National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum<\/a> in Milwaukee, has built a career identifying figures worthy of a perpetual nod. \u201cWe saw an opportunity,\u201d Sklar said. \u201cThere was a lot of people and characters who hadn\u2019t had bobbleheads or hadn\u2019t had them in a long time and we thought, \u2018Hey, we could make some fun, unique bobbleheads.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\nThat’s right: in addition to collecting rare and\u00a0sought-after bobbleheads, the museum\u00a0produces high-quality, customized bobbleheads for retail sale and for organizations, individuals, and teams nationwide.<\/p>\n
TCU, he said, stood out immediately. Among nearly 250 colleges now licensed by the museum, the Horned Frog occupied rare air. \u201cWe started focusing on schools with live mascots,\u201d Sklar said, \u201cand then we sort of branched out into other schools that people were requesting and then schools that have unique mascots, and obviously the Horned Frog qualifies in those\u00a0categories.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unique is a polite understatement. The Horned Frog, a once-plentiful Texas lizard, first appeared on the cover of TCU\u2019s inaugural yearbook in 1897. By 1915, it had claimed a place on the school seal. In the postwar years, it spread everywhere, from class rings and stationery to bass drums, before taking human form in 1949 as Addie the All-American Frog. By 1979, it had become SuperFrog, and in 1999, the mascot underwent the modern redesign fans know today, equal parts amphibian and attitude.<\/p>\n
Capturing that attitude in bobblehead form proved trickier than expected. \u201cThis one did have more of a delay than a lot of the other ones that we\u2019ve done,\u201d Sklar admitted. \u201cFor some reason, the sculptor was having a hard time getting the head right. It\u2019s a unique shape, with different angles and so forth. So it took a little bit longer than normal. We\u2019ve been working on this one for, I\u2019d say at least a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
That patience is part of the appeal. In an era dominated by digital ephemera, bobbleheads remain stubbornly physical, objects meant to sit on desks, wobble on shelves, and quietly mark allegiance. Sklar understands the impulse. \u201cThat\u2019s how the museum started, with the collection that grew out of control,\u201d he said. What began with a single minor league mascot bobblehead in 2003 has grown into more than 10,000 figures displayed inside the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, a 4,000-square-foot space that draws visitors from all 50 states and more than 30 countries.<\/p>\n
Sklar\u2019s connection to TCU is more than professional. He has walked the campus, watched SuperFrog in motion, and attended a Horned Frogs basketball upset over Texas Tech that ended with a court storm. \u201cYou\u2019re even more sort of tied to the project when you see the mascot in person,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For TCU fans, alumni, and collectors, the SuperFrog bobblehead is less a novelty than a punctuation mark, a nodding acknowledgment of a banner moment layered atop a long, strange, unmistakably Texan history. As Sklar put it, \u201cIt\u2019s definitely one of the most unique mascots in sports and also a great school.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are only so many ways a college mascot knows it has truly arrived, and one of them…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[50372,116,118,117,8164,154,1012,2324,50371,853,44803,92,33802,512],"class_list":{"0":"post-114399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fort-worth","8":"tag-collectable","9":"tag-fort-worth","10":"tag-fort-worth-headlines","11":"tag-fort-worth-news","12":"tag-horned-frogs","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-stephen-montoya","15":"tag-style","16":"tag-superfrog","17":"tag-tcu","18":"tag-tcu-mascot","19":"tag-top-story","20":"tag-toys","21":"tag-university"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}