Popular Culture for Sale
I’ve been thinking about how neat it would be to be able to predict what will be collectible in ten or twenty years. It is so difficult to tell really. A bit of time browsing the collectible category of eBay show some surprising things. I’m sure that when gas and oil companies were producing their advertising materials during the 1940s and 1950s, they never even considered that what they were giving away for free, or even paying to get seen, would some day be sold for thousands of dollars.
Even celebrity merchandise can be this way. Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen were huge in their prime, but the dolls made to commemorate them are not nearly as popular at auction as a Six Million Dollar Man doll. Michael Jackson dolls are now extremely popular as a collectible because of his recent death sparking a collecting frenzy. A couple of months ago, the figures would not have commanded nearly what they do now.
Popular culture is very fickle and predicting trends is a full time job of guessing what the next big thing will be. If you figure it out, you will be very popular among some advertising people out there.