everyone angry. The franchise is sold to Disney in 2012 for an astonishing $4 billion. Disney has since produced a new trilogy, multiple stand-alone films in the greater Star Wars universe, scrapped the beloved-by-dozens Big Thunder Ranch portion of Disneyland for a theme park tie-in, and as of November 12, 2019, launched original Star Wars content on its Disney+ streaming service.   

So to get from good old-fashioned national pastime bobbleheads to Star Wars bobbleheads, we need Star Wars Night. To get Star Wars Night, you need the desperation-borne weirdness that can only exist in the minor leagues. History suggests the mysterious, arcane alchemy of getting people who aren’t necessarily fans of baseball through the gates of a baseball stadium first produced a Star Wars Night at Comstock Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. From Noah Frank of WTOP:

Sometime in 2006, Grand Rapids, Michigan television reporter/anchor Brent Ashcroft reached out to Mickey Graham, then the head of promotions with the West Michigan Whitecaps, a Single-A affiliate of the cross-state Detroit Tigers…Ashcroft had joined the 501st Legion, a Star Wars-themed cosplay club in late 2005, enlisting in the Great Lakes Garrison…After appearing in costume a few times, Ashcroft had the idea to approach the local baseball club…By June, Graham called back with the go-ahead. He remembers 20-30 members roaming the concourse in full, movie-quality regalia.”

The success of the promotion, now emulated every year by 29 out of 30 teams (not sure what’s going on there, Cleveland!) speaks for itself. Promotional flyers get thrown away, websites go unrenewed, teams change cities and leagues — it’s difficult to trace the spread of Star Wars Night precisely from 2006 to the major leagues, but thanks to dutiful collectors and eBay’s odd tendency of leaving old listings up forever, we can reconstruct some early Star Wars bobblehead milestones. It’s fitting that the first position player bobblehead we find is from the team that resurrected the novelty’s popularity: Buster Posey of the Giants, given away September 8, 2013.

This bobblehead has the dubious honor of being one of the very few prequel-themed bobbleheads, as this release fell in a strange period of time between the acquisition of LucasFilm by Disney and the Christmas 2015 release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Research suggests that while Star Wars Night was an increasingly popular trend in the majors during this short window, only a few teams actually produced bobbleheads: The Diamondbacks released an uninspired Josh Collmenter Jedi-themed bobblehead; Colorado, a truly grotesque “Obi-Wan Owitzki” bobblehead gnome. And then there’s the curious case of the Lancaster Jethawks Jose Altuve Star Wars bobble.

Altuve was in the majors producing his first 5+ WAR season by 2014, and hadn’t played for the Single-A affiliate Jethawks for several years. But it is somewhat fitting to end this early era of Star Wars MLB tie-ins on another product of the minor leagues, some 2,000 miles from where the strange promotion cooked up by an ardent fan with the resources of a serious hobbyist first began. 

It has been suggested in recent months that baseball does not need the minor leagues anymore — that it is an outdated system when players can hook into a Rapsodo machine and perfect a major league-ready launch angle outside the indignity of grinding plate appearances in front of diminutive crowds. And it is true that the minors are a flawed product, though it seems suspicious that the conversation of shutting down the farm system has risen so sharply in parallel to the growing sentiment that the players on these teams should organize to negotiate better conditions and wages.

Setting aside that much larger conversation, losing the minor leagues means losing a lot of people on the fringes of the industry outside just the players on the field. An idea like Star Wars Night might arise organically only from a place like that, birthed from real enthusiasm for a movie people of a certain age grew up with. In 2006 there was no indication that this would work at the highest level of the game, and many would have called the spectacle undignified —it took the shamelessness of the lowest levels of the minors to take a risk, and those places will always, for better or worse, be a crucible for innovation.

After 2014, we see rapid growth and innovation as Star Wars Night spreads to more and more clubs. Different teams embrace the novelty giveaway with different levels of enthusiasm — there is not much inspired about putting Mr. Redlegs in an X-Wing, especially compared to the kisses-fingertips masterpiece that is the Stormin’ Gorman Thomas Storm Trooper of the same year just two-ish states over.

Pun names quickly became a staple, from the Mariners gimme that was the 2016 Taijuan Skywalker bobblehead (spun again by the Diamondbacks several years later for a Game of Thrones-themed “Taijuan Whitewalker” statue) to the cheeky and dashing  “Landrus Calrissian” given away by the Rangers in August. 

A notable release from the 2017 season, when 12 teams produced bobbles of varying quality for their Star Wars nights: The Paul Goldschmidt “Gold Leader” X-Wing bobblehead, wherein a select few lucky recipients received a special gold-painted helmet instead of the standard matte black. The Diamondbacks then granted the winning children a once-in-a-lifetime tour of the fanciful churro dog factory beneath Chase Field, guided by an eccentric and slightly malevolent Steve Berthiaume.  

The end of the 2017 season marks the end of this innovative middle era for the Star Wars bobble. Maybe fittingly for the modern game, where front offices seem to prioritize undervalued assets and undeveloped markets and where the smart team zigs when everyone else zags, the final themed bobblehead of the year was a September 26 giveaway by the Phillies. On its first and only Star Trek night, the organization gave away 3,000 bobbleheads of Captain Picard to celebrate the show’s 30th anniversary.

A defining feature of this middle era is that baseball’s event planners hadn’t quite caught on to May 4, the official-unofficial Star Wars national holiday. Only four of the 27 bobbleheads between 2014 and 2017 were given away in May, the rest interspersed across the summer months wherever teams could fit them in. This changed in 2018 when 15 major league teams released bobbleheads in proximity to the date. Perhaps uncoincidentally, May 10, 2018, saw the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the stand-alone vehicle for Han Solo, now untied from Harrison Ford. The movie was released to somewhat mixed reviews, a foreboding sign to come for the 10 Han Solo themed bobbleheads released with the help of major league cross-promotion.

The best of the bunch was, unquestionably, Braun Solo. The quality of puns rapidly tumbles after that, from a passable Han Gallo and Hawk Solo (the White Sox really didn’t have anyone better on the roster that fit the rhyme scheme) to the dregs of Han Myers (Wil Solo would have already felt like a Star Wars extended universe distant relation) or Sal Solo, with the much better suited Jorge Soler also on the Royals.

Truly the worst of the bunch, though, at number 10 of 10, is the lackluster “Mr. Met as Han Solo.” Bland on its own, yes, but downright criminal on a roster that featured Brandon Nimmo, Michael Conforto, Amed Rosario, and Seth Lugo. I honestly would have preferred Han Yoloenis to what Mets fans actually got. This should be remembered as one of the most confusing managerial moves in franchise history.

If the Han Solo bobblehead tie-in marked a point of saturation for Star Wars exposure in major league baseball, it perhaps reflects a similar trend in America’s growing exhaustion with Disney’s cultural domination at the box office: six of the year’s top 10 highest-grossing movies domestically were from Disney via the Star Wars, Pixar or Marvel property groups, all owned (or soon to be owned, via the Fox merger of March 2019) by the corporation. Number 11 on the list was Sony’s Venom.

Throughout 2019, the studio faced growing backlash to its now-yearly release cycle of Star Wars movies and seemed to make a conscious decision to take the pedal off the gas when it shelved a planned trilogy with D.B. Weiss and David Benioff of Game of Thrones fame indefinitely in October. 

In a similar vein, the number of Star Wars bobbleheads seemed to take a step backward this year to a comparatively measly 12 — the best of which is unquestionably “Obi Sean Kenobi,” made all the better by the real Jedi Sean Doolittle’s enthusiastic waving of a plastic lightsaber throughout the post-game celebrations of the Nationals’ run to the World Series.  

That is not to say, however, that MLB has slowed its promotional calendar, having merely diversified its ever-increasing number of giveaways across other franchises. Game of Thrones and Marvel have both trended upwards, and according to Sports Business Daily, despite giving away more bobbleheads than ever before, they remain the most popular memorabilia among fans. 

It’s easy to project personal feelings onto the wider culture. As we age, our relationships to the things we once enjoyed wholeheartedly change. Many of us have fallen into the trap of projecting our own loss of interest in a subject onto something bigger, conjuring in our minds a malaise of disinterest gripping millions. Other adults must also be struggling with their growing indifference to what they once looked forward to, right? The simple answer is just that you are approaching your thirties and you have commitments to career, family, and kids that you didn’t have when Iron Man came out. 

But sometimes, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the creep of monoculture. It’s hard to resist the idea that MLB has fully embraced the opportunity to cross-promote with the most popular brands in contemporary entertainment, and that there’s nowhere to go from here but to diversify the portfolio- fewer Star Wars bobbleheads and fewer Star Wars movies, more Marvel bobbleheads and Disney+ tie in shows. That all we can look forward to is newly branded collectibles alluding to whatever cultural product escapes into the wider consciousness, gewgaws commemorating whatever the latest HBO watercooler show may be. And what you get out of it, in the end, isn’t really a renewed sense of childhood delight. It’s just a few tchotchkes that you associate with a time in your life when you had the time to see all the movies and you were invested in the players on a baseball field. 

And, after all, there’s still a little hope left in you. Maybe you’ll get a little plastic “‘Baby Koda’ Glover” statue for the shelf on your desk some time next August.