Collectible Cloney Babies

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We all have seen them, in real life and in fiction. These collectible toys that somehow go viral on the news. People yell if some are removed from the box. In some cases, there are fistfights or even riots. Soon we see the nightly news and wonder how someone could get sucked into such a fad.

Then we hold one. And suddenly we want it.

Collectible Cloney Babies are a type of toy that people want. It doesn't matter if they can be played with or not. We need the toy, to collect them all. Some consumers want bragging rights. Others are blinded by the brand status.

Criteria for this type of toy collection are as follows:

1. There is more than one with variety, as part of a collection. (Mind there are some exceptions if the toy is extremely rare and one-of-a-kind, like with the Tickle-Me-Wiggly.)
2. They have a Periphery Demographic with both kids and adults. Kids want to play with them, while adults want to collect them.
3. They go viral, and some become hard to find. In a few cases, people may get into fights over them. The demand seems to supercede the supply.

One addendum is that sometimes toy companies or individuals try to leverage this trope, but fail. It can be hard to guess what people want out of a product.

Sometimes toy companies will deliberately invoke this, to make more money. Psychologists have studied this phenomenon, about how marketing takes advantage of the human need to collect.

Examples of Collectible Cloney Babies include:

Advertising

• Burger King had its line of collectible toys that came out with different merchandise options, depending on the film and media released at the time.
• McDonald's went above and beyond, with Monopoly sweepstakes that people could use to win real money, in addition to toy lines. The documentary McMillions revealed that the sweepstakes became the center of a scam where associates Simon Marketing embezzled $24 million and laundered the winning pieces to boot.

Anime and Manga

• The Way of the Househusband reveals that Tatsu's wife Miku is a fan of a magical girl anime called Policure. Some manga and anime chapters feature him tracking down merchandise for her, from Blu-Ray to action figures. When a kid he's babysitting breaks Miku's favorite action figure by accident, Tatsu tells him they have to "bury the body" before Miku comes home. (She figures it out anyway.)
• Mikoto Misaka of A Certain Scientific Railgun goes out of her way to collect "Gekota" toys and goods, to the point where she spends an entire afternoon trying to get a particular badge from a vending machine, and she's very upset when she loses one toy to a preschool girl who actually plays with it. This is just the Gekota toys; she doesn't care about other stuffed animals.
• Yu-Gi-Oh Season 0 and the manga featured this with Capsule Monsters, Capmon for short. They would come from a vending machine, with the luck of the draw determining what monster level and type you get. Part of the fun is the randomness, and that you use these monsters to battle:
  • In the manga, Mokuba used a Capmon battle as a pretense to kidnap Yugi and get revenge for his big brother Seto. He deliberately goads Yami Yugi to come out and fight, believing that since he has stronger monsters, he'll win. Yami Yugi proves him wrong, but lets him off with temporary, mild hallucinations.
  • In the anime, someone gifts Miho a Gacha box loaded with Capsule Monsters. The capsules are filled with jewels, and Miho reveals a university student, an avid Capmon collector named Warashibe-kun, was hitting on her. Yugi happens to know him, and catches up with Warashibe-kun after school to ask him about it. Miho isn't impressed with the CapMon she sees, saying they aren't that cute for collecting, and gets creeped out when Warashibe stages a meeting with her, calling her his "Capmon Queen". Yugi beats him in a Capmon duel when he poisons Anzu, Honda and Jounouchi and blackmails Miho.
  • Duel Monsters in season 1 and subsequent series also engages in this. Some packs do have rare cards, like Exodia or the Blue Eyes White Dragon. Some episodes have Jounouchi and Honda asking Yugi's grandfather if new sets have come in or not; he chuckles and says not yet, most of the time. Seto Kaiba starts his rivalry with Yugi by trying to steal his grandfather's Blue Eyes White Dragon after the man refuses to sell it to him, explaining that the card has sentimental value. (It's because the card belonged to his best friend, who gave it to him after they nearly died while exploring a pyramid.) Kaiba doesn't learn; in Battle City, he says that losers in duels need to forfeit their rarest card, hoping this will help him acquire all the God cards that Isis Ishtar told him about when visiting Japan. Predictably, Yugi beats him fair and square, taking Obelisk before facing Malik.
• Aggretsuko takes a potshot at games that use this trope for microtransitions:
  • Retsuko ends up in debt playing a unicorn dating sim. The micro-transitions involve spending real money on clothes for said unicorn; the more you buy, the more that he likes you. Retsuko spends so much that she is reduced to eating bread crusts for lunch at work.
  • The same thing happens to Haida when, in a depressive funk over letting the new CEO blackmail him into fudging numbers for their company, he spends all of his savings trying to get cool new rare weapons in an online RPG. It's so bad that, when his father through his brother cuts him off, the most that Haida can afford is a cubicle in an Internet cafe for months. He then has to crash with Retsuko and aggressively job hunt.
• Pokemon in one episode has Misty and Jessie compete in a tournament to win a rare doll set. Jessie says that as a foster kid, she never had real toys of her own. For Misty, it's that it would be the first toys she ever owned that wouldn't be a hand-me-down from her sisters; she mentions that they would just let her use their secondhand candy box.
• Sailor Moon
  • In the manga, the Inner Senshi receive their transformation pens from playing the Sailor V game. When Usagi plays, she receives the Disguise Pen to reward her progress for making it that far. Makes sense when we learn that a computer replica of her mother Queen Serenity is revealed to be the brains behind Crown Game Arcade's system, and pulls a Heroic Sacrifice rescuing the Senshi from a brainwashed Endymion.
  • Crane Game Joe, one of the seven beings that has a youma inside of him, uses telekinesis to win different dolls from arcade games. Some are even knockoff Sailor Moon merchandise.
  • During the episode of S where Minako gets her heart stolen, she's playing a crane game while talking to Usagi about making herself worthy. Usagi, flashing back to when Minako and the Senshi died in season one as well as everyone getting their hearts stolen, starts banging her against the machine, begging her not to risk her life. As a result, Minako wins twenty toys, which she proceeds to give to everyone. When her heart gets removed and she runs off with it, the Senshi toss the toys at the daimon to distract it.
• Codename Sailor V has Artemis realize that Minako won't pay attention to training, unless it's in video game form and she receives items. Minako also likes collecting magical items, and Artemis decides to exploit this obsession. So he reprograms some of the arcade games at the Crown Game Arcade to train her how to fight as Sailor V and reward her progress with magical tokens.

Comic Books

• In the Marvel universe, the Collector is named thusly because he collects strange artifacts and life forms. He attempts to "collect" all of the Avengers in the Silver Age, starting with Wasp, because they are one-of-a-kind. The Avengers weren't having it, and defeated him at three times.

Film

• Jingle All the Way is a black comedy take on this trope, where two dads compete to get the last action figure of their sons' favorite superhero for Christmas. It gets to the point where they have a public fistfight in the climax dressed as said hero and villain respectively.
• Spy Kids references this in a disturbing fashion; Floop (actually Minion) turns captured OSS agents into the Fooglies for his show, and then merchandises them as toys. Juni even owns a few, which he takes with him on the mission. To intimidate Gregorio, Floop uses his technology to turn Felix into a Fooglie, and says he can't wait to put his toys on the Christmas market.
• The Toy Story franchise features this for several items:
  • At Andy's birthday party in the first movie, he is gifted Buzz Lightyear-themed merchandise before his mother reveals Buzz as a surprise present. Buzz is apparently the hottest new toy of the year, much to Woody's chagrin.
  • Pizza Planet offers Little Green Man plushies as prizes within a crane game. While most kids would collect them for the novelty, Sid wins one to offer his dog Scud a new toy. He battles the crane game -- and Woody unknowingly-- on seeing that "Buzz Lightyear" is in there as a bonus prize.
  • In Toy Story 2, Al of Al's Toy Barn steals Woody on seeing he is an intact Woody, hat and all, with one "flaw" that is fixable-- Woody's ripped arm. In his apartment, Jessie and Bullseye reveal that Woody used to be a tie-in toy for a show, along with them and Stinky Pete. Woody is the rarest owing to being the most popular and fragile.
  • "Toy Story of Terror" reveals that a seedy hotel owner uses his monitor lizard to steal toys from hotel rooms so that he can sell them on the Internet. Jessie manages to expose the scheme so that Bonnie and her mother can rescue Woody and the others. Her mother also calls the cops on the guy.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe had Captain America trading cards issued during World War II. In 2012's The Avengers, it's revealed that SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson had spent several years (and presumably a substantial amount of money) assembling a complete set, which he asked Captain America to autograph.

Literature

• The Berenstain Bears parodied this with Beary Bubbies in "The Mad, Mad, Mad Toy Craze". Both Brother and Sister Bear become obsessed with collecting Beary Bubbies, to the point that they do extra chores around the house to earn extra allowance money, and bumming rides from their parents to stores that have them. They aren't the only ones; a trip to a big mall reveals that bear parents are getting into fistfights over them. Thing is that the authors emphasize that you can't even play with a Beary Bubbie as you would with a regular plushie, meaning all you can do is look at them or brag about how many you have. The ending page is the Bears looking at their collection and asking Was It Really Worth It?
• Harry Potter references this with Chocolate Frog cards in the first book. Ron explains that some cards are rarer than others, and collecting them can give you bragging rights. He's been searching for Agrippa.
• In the novel Afterworlds, the copyright-friendly Sparkle Pony franchise is mentioned a few times. Darcy's fellow author and girlfriend mentions writing fanfic for it, and her little sister Nisha has spent ample time designing icons of herself. They also both collect the toys.
• In Fangirl, nearly all of Cath's art, shirts and memorabilia are fanmade Simon Snow material. Her dad even had a coworker at his advertising firm draw up a map of Watford for her and her twin sister Wren.

Live-Action TV

• In Squid Game, a crane game toy fumble caps off the terrible day Gi-hun is having. When he's pickpocketed and coerced by the loan sharks just as he earns enough money from betting on horse races to treat his daughter for his birthday, he's reduced to winning her a prize from a crane game. Though a child kindly helps him acquire one, the gift ends up being a gun-shaped cigarette lighter. Ga-yeong takes it well. TV Sins pointed out how dumb Gi-hun was since the next crane game had Stitch plushies in them.
• Fresh Off the Boat has a season 2 episode, "Shaq Motors," where in a subplot Eddie sells Emery's toy collection to purchase a Slip 'N Slide. He doesn't understand why Emery is upset until his parents gift him autographed Shaq sneakers and he talks about how priceless it is. Having a Jerkass Realization, he sells the sneakers to buy back his little brother's collection.

Newspaper Comics

• Peanuts:
  • Charlie Brown in the 1950s got into a variant, a Davy Crockett phase thanks to the Disney miniseries of the same name. He got a hat, records, and the lot. In the end, he gave it up, asking when the fad would end.
  • It's revealed in a later arc that Charlie Brown has a huge collection of comic books. He sells them all to buy a nice pair of gloves for Peggy Jean...just as she encounters him in the store and reveals a pair that she got as a gift. Charlie Brown can't return the gloves, so he gives them to Snoopy instead for Christmas.
• FoxTrot
  • Jason once tried to make Slugman merchandise that he hoped people would buy, namely Slugman suction ornaments. They didn't take off, for obvious reasons.
  • Peter accidentally got Andy addicted to Bitty Babies after bringing a fast food version home. She soon bought so many that Roger had to stop her before she sold the car to fund them. (Quincy ended up convincing her to sell them to a dealer, by eating some of the rarer ones.)
  • As a Brick Joke, when Peter went to the same fast food chain via drive-through, the exasperated retail worker told him they were out of Bitty Babies and stop being weird. Peter meekly said he just wanted a burger and fries.
  • Happened with Andy and Apple's newest desktop computer, the iFruit. Though Jason came along and wanted a heavy-duty computer tower and monitor, Andy opted for the "cute" iFruit. When an Apple Store Genius told her that Apple was stopping production of the Mango Kiwi color, Andy said she wanted to buy as many Mango Kiwi models as possible. Jason tries to stop her, lampshading that computers aren't Beanie Babies.
  • Eileen blackmailed Jason into being her field trip partner in exchange for a rare Pokémon card that he was seeking. To make sure he didn't skive off, she handcuffed herself to him during a planetarium show.
• Pearls Before Swine
  • Rat once created a line of Beefy Babies, toys made out of beef. Due to Early Installment Weirdness, Pig also got the idea to make tuna babies. Federal regulators stepped in because people complained that the beef got bad and rotten after being outside for a few days, and forcing Rat to stop production. Rat isn't amused, saying it's obvious that beef isn't going to last forever.
  • Parodied when Stephen did an arc about Toby the agoraphobic tortoise and told Rat he wasn't appearing again. Rat accused him of wanting more marketable plushies like for Pig. Cut to Stephen buried in Pig plushies.
• Calvin and Hobbes: Lots of merchandise is tied-in with Calvin's favorite cereal, Chocolate Frosted Sugarbombs.
  • One early arc had Calvin going through a higher cereal intake than usual to send off four box-tops, in exchange for a propeller Beanie. While Calvin normally loves the cereal, he was feeling sick from it since Hobbes couldn't eat that much and his parents refused to help on principle. And after all that, plus waiting for the beanie, having to assemble it, and breaking a part that his dad had to fix, the beanie didn't even fly.
  • In another standalone strip, you could collect up to five trinkets from the cereal boxes if you bought enough of them. Calvin said while he can eat the cereal fast, eating more than this three to four bowls a day makes him wired.
  • Calvin notes while eating cereal that there's another box-top campaign for Buzzy the Hummingbird. We don't see an arc of this one.

Theatre

• Hatchetfield
  • Black Friday has the Tickle-Me-Wiggly, a new toy that is in so much demand that the one Lex plans to auction online could fetch up to 7000. Any adult who sees a Tickle-Me-Wiggly wants one, no matter the cost, and some resort to murder to get it on Black Friday, the day of the year when every adult can purchase one. When local toy shop owner Frank tries to reason with the mobs by pointing out that he can ask for a rush order from the manufacturer, their ringleader slits his throat in response. (Wiggly is actually an Eldritch Abomination using this hatred to emerge on Earth in a new form and Take Over the World.)
  • The Nightmare Time episode "Watcher World" has Blinky doing the same thing in the titular theme park, with Blinky plushies. Bill bankrupts himself trying to win a Blinky doll for Alice from a "Test Your Strength" game.

Video Games

• In Undertale and its companion game Deltarune, Alphys collects merchandise from the Kissy Kissy Mew anime franchise. In the Switch version, you can even get into an optional boss battle with one at the Dog Shrine.

Web Animation

• Illymation's video "Animal Crossing Burnout" talks about how she spent money to buy Biskit on eBay, so as to add him to her New Horizons island. She reveals that some Animal Crossing vintage characters cost as much as several million online, but Biskit was the only one in her heart.
• How It Should Have Ended shows its take on the The Lego Batman Movie as Batman and Superman playing with LEGO versions of themselves at their regular cafe. Batman rage-quits when Superman masterminds the League pulling a Deus Ex Machina when saving the city, leading to Superman mocking him with his LEGO.

Web Comics

• In PvP, we see some collectible trends that come and sweep the cast:
  • Brett treats the new iPhone as this, wanting to be the first person in the area to get one. To accomplish this goal, he gets a job at the local Apple store in the hopes that employees get first dibs. It goes horribly wrong when he tries to quit at the premiere to get the first spot in line, and he ends up hospitalized.
• The gag comic Vegetables for Dessert had a one-shot depicting how teddy bears are made. Hunters shoot them in the wild, stuff them, and sells them as collectible toys. All as black comedy, of course.

Web Original

• On Channel Awesome, it's revealed on Paw Dugan's music reviews that his girlfriend Elyse, aka Maven of the Eventide, collects Phantom of the Opera plushies. She hijacks several of his reviews in revenge for one of his darts hitting her favorite one and "killing" it. They eventually make up, though, when covering Fantasia 2000.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs:
  • One episode of "Pinky and the Brain" had Brain weaponize this, using trading cards sold with sausages, to encourage kids to buy propaganda for his latest Evil Plan to Take Over the World. It backfires horribly; since they're in medieval Germany, the parents start a lynch mob and end the episode preparing to burn the titular characters at the stake.
  • The "Pinky and the Brain" Christmas special had Brain try to exploit this trope by going to the North Pole, disguising himself and Pinky as elves, and hack into Santa's computer database to make every kid's Christmas list request a "Noodle Noggin doll," his latest invention. The doll would induce Mass Hypnosis and allow him to Take Over the World. It almost worked... but Brain read Pinky's Christmas letter that Pinky was trying to deliver to Santa, and revealed that Pinky asked Santa to give all the toys he would receive for Brain, and kindly asked if the world would fit in the sack. Brain aborted the plan out of sheer guilt.
• Arthur
  • Woogles become this in "Arthur Rides the Bandwagon". Arthur at first scoffs at the idea of Woogles, saying they look "dweeby". Soon enough, however, everyone in his class has a Woogle; by the time Arthur has a nightmare about being ostracized due to not having a Woogle, they're all sold out of the stores. Muffy has the rare ones, and has a guidebook on how much each is worth; the one she offers to sell to Arthur is worth thirty dollars. Grandma Thora tries to explain that it's just a fad, using David's pet rock as an example, but Arthur doesn't understand until he makes bottlecaps the new trend.
  • D.W. gets into a not-My Little Pony franchise of unicorns in "D.W. Tricks the Tooth Fairy." The plot starts when her mother tells her that it would take months for her to save her allowance to by a clothes toy barn that comes separately. Realizing she can't earn that much money in time and her birthday already passed, D.W. opts to try and lose a tooth so that the tooth fairy will give her money.
• Dexter's Laboratory had an episode where Dexter and his friends went to a local comic convention, only to end up in the wrong area. Rather than join a room of space nerds, they end up in a land of doll collectors, who yell at them for ripping a box open. Though Dexter defeats their champion in a fair fight, they have to leave disguised as collectible dolls to enter the space area. And it turns out they look like collectible figures from said space franchise...
• A Gravity Falls ad for Journal 3 in real life parodied this. Kristen Schaal, who plays Mabel tried marketing customizable book sweaters for the journals. Jason Ritter, who plays Dipper, asks what kind of "creep" would buy them. Answer Cut to show creator Alex Hirsch saying, "I'll take ten" before upending a shelf of journals. Kristen grins and says there are a lot of creeps in the world, and she's counting on them.
• Kim Possible showed off DNAmy's Cuddle Buddies. She actually tried to sell life-sized versions legitimately.
• In Sabrina the Animated Series, "Brina Baby" involves Sabrina's inner child Brina getting loose when she takes an oath to give up magic and becomes a workaholic. Among Brina's pranks include stealing all the Itsy Bitsy Babies in town and piling them in the Spellman household. Even the cop who has been checking on the Spellmans finds his Itsy Bitsy Babies missing, and he had trackers planted in them.

Real Life

• Beanie Babies are the Trope Namer. They went viral in the 1990s when the main company started manufacturing rare ones that would have a limited run, fueling collector demand. In addition, they were the first American company that sold directly to consumers, which helped fostering demand. Some documentaries and books accuse founder Ty Warner of deliberately creating a bubble that would burst, without any care for the people that put their life savings into collecting and reselling.
• Cabbage Patch Kids were another one that followed this trend. You could find a baby and collect it, with varieties. Unlike other collectibles, though, Cabbage Patch Kids were manufactured with a process that randomized each doll, making it essentially unique; the psychology behind their collectability was less about finding specific rare varieties and more about acquiring dolls with features or combinations of features that appealed to the collector.
• American Girl is the expensive version, with some dolls being retired over time like Addie and Kirsten. The company does supplement this by offering other products like books, retail, and tea parties at their in-person stores.
• Collectible Card Games:
  • Pokémon trading cards were this for '90s kids. People would play for their cards and try to collect the rarest ones. Some in the 2020s will retail for as much as 2,000 dollars for one card!
  • Similarly, some Magic: The Gathering sets and cards can fetch a high price. Some collections cost as much as $4000. Hasbro has come under fire for sending the Pinkertons, historical mercenaries, after YouTuber Dan Cannon for receiving a May collection two weeks early and terrorizing his family.
• Even earlier than CCGs -- and one of their ancestors -- were bubblegum trading cards, most prominently baseball cards. Until Magic appeared in the 1990s, if you heard about a trading card being sold for an outrageous amount of money, it was almost certainly a rare card for a baseball player.
• During the 1960s and 1970s Topps (publisher of almost all baseball cards) released Wacky Packages gum, which had stickers parodying various consumer products instead of cards. Because the stickers were, naturally, stuck to things by the kids who bought them and were consequently destroyed by wear-and-tear, very few of the original stickers have survived, and command high prices from collectors in the 21st century. And because of their popularity (and of course nostalgia), the line has been revived and/or reissued several times over the ensuing decades, although no single revival run was anywhere as close to large as the original release.
  • Wacky Packages was so successful that some of Topps' competitors issued their own parody sticker lines. Usually featuring notably lower-quality art and looking visibly shoddy compared to the high-end cartoon art used by Wacky Packages, lines like Crazy Covers from Fleet (which parodied various magazines and comic books) still garnered their own devoted followers and have their own obsessed collectors half a century later.
  • A rejected artwork for Wacky Packages went on to inspire another successful line of sticker trading cards from Topps in 1985 -- the Garbage Pail Kids, which parodied the Cabbage Patch Kids and was successful enough to spawn a spin-off movie in 1987. The Garbage Pail Kids line has had several reissues/revivals over the years and, as might be expected since it has an entry on this page, remains a favorite of collectors.
• Disney enamel pins have become this for adults. Even Lindsay Ellis aka The Nostalgia Chick has mentioned that she got into the trend.
• For a few years, Comparethemarket.com gave customers meerkat toys as part of their viral marketing campaign. Initially the toys were chosen at random from a small group, and high prices were reportedly paid on the second-hand market by people trying to collect them all. The excitement fizzled after a while, but prices seem to have risen again since the promotion ended in 2018.