re: How many Funko Pops did you add to your collection for Christmas?

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at least w/ hobbies like model railroading and building scale models you end up with an exact scaled replica of something.

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It's a rubber doll with zero function.

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So the heads don’t bobble? I always thought they were bobble heads.

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Before there was the Pokemon gold rush, there was the Beanie Baby gold rush. Many families in the ‘90s bought Beanie Babies and put them in hard plastic containers or weird sleeping bags with the idea that, years later, they could flip them for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Beanie Baby prices famously crashed, and for most people they are an afterthought. But a search through eBay’s recently sold listings is truly bizarre. Most supposedly rare Beanie Babies like “Princess,” the purple Princess Dianna bear, are selling for a couple bucks. But there’s also dozens of listings showing Princess and other Beanie Babies selling for outrageous sums: A Princess seemingly sold on June 30 for $25,000, an Iggy the Iguana sold for $15,000, Gobbles the turkey sold for $14,888.

What gives? Is this some sort of scam? Why are some of the exact same Beanie Babies seemingly selling for thousands, while others are selling for pennies?

What’s happening, according to Beanie Baby experts, is a quirk of both eBay and society at large. The vast majority of Beanie Babies are essentially worthless, but the craze of the 1990s and the seemingly high sales prices of certain beanies have led to a collective delusion.

Looking at the Princess Di bear sold on June 30 for $25,000, the listing shows the seller created an account in 2019 and has no sales history. The bear shows as sold, but then was relisted for $17,000.

So did this bear sell or not? With eBay, it’s hard to tell. If you modify the search conditions to show “completed items” as well as “sold items” then the $25,000 price tag returns with a line through it. This indicates that it didn’t actually sell for $25,000 but went for the best offer, which is a secret between the seller and buyer.

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“Those are bogus,” Schlossberg, a historian of Beanie Babies who runs the website Ty Collector with his daughter, told Motherboard. “You’ll see somebody who lists a Beanie Baby for $14,000. They’ll have an accomplice buy it and then they’ll cancel the transaction...and it’ll disappear from eBay.”

Legitimate Beanie Baby collectors have a theory. “Its’ either money laundering or bogus transactions,” Scholssberg said. “Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.”

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“The Rarest Ty Beanie Baby I’ve Ever Come Across,” a recent post in the group announced above pictures of a white bear with odd shaped eyes and errors on its tags. “IT IS NOT FREE!!! SERIOUS OFFERS ONLY!!”

“Tag errors add no value as these were mass produced on millions of beanies,” the first comment said. “Current value $3 to $8.”

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In the mid-1990s, Beanie Babies experienced an incredible surge in popularity. People bought up thousands of them and adults decided they might be worth thousands of dollars in the future. According to Scholssberg, an early guide to the value of Beanies listed projected values for the toys in the future. “They made all that stuff up,” he said. “They had no experience in plush collecting and absolutely no experience in Beanie Baby collecting...but adults saw that and said, ‘Oh I can buy this thing for $5 and in five years it’s going to be worth $300 or $700. They were just making these values up.”

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Sad part is most of these funko pop top collectors are making more bank than most of tOT

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